Today, when we’ve unlocked the secrets of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Maya writing and hosts of far lesser known scripts, it seems as though there’s nothing left for enterprising epigraphers. Fear not, for ...

Joan Oates’s sharp blue eyes spotted something that was not right. Standing on the windy summit of a vast, human-made mound in northeastern Syria, the wiry 81-year-old archaeologist noticed an ugly ...

When the Yale University history lecturer Hiram Bingham III encountered the ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru 100 years ago, on July 24, 1911, archaeologists and explorers around the world (including ...

India is routinely counted among the world's oldest civilizations, but determining exactly where its story begins is surprisingly complicated. The Indus Valley Civilization was flourishing by around ...

As civilizations die, so do their forms of writing, top scholars of ancient cultures found in the first study to examine the extinction of writing systems. The research also showed that ancient ...

The National Library of Israel (NLI) in Jerusalem has set out to transcend political and religious divisions by putting more than 2,500 rare manuscripts and books from the Islamic world online.

Annalee Newitz is the author of “Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.” But the historical record shows that reports of the end times always turned out to be wrong. “Barbarians” didn’t ...