Evidence-led history, clearly told.
The fall of Babylon in 539 BCE is often retold as a neat transfer of power from a failing Babylonian king to a liberating Persian conqueror. The Nabonidus Chronicle is…
The Uluburun wreck is valuable because it is not a single spectacular object. It is a whole cargo: metals, jars, glass, ivory, anchors, tools and personal goods caught together at…
The Cyrus Cylinder is famous because it sits at the crossroads of archaeology, imperial politics, biblical memory and modern rights language. A careful reading makes it more interesting, not less:…
The Lachish ostraca are often introduced as dramatic letters from the edge of disaster. They are more valuable than that slogan suggests: small pieces of pottery that preserve administrative voices,…
The ancient bronze fragments are often called the world’s first computer. That phrase is useful only if it is followed by the harder question: what exactly does the surviving evidence…
One decree in three scripts gave scholars a way to test names and repeated phrases. The Rosetta Stone helped decipher hieroglyphs, but it was never a word-for-word dictionary.
On October 23, 1826, a wealthy British chemist named James Smithson wrote a will containing one of the strangest gifts in American history. Smithson had never visited the United States.…
On the night of August 29-30, 1776, George Washington faced a problem more dangerous than the defeat his army had suffered two days earlier. Thousands of Continental troops were compressed…
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