The Honjo Masamune Sword
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 The Honjō Masamune is the most famous lost sword in Japanese history. Forged around the turn of the fourteenth century by Gorō Nyūdō Masamune (c. 1264–1343), it served as the hereditary blade of the Tokugawa shoguns for more than two centuries before […]
The Lost Roman Legion in China
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Somewhere on the eastern lip of the Gobi, a few hundred farmers in a Gansu village called Zhelaizhai look, by Han Chinese standards, a touch unusual. A few have light hair. A few have green or hazel eyes. A small museum at […]
The Viking Voyages to Vinland
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 What Was Vinland, and What Have the Vikings Left Behind? Vinland was the Old Norse name for a forested coastal region of northeastern North America that Greenlandic Norse explorers reached around the year 1000 CE. The clearest physical trace is at L’Anse […]
Jack the Ripper’s Identity
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 6, 2026. Why Jack the Ripper’s Identity Is Still Open Jack the Ripper is the unidentified killer of at least five women in Whitechapel, East London, between 31 August and 9 November 1888. Police never charged anyone. The principal […]
Teotihuacan’s Pyramids
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 The pyramids of Teotihuacan rise from the Valley of Mexico like a problem the surviving record cannot quite resolve. By the time the Mexica encountered the abandoned city in the late fourteenth century, its three great monuments — the Pyramid of the […]
The Cascajal Block: Oldest Writing in the New World?
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 6, 2026. What Is the Cascajal Block? The Cascajal Block is a small slab of greenish serpentinite, roughly the size of a hardcover book, incised on one face with sixty-two carved signs. It is dated to the late San […]
The Princes in the Tower Mystery
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 6, 2026. What the Surviving Record Actually Shows In the spring and summer of 1483, the two young sons of King Edward IV of England, twelve-year-old Edward V (1470 to disappearance 1483) and his nine-year-old brother Richard, Duke of […]
The Coso Artifact: A Spark Plug in Geode?
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 The Coso Artifact entered popular memory as a riddle: a porcelain-and-metal cylinder pried out of what its discoverers called a half-million-year-old geode in the high desert above Owens Lake. The riddle was solved decades ago. Yet the case remains a useful teaching […]
The Crown Jewels of Ireland
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 On the morning of 6 July 1907, four days before King Edward VII was due to invest a new knight of the Order of St Patrick at Dublin Castle, a messenger named William Stivey turned a key in a safe in the […]
The Minoan Civilization: Lost to the Sea?
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 6, 2026. The Eruption and the Civilization Are Not the Same Story The Minoan civilization of Bronze Age Crete did not vanish in a single afternoon when the volcanic island of Thera blew itself apart around the late seventeenth […]