A 15th-century manuscript shows trees bearing (clockwise from top left): sweet apples, jujubes, lemons, cherries, dates, and sour apples. By 7,000 years ago, people in New Guinea were cultivating ...

Ancient Greece is renowned for its extraordinary stone temples. Structures such as the Parthenon were only made possible by the invention of the crane, which is considered to be one the Greeks’ ...

Assyrian cuneiform tablet from Kanesh(Courtesy of the Yale Babylonian Collection/Photography by Alberto Urcia/Text NBC 1907) Harvard University Assyriologist Gojko Barjamovic is currently ...

Each cell in a plant, animal, or person contains millions, or even billions, of DNA base pairs—molecules connected by hydrogen bonds that are the building blocks of DNA. These base pairs collectively ...

A sculpture known as the Hell Mouth is one of several dozen fantastical creations dating to the sixteenth century that line the paths of a park called the Sacro Bosco, or Sacred Wood, near the central ...

It’s much easier to build a new building,” says Vassiliki Eleftheriou, “than to rebuild an ancient one.” Eleftheriou, an architect by training, is director of the Acropolis Restoration Service, where ...

After defeating Hannibal and Carthage in the Second Punic War (218–201 B.C.), Rome found itself the dominant power in the western Mediterranean. While it may seem obvious that Rome’s prospects would ...

Though her moment in time was short, Boudicca is a towering figure of British history. As the leader of a large popular uprising in A.D. 60, she has been lauded for her defense of Britain from ...

Archaeologists return to Nineveh in northern Iraq, one of the ancient world’s grandest imperial capitals Archaeologists didn’t know what to expect when they began searching for a 2,700-year-old ...

Artifacts (left to right) such as a chalcedony cameo depicting the god Dionysus, and a glass gem showing a wounded child of the mortal Niobe, a glass bead with an image of a sacred bull, probably made ...

Phys.org reports that a Kerma culture burial radiocarbon dated to between 1775 and 1609 B.C. has been discovered in Sudan’s Bayuda Desert, in what was once ancient Nubia, by a team of researchers ...

The World Heritage site of Chauvet Cave in southern France is famous—and a source of both wonder and controversy—for having the world’s oldest cave paintings. When the cave was discovered in 1994, ...