Is it any wonder ancient people thought lightning came from the gods? Even today a close lightning strike feels like a terrifying brush with the supernatural. Some ancient thinkers, however, suspected ...

Apparently, this approach for remembering grocery lists, house chores, deliveries, and the like was also a huge part of life for ancient Egyptians living over 2,000 years ago—something for which ...

An ancient artist applied a white substance to an illustration of a jackal, slimming down its appearance, according to ...

A white-out fluid, found on a 3,300-year-old papyrus, was used to make a jackal appear skinnier, Egyptologists have found.

I’ve never quite understood why tourists can’t help but write things like, “Gayoung was here.” But archaeological records ...

The distinctive smell of ancient mummies is helping scientists decode the secrets of Egyptian mummification. By analyzing tiny traces of chemicals in the air around mummy samples, researchers ...

Could ancient humans really have built the pyramids without extraterrestrial help? Or do such questions reveal more about modern anxieties than the past itself?

The skeleton is the latest in a series of bodies discovered in the city of Dijon that were mysteriously buried in a seated ...

CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND—Curators at the Fitzwilliam Museum noticed that an image of a jackal on a 3,300-year-old Egyptian papyrus had been modified with white fluid, according to an ArtNet News report. The ...

How would a New York Times obituary writer measure up to the scribes of the Book of the Dead? He found out at the Brooklyn Museum. A detail of the gilded Book of the Dead of Ankhmerwer, a funerary ...

Debunking alien claims matters, but so does telling richer, more compelling stories about how humans shaped their own past.

Roughly 2,000 years ago, a traveler from southern India stood inside the sacred tombs of Egypt’s Valley of the Kings and decided to leave his mark. The man, named Cikai Korran, carved his name into ...