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Today we cover the Indictment of Madduwatta: a 3,400-year-old Hittite legal complaint that happens to contain the oldest named Greek warrior in the historical record. Long before Homer ever put pen to paper on the Iliad or the Odyssey, a warlord named Attarissiya crossed the Aegean with a hundred chariots, tore through western Anatolia, unseated a Hittite-backed ruler, and fought the empire's own army to a standstill before sailing home. We also trace the wider collapse-era: the Hittite Empire at Hattusa, the Lukka coastal peoples, the Assuwa confederation, and Ahhiyawa. The Invasion That Inspired Homer's Iliad | 18:55 Bronze to...

Ever since Benjamin Franklin wielded his fluent French to persuade Parisian elites to support the War of Independence, foreign language knowledge has enabled American diplomats and representatives—not to mention spies—to promote the nation’s interests. During World War II and throughout the Cold War, colleges provided education in languages deemed essential for national defense. Those programs were a great success. In the 1940s, Harvard, Michigan, and Berkeley founded secret schools in Japanese, often led by Japanese-Americans. Other institutions opened foreign language programs thereafter. In the wake of Sputnik in 1958, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act. In recent years, however,...

LINGUISTS TEND to say that all languages are valuable, expressive and complex. They usually attribute negative attitudes to prejudice and politics. That is probably why no one has carefully studied the touchy question of which ones are seen as beautiful or ugly. That is until three scholars—Andrey Anikin, Nikolay Aseyev and Niklas Erben Johansson—published their study of 228 languages last year*. They hit upon the idea of using an online film about the life of Jesus, which its promoters have recorded in hundreds of languages. Crucially, most recordings had at least five different speakers, as the film has both exposition...

While digging in their backyard, an accidental archaeologist in Denmark unearthed 18.5 kilograms (40.7 pounds) of silver treasure. The chance discovery is the largest known silver hoard from the Viking Age in the country and could prove invaluable in understanding this chapter of history. The treasure trove consists of 700 silver objects, including silver bars, bracelets, dozens of coins, a small Thor's hammer, and various cut objects. These kinds of silver artifacts were often used as a means of payment and a store of value... Around 320 of the objects were found within the original clay vessel, while the rest...

Newspaper artist Howard Brodie enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942, soon joining the combat artist program. He was sent by Yank magazine to capture his impressions of the war with a pencil during the Guadalcanal campaign and then the fighting in Europe. One observer of his work wrote, “By capturing emotions on the field with fluid lines and attention to detail, Brodie’s work is honest and at times, harrowing, but this honesty established him as one of the top news artists of his time. In February 1945, he had been assigned by Yank to accompany K Company, 406th Regiment,...

The people who live and breathe politics often talk as if the upcoming election is the most important election of all time. As they see it, we are in an unprecedented historical moment and the choices we make today will determine the fate of the nation. I understand their perspective and a younger version of me occasionally slipped into that mindset. However, far from being unprecedented, the core challenge facing America today was described more than 2,000 years ago by an ancient Greek philosopher. Plato, a student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, imagined prisoners chained inside a dark cave,...

Wilhelm Dörpfeld was a German architect and archaeologist, a pioneer of stratigraphic excavation and precise graphical documentation of archaeological projects... In 1877, Döerpfeld became an assistant at the excavations of Ancient Olympia, Greece, conducted under Richard Bohn, Friedrich Adler, and Ernst Curtius. He later became the technical manager of the project. The group uncovered, among other artifacts, an intact statue of Hermes by Praxiteles. The excavations revived the memory of the ancient Olympic Games and contributed toward the establishment of the modern Olympic Games, in 1896. In 1882, Dörpfeld joined Schliemann, who was then excavating Troy... The two eventually became...

A thousand years ago, almost nobody would have bet on Europe. China was richer, more advanced and more powerful. So how did a poor, divided backwater end up dominating the world? This is the strange story of Europe's unlikely rise, and the accidental advantage that may have changed history forever... Something Went Very Wrong With Human History | 17:26 Michael Button | Patterns of History | 21.5K subscribers | 53,344 views | August 16, 2026

Nolan’s Odyssey is a massive boon to those who care about literature and the written word. Book versions of Homer’s epic poem have been selling like hotcakes in the wake of the film’s release. Just days after the film premiered, translations of the story had reached Nos. 4, 8, and 49 on Amazon’s bestsellers list, with a translation of the Iliad at No. 61. Nolan’s film “boosted sales” of the book enough to net a sales increase of 76% “across all editions,” including both text and audio versions of the tale, as Spotify revealed that listens to the audiobook on...

Likely prompted by the runaway success of a certain classically oriented movie in theaters this summer, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has returned the oldest preserved fragment of The Odyssey to one of its galleries, where it can be seen and appreciated after a long time out of view. The relic is now on display in Gallery 162 in the museum’s section devoted to Greek and Roman Art. In a round-up of Odyssey-related collection treasures on its website, the Met describes the relic as the first early Ptolemaic fragment of the text ever discovered and notes: “Dating from around 285–250...

A book borrowed 150 years ago has finally been returned to an Australian library, with the culprit linked to the Houses of Parliament in London. Antiquities of Athens was borrowed from a local library in Kiama, a seaside town about 120km (75 miles) south of Sydney, some time in the mid-1870s. The book on classic Greek architecture was stored in a tea chest hidden behind a boarded-up fireplace for decades before it was recently discovered by a family member. Ross Simmons, 77, thinks his great-grandfather, John Simmons, might have borrowed the book to help with his career, having worked as...

In this video, we explore the history of Arabia before Islam, starting with the prehistoric period when the region was far greener than today, filled with lakes, rivers, and wildlife. We follow the transformation of this landscape into desert and how early communities adapted to it. What Was Arabia Like Before Islam? | DOCUMENTARY | 38:22 Para Bellum | 140K subscribers | 1,362,096 views | March 29, 2026

Archaeologists have identified the oldest known library on the Iberian Peninsula inside a Roman villa in southern Spain, overturning decades of belief that the room was a sanctuary dedicated to the Roman god Mithras.The discovery was made at the Roman villa of Fuente Álamo in Puente Genil, in Spain's Córdoba province. Researchers concluded the room served as a space for reading, study, and preserving written works, making it the westernmost known library in the Roman Empire and one of its best-preserved private examples.The room contains several architectural features typical of Roman libraries, including an apse, rectangular niches that likely held...

Painting depicting Odysseus and his crew at their ship (Odysseus tied to the mast), while Sirens are around them. John William Waterhouse, Ulysses and the Sirens (1891). Did this voyage take Odysseus to America? Credit: Public Domain For centuries, scholars and enthusiasts have debated where Odysseus truly traveled during his legendary journey back to Ithaca. Among the most intriguing theories is the notion that the hero ventured beyond the Mediterranean, crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and reached the shores of what is now known as America. But what evidence supports this extraordinary claim, and does it truly align with Homer’s descriptions...

Most of the occurrences of Narmer's name are on jars and jar fragments; an astonishing number of serekhs has emerged in the last 25 years from excavations in Israel and Palestine (Tel Erani, En Besor, Arad, Halif Terrace/Nahal Tillah, Small Tel Malhata, Tel Maahaz, Tel Lod and some more) signifying an apex of commercial contacts between Egypt and Canaan which lasted all through [Early Bronze I] ...These data and the excavation of many Southern Palestine sites, are proof of a very complex series of interrelations between Egypt and peoples centred beyond North Sinai lasting more than two (or three) centuries....

...Professor Michael Hudson characterizes the relationship between creditors and debtors as a 5,000 year long war which in our time is being won by the creditors. Indeed, an independent oligarchy of creditors has been created and is currently buying up land that the population itself cannot afford to own. As Professor Hudson puts it, when you look at history in terms of the fight between creditors and debtors, it is a debt crisis that enslaved the Roman Empire and led to the fall of Rome. You have had the same tension in miniature in almost every subsequent economy. It is...

Ancient mathematical texts discovered at the Maya city of Xultun in Guatemala have revealed the name of a Maya astronomer for the first time, offering rare evidence of the scholars behind one of the ancient world’s most advanced systems of mathematics and astronomy. Researchers reconstructed and transcribed dozens of tiny inscriptions found on the plaster walls of a small building at the site. Their work uncovered a unique mathematical formula and identified its author, marking the first known case of a Classic Maya mathematician-astronomer being directly credited for his work. The findings were published in the journal Antiquity. Wall writings...

The carvings at Göbekli Tepe even show the movements of the constellations. Image credit: Dr Martin Sweatman Acataclysmic comet impact 13,000 years ago may have sparked the rise of civilization, according to the authors of a new study. The event – which many scientists believe never happened – may even be documented at the world-famous site of Göbekli Tepe, forming part of a series of carvings that the researchers say represent the world’s oldest solar calendar. Located in southern Türkiye, Göbekli Tepe is a pre-pottery Neolithic complex that is estimated to be around 12,000 years old. Analyzing an intricately carved...

Göbekli Tepe was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2018, and it's not hard to see why. Image credit: Resul Muslu/Shutterstock.com ============================================================================ Did a cataclysmic comet impact 13,000 years ago spark the rise of civilization? That's the explosive claim behind a study of carvings at the world-famous site of Göbekli Tepe, which researchers say encode not just a catastrophic comet strike, but the world's oldest solar calendar. Located in southern Türkiye, Göbekli Tepe is a pre-pottery Neolithic complex that is estimated to be around 12,000 years old. Analyzing an intricately carved pillar at the site, the study authors propose...

For over a century, post-modern critics have insisted that literature must be liberated from the stifling realm of moralism in order to become truly authentic in its artistic approach. The various platitudes in this vein have been prolific: “Morality ruins creativity,” “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” or the proposition of “art for art’s sake,” which all seem less as genuine insights into the faculty of human creativity and more as rhetorical shields against difficult questions relating to the nature of truth. In our own contemporary age, the argument has at least partially mutated, but it has never...