The Florentine Diamond
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 13, 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 abdication of Emperor Karl […]
The Sumerians: Pioneers of Mesopotamia
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 13, 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 first true city-states, codified […]
The Expedition of Hernán Cortés
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 13, 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 Mexica (Aztec) empire. Cortés sailed […]
The Dropa Stones
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 What Are the Dropa Stones? The Dropa Stones are a set of perforated stone disks said to have been recovered in 1937-1938 from caves in the Bayan Har Mountains on the Sino-Tibetan border, allegedly inscribed with spiral hieroglyphs decoded in 1962 to […]
The Nazca Lines Mystery
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 5, 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 May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 5, 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 May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 5, 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 […]
The Dorchester Pot: A Victorian Era OOPArt
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 What Is the Dorchester Pot? The Dorchester Pot is a small bell-shaped metallic vessel said to have been blasted out of Roxbury Puddingstone in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1852. Reported in Scientific American on June 5 of that year, it […]
The Lost Library of Alexandria
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 What Was the Lost Library of Alexandria? The Library of Alexandria was the research collection of the Mouseion, a royal academy founded in Egypt in the early third century BCE under the Ptolemaic dynasty. At its height it housed perhaps several hundred […]
The Indus Valley Civilization: An Unsolved Mystery
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 5, 2026. What Was the Indus Valley Civilization? The Indus Valley Civilization was a Bronze Age urban culture that flourished from roughly 2600 to 1900 BCE across the floodplains of the Indus and now-dry Ghaggar-Hakra rivers. Its planned cities, […]