The First Crusade
What Was the First Crusade? The First Crusade (1096-1099) was an armed pilgrimage launched from Latin Christendom in response to Pope Urban II‘s sermon at Clermont on 27 November 1095. Tens of thousands of fighters and non-combatants travelled overland to Constantinople, fought through Anatolia and Syria, and stormed Jerusalem on 15 July 1099 with a […]
The Great Pyramid’s Construction Theory
How Was the Great Pyramid of Giza Actually Built? The Great Pyramid of Giza was built in roughly 23 years for the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh Khufu, beginning around 2580 BCE and finished by his death around 2560 BCE. It contains an estimated 2.3 million dressed limestone and granite blocks averaging about 2.5 tonnes apiece, drawn […]
The Ulfberht Swords
What Are the Ulfberht Swords? The Ulfberht swords are a corpus of roughly one hundred and seventy Viking-Age blades, produced between about 800 and 1000 CE, bearing an iron-inlaid +VLFBERH+T or +VLFBERHT+ inscription along the upper third of the blade. The metallurgically authentic specimens carry a carbon content of roughly one to one-point-two percent in […]
The South American Quipus: Advanced Record-Keeping
What Are the South American Quipus? The South American quipus, sometimes spelled khipus from the Quechua word for knot, are knotted-cord recording devices developed in the Andes from at least the third millennium BCE and brought to administrative perfection by the Inka empire of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries CE. A quipu is a primary […]
The Serpent Mound
In Adams County, Ohio, on a forested ridge above Brush Creek, an earthen serpent runs along the contour of a high plateau for roughly four hundred and eleven meters. Its head opens onto an oval embankment that some readers see as an egg, others as the eye of a great beast, others as the orb […]
The Glozel Tablets: A French Mystery
What Are the Glozel Tablets? The Glozel tablets are a body of inscribed clay objects, part of a larger assemblage of roughly three thousand artifacts, recovered between 1924 and 1930 from a single field outside the hamlet of Glozel, in the Auvergne region of central France. The tablets carry incised signs that resemble no securely […]
The Vanishing of the USS Cyclops
On 4 March 1918 the collier USS Cyclops cleared the harbor at Bridgetown, Barbados, bound north for the Norfolk Navy Yard with a hold of 10,800 tons of Brazilian manganese ore and 306 souls aboard. She never arrived. No SOS, no debris field, no oil slick — and, more than a century later, no wreck. […]
The Kingoodie Artifact: A Nail in Ancient Rock
In 1844, a Scottish quarryman split a block of Old Red Sandstone at Kingoodie Quarry near Inchture, and a corroded iron nail came out with the rock. Sir David Brewster reported the find to the British Association for the Advancement of Science that same year. The fact of the find is real. The popular gloss, […]
The Treasure of the San José Galleon
The 1708 Wreck Off Cartagena and What Lies on the Caribbean Floor The Spanish sixty-four-gun galleon San José sailed from Portobelo on the Panamanian isthmus on May 28, 1708, riding low under the year’s accumulated New World tribute, and was sunk on the evening of June 8, 1708, in a running fight off the Baru […]
The Vinča Culture: Europe’s First Civilization?
Was the Vinča Culture Europe’s First Civilization? The Vinča culture flourished in the central Balkans between roughly 5700 and 4500 BCE and produced large planned settlements, the world’s earliest copper smelting, elaborate figurines, and a corpus of incised signs that some scholars treat as proto-writing. Whether it qualifies as Europe’s first civilization depends on how […]