Machu Picchu: The Lost City of the Incas
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 5, 2026. What Machu Picchu Actually Is Machu Picchu is a fifteenth-century Inca royal estate built on a granite saddle between two Andean peaks in the Cusco Region of Peru, roughly 2,430 meters above sea level and about 80 […]
The Tartaria Tablets: Europe’s Oldest Writing?
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated September 10, 2026 Last reviewed: September 10, 2026. What Are the Tartaria Tablets? The Tartaria tablets are three small clay objects pulled from a Neolithic ritual pit in western Romania in 1961. Two are pierced rectangles, one is a perforated disc, and all three carry […]
The Disappearance of Glenn Miller
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated September 10, 2026 Last updated: September 10, 2026. What Happened to Glenn Miller on 15 December 1944? Bandleader Major Alton Glenn Miller boarded a single-engine UC-64A Norseman at Twinwood Farm airfield in Bedfordshire, England, on the afternoon of 15 December 1944, bound for newly liberated […]
The London Hammer: A Prehistoric Tool
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated September 10, 2026 Last updated: September 10, 2026. What Is the London Hammer? The London Hammer is a small iron-headed hammer with a partly mineralized wooden handle, recovered as a loose surface find in 1936 near London, Texas, and later embedded in a chunk of […]
The Florentine Diamond
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated September 10, 2026 Last updated: September 10, 2026. What Is the Florentine Diamond? The Florentine Diamond is a roughly 137-carat yellow diamond, briolette-cut with around 126 facets, that passed from Burgundian to Medici to Habsburg hands between the late fifteenth and early twentieth centuries. After […]
The Sumerians: Pioneers of Mesopotamia
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated September 10, 2026 Last updated: September 10, 2026. Who Were the Sumerians of Mesopotamia? The Sumerians were the earliest urban civilization of southern Mesopotamia, flourishing roughly between 3500 and 2000 BCE in the alluvial plain between the Tigris and Euphrates. They invented cuneiform writing, organized […]
The Expedition of Hernán Cortés
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated September 10, 2026 Last updated: September 10, 2026. What Was the Expedition of Hernán Cortés? The expedition of Hernán Cortés was a Spanish military and diplomatic campaign that ran from February 1519 to August 1521 and ended with the fall of Tenochtitlán, capital of the […]
The Nazca Lines Mystery
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated September 13, 2026 Last reviewed: September 13, 2026. What Are the Nazca Lines? The Nazca Lines are a network of more than a thousand geoglyphs scratched into the arid plateau of southern Peru between roughly 200 BCE and 650 CE. They include long straight paths, […]
The Cretan Hieroglyphs: Decoding the Signs
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated September 10, 2026 Last reviewed: September 10, 2026. What Are the Cretan Hieroglyphs? Cretan Hieroglyphic is a pictographic Bronze Age script from the island of Crete, used roughly between 2100 and 1700 BCE on seal-stones, clay bars, medallions, and a small set of administrative tablets. […]
The Mystery of the Anasazi
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated September 10, 2026 Last reviewed: September 10, 2026. What Happened to the Anasazi at the End of the Thirteenth Century? Between roughly 1276 and 1300 CE, the Ancestral Puebloan communities living in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest abandoned the cliff-dwellings, kivas, and […]