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In June 2009, a broken limestone mug was discovered by archaeologists in the rubble of a Jewish home on Mount Zion. The house had been destroyed in 70 C.E. when the Romans leveled Jerusalem and the Temple to stomp home the message of their victory over the unmanageable Jews.Ostensibly typical of tableware in Jewish homes of the Second Temple period, this mug was unlike any other ever found, Professor Shimon Gibson of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte reports in the recent issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, just out.Limestone dishes began to emerge in about the year 40 B.C.E.,...

When archaeologists were sifting through layers of sediment from the San Lázaro rock shelter in Segovia, Spain, they noticed an unusual looking stone that seemed to contain a small red dot in the middle. BBC News reports that deeper analysis of the object revealed that the strange mark was actually a Neanderthal fingerprint, the oldest known human fingerprint in existence. The researchers suggest that the small rock's three natural indentations resemble the two eyes and mouth of a human face. The dot seems to have been added to the stone's surface with red ocher to create the missing nose. Multispectral...

Could artificial intelligence solve one of the Bible’s biggest mysteries? A team of researchers used AI-powered statistical modeling to analyze the authorship of the Hebrew Bible and made surprising discoveries about ancient narratives. Credit: Shutterstock A multidisciplinary team of researchers is using artificial intelligence to unravel the authorship of the Hebrew Bible’s earliest books. Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing everything from healthcare to filmmaking to finance. So, why not apply it to one of the most ancient and influential books in history—the Bible? That’s exactly what an international team of researchers set out to do. Among them was Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin, an...

The dominant literary culture of the late 20th century loved to tear down the heroes of the past, focusing almost entirely on their flaws while belittling the virtues, beliefs, and deeds that made them worthy of admiration in the first place. I have written about this annoying tendency previously on several occasions, including here and here. In our own time, we are afflicted with a slightly different problem: cultural arbiters who know almost nothing about the great men and women who went before them, save the cherry-picked anecdotes that magically seem to support their political cause of the moment. It...

0:00 Introduction 0:36 Old English 1:25 Norman conquest 3:23 Medieval to Renaissance 4:18 Shakespeare and company 5:08 Modern borrowings 5:48 Spelling 6:33 Grammar 7:03 Too much Latin? 7:40 Gifts of a dual heritage The Latin Roots of English | 10:29toldinstone | 583K subscribers | 28,937 views | June 6, 2025

One of the most spectacular Byzantine mosaics ever discovered in Israel was finally revealed to the public for the first time, according to a statement released by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). The so-called Be'er Shema (Birsama) mosaic was first uncovered three decades ago near Khirbat Be'er Shema in the western Negev, but spent years undergoing intensive conservation and preservation work. "Over the ensuing years since its discovery, the mosaic floor's state of conservation deteriorated," said IAA's Ami Shahar. "Upon completion of our expert team's intensive efforts, the results enable the public to view and appreciate a spectacular 1,600-year-old work...

The study, currently under review by Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, applied the Generalized Hough Transform, a sophisticated computer vision method, to digital images of the manuscript. The method, widely used in image processing, allowed researchers to compare the positions of stars that were listed in the catalog with modern-day astronomical coordinates, accounting for distortions due to Earth's axial precession and positional inaccuracies in ancient recordings.Dating back as far as Shi Shen, the prominent Chinese astronomer of the Warring States period, the Star Manual of Master Shi (石氏星经) has long perplexed historians due to star position discrepancies that would appear...

The Egyptian Gazette reports that an archaeological mission working in Manqabad near Assiut unearthed the remains of a unique Coptic-period building. The walls of the two-story mudbrick structure, which dates to the sixth or seventh century a.d., were covered with remarkable murals. One room was painted with a series of eyes that were centered around a single human face. Researchers believe that this design symbolizes spiritual insight, wisdom, and inner vision, which were key themes of Coptic religious life. Another fresco bears the image of a bearded man holding a small child, likely representing Saint Joseph and an infant Jesus...

Why did the star lot of the spring season, a bronze head by the master sculptor Alberto Giacometti, fail to sell at Sotheby’s? Alberto Giacometti’s 1955 bust, “Grande tête mince" (“Big Thin Head”), carried a pre-sale estimate of $70 million in Sotheby’s Modern evening auction. The auctioneer started the bidding at $59 million dollars. But no one bid - the piece went unsold. It was the second high-profile lot to disappoint in two days. Andy Warhol’s “Big Electric Chair” (1967-68) was withdrawn from Christie’s 20th century evening auction the day before. Is the fine art market in trouble?

This multidisciplinary work merges radiocarbon dating, ancient handwriting analysis, and machine learning. In a recent development, AI has been deployed to date the Dead Sea Scrolls with astounding accuracy, radically challenging misconceptions regarding their age and the historical timelines they fall under. The results show that several of the Scrolls might actually be much older than what is assumed, and in some cases, could be from the era of the biblical figures that supposedly wrote them. Pioneered by the University of Groningen, this multidisciplinary work merges radiocarbon dating, ancient handwriting analysis, and machine learning. The outcome is Enoch, the first...

The Roman theater at Aspendos, now in southern Turkey, is better-preserved than any other in the classical world. It is still routinely used for performances. The Best-Preserved Roman Theater | 4:21 Toldinstone Footnotes | 41.7K subscribers | 5,896 views | June 3, 2025

Thanks to the generosity of Pompeii Sites, we can explore the newly discovered large-scale frescoes from an ongoing excavation in Region IX and compare it with two other nearly contemporary fresco cycles. This new hall with Dionsysiac scenes is truly a one of a kind discovery. Join Darius for a unique opportunity on site in Pompeii as the excavation continues! Newly Discovered Large-Scale Pompeii Frescoes | 10:25 Darius Arya Digs | 31.8K subscribers | 35,437 views | June 2, 2025

...the account may best be understood as a form of conjectural history. This genre is a particular kind of narrative strategy which, as Christopher Pelling suggests, '[analyzes] the logical presuppositions of a functioning system and transposing them, for expositional clarity, into a historicist register.' Herodotus' narrative strategies interrogate the very same presuppositions on which Psammetichus' experiment is built: the primacy of language in human development, and the analogy between childhood and the world's first humans.Reading Herodotus' passage alongside Lucretius' De rerum natura and Plato's Cratylus, I argue that Herodotus exploits an ambiguity in terms φωνή and ἔπος in order to...

SICILY, Italy – Italy’s Mount Etna volcano violently erupted on Monday, sending plumes of toxic ash and smoke billowing into the sky as people on the mountain ran for safety to escape the danger. According to Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), activity at Mount Etna on Sicily began during the pre-dawn hours on Monday and culminated with "intense and almost continuous" strombolian explosions hours later. The INGV said that strombolian activity is a relatively low-level volcanic eruption, during which a modest amount of energy is released. Dramatic photos and video showed dangerous pyroclastic flows racing down the...

A small bronze coin found at an ancient site near Tashkent has the potential to reshape archaeologists' understanding of early Turkic civilization, reports Türkiye Today. According to archaeologist Gaybulla Babayarov of the Uzbekistan Academy of Sciences, the late sixth– or early seventh–century object is stamped with the phrase "Turk-Kagan" written in the Sogdian language. While the word "kagan," sometimes spelled khagan, refers to the ruler of an empire or khaganate, Babayarov argues the usage of the word "Turk" here denotes the oldest known reference to ethnic Turkic identity. Previously, the earliest known appearance of the term "Turk" came from eighth-century...

Flaming June triumphed at exhibition in 1895, but its moment in the sun was short. Leighton's death the following year heralded the end of an era. As Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and abstraction gained prominence in Europe and the United States, the artistic vision that he proposed came to be seen by many curators, scholars, and critics as outmoded and sentimental. Flaming June seemed superficial and vapid, an invocation of sensibilities that no longer rang true; the painting fell into obscurity. We do not know where it was from 1930 until 1962, when it resurfaced on the art market without its original...

In his new memoir, Sonny Boy, Al Pacino describes how Shakespeare was central to his early development as a young actor. “I would bellow out monologues as I rambled through the streets of Manhattan,” Pacino writes. “If the hour was late and you heard someone in your alleyway with a bombastic voice shouting iambic pentameter into the night, that was probably me, training myself on the famous Shakespeare soliloquies.”... Pacino “always felt at home on a stage,” and an early performance in a school play literally brought his divorced parents “back together again,” if only for a post-show ice cream....

How "Roman" is Times New Roman? | 9:40 toldinstone | 579K subscribers | 9,567 views | May 24, 2025 Chapters 0:00 Introduction 0:42 The Latin Alphabet 1:53 Rustic capitals 2:21 Uncial 2:50 Carolingian miniscule 3:32 Gothic 4:24 The Book 5:26 The first fonts 6:05 Littera Antiqua 6:46 Aldus Manutius and his successors 7:40 Times New Roman 8:07 How Roman?

“The Quran gained a popular readership among Protestants both in England and in North America largely out of curiosity,” says Denise A. Spellberg, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Thomas Jefferson’s Qu'ran: Islam and the Founders. “But also because people thought of the book as a book of law and a way to understand Muslims with whom they were interacting already pretty consistently, in the Ottoman Empire and in North Africa.” When Jefferson bought his Quran as a law student in 1765, it was probably because of his interest in understanding Ottoman law....

There is no single answer to this puzzle. Dinosaurs dominated the planet for around 179 million years and during that time, evolved into an enormous array of different shapes and sizes. Some were tiny, like the diminutive Albinykus, which weighed under a kilogram (2.2lbs) and was probably less than 2ft (60cm) long. Others were among the biggest animals to have ever lived on land, such as the titanosaur Patagotitan mayorum, which may have weighed up to 72 tonnes. They ran on two legs, or plodded on four. And along with these diverse body shapes, they would have produced an equally...