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According to a Live Science report, a 2,200-year-old gold coin was discovered by a metal detectorist in eastern Germany. Known as "rainbow cups" for their curved shape and the folklore that treasure can be found where a rainbow touches the ground, such coins were minted by the Celts, who did not inhabit this region. Only two other Celtic coins have been found in the German state of Saxony, and are thought to have been obtained through trade between the Celts and Germanic-speaking people. Saxony state archaeologist Regina Smolnik said that this rainbow cup is in excellent condition, and was therefore...

"Follow me along ancient caravan tracks, reading a hieroglyphic inscription carved on a mountain, and up and down millennia-old staircases to find a lost temple in the desert east of Elkab in Upper Egypt." Finding a Lost Temple in the Egyptian Desert | 4:57 Vintage Egyptologist | 74.2K subscribers | 9,501 views | Premiered November 12, 2025

There are only two accepted representations of William Shakespeare that are considered "official" -- but could a portrait that has been hanging over a family's mantelpiece for the last 50 years be the third? British window washer Steven Wadlow, whose father bought the portrait in the 1960s, is on the hunt to prove the painting is indeed genuine. If so, it could be worth as much as $200 million. New Shakespeare Portrait Could Change History | Full Episode Secrets of the Dead | 55:35 PBS | 1.62M subscribers | 59,578 views | November 12, 2025

While many argue that "modern art" began in the 1800s, could it actually have started with Joseph Wright of Derby's An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, nearly a century before?What is "modern art"? It seems like a simple question, but critics and art historians have quarrelled about it for decades without agreement. Nor is there any consensus about which artwork marks the turning point between "traditional" and "modern".Many point to the 1800s – and paintings like Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (1863) by Édouard Manet, Rain, Steam, and Speed - The Great Western Railway (1844) by JMW Turner,...

No serious art collection today is complete without a genuine Rembrandt. Born in 1606, the son of a miller, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn revolutionized painting, famously capturing the very souls of his subjects through his portraits. But the life of this Baroque genius was as dramatic as his art. Plagued by tragedy and family struggles, the art titan died at 63, lonely, poor, and misunderstood. This documentary journeys back to his Dutch roots and offers an intimate look at the groundbreaking conservation effort, "Operation Nightwatch," underway at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. New Technology Reveals Hidden Secrets Behind Rembrandt's Masterpiece |...

Scientists have cracked the code behind a mysterious language discovered among a non-human species living in Earth's oceans that mirrors human speech. Using AI to study whale communication, Project CETI researchers discovered that sperm whales 'talk' to each other with strange, Morse code-like clicking patterns. The mammals used patterned click sequences known as codas, which include two distinct vowel-like sounds — an 'ah'-like a-coda and an 'ee'-like i-coda. The vowel-like noises were not random, as whales were seen actively controlling the pitch, length, and type of sounds they were making as they 'pronounced' different words.

According to an IFL Science report, traces of opium have been detected in an ancient Egyptian alabaster vase held in Yale University's Peabody Museum. A team of researchers led by Andrew J. Koh of Yale University used gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to analyze the sticky, dark-brown residue with a distinct odor that was found in the jar. Noscapine, hydrocotarnine, morphine, thebaine, and papaverine -- all diagnostic biomarkers for opium -- were identified. The alabastron bears inscriptions written in Akkadian, Elamite, Persian, and Egyptian, and names “Great King” Xerxes I, who ruled Persia in the fifth century B.C. It had been previously...

According to a Live Science report, the name of a previously unknown Maya queen has been deciphered from an inscription discovered last year on a staircase at Cobá, an urban center on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula that was occupied from about 350 B.C. into the fourteenth century. Researchers from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) named the staircase Foundation Rock. Although its 123 hieroglyphic panels have been damaged by erosion, David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin and Octavio Esparza Olguín of the National Autonomous University of Mexico were able to match one of the Foundation Rock...

Live Science reports that analysis of the skeletons of seven men recovered from a well in eastern Croatia in 2011 suggests that they are the remains of Roman soldiers who fought in the Battle of Mursa in A.D. 260. "Presumably, all of the individuals were stripped of any valuables -- weapons, armor, equipment, jewelry, etc. -- before they were thrown into the well," said bioarchaeologist Mario Novak of the Institute for Anthropological Research in Zagreb. He and his colleagues determined that all of the remains represented adult men, four of whom were younger and three who were middle-aged at the...

Caedmon's Hymn in Whitby! The 7thC Englishmen who inspired Lord of the Rings | 8:01 BritMapped - Hidden Britain | 22.4K subscribers | 29,517 views | October 29, 2025

It won’t catch any fish, but the discovery of as many as 20,000 silver coins and pieces of jewelry dates back to the early Middle Ages. Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: A fisherman digging for worms at his summer home in Sweden instead discovered over 13 pounds of buried silver treasure. The hoard comes from the early Middle Ages, and includes mostly coins (and some jewelry). The entire cache of silver was tucked inside a copper pot. A Swedish fisherman searching for gooey, juicy worms to use as bait near his summer home near Stockholm instead...

Austrian archaeologists have found a Babylonian seal in Egypt that confirms contact between the Babylonians and the Hyksos during the second millennium B.C. Irene Forstner-Müller, the head of the Austrian Archaeological Institute's (ÖAI) branch office in Cairo, said today (Thurs) the find had occurred at the site of the ancient town of Avaris near what is today the city of Tell el-Dab'a in the eastern Nile delta. The Hyksos conquered Egypt and reigned there from 1640 to 1530 B.C. She said a recently-discovered cuneiform tablet had led archaeologists to suspect there had been contact between the Babylonians and the Hyksos....

Georgeos Diaz-Montexano, scriptologist and Egyptologist amateur, has been able to identify the names of the Hyksos kings like pertaining to the group of languages and proto-Greek or Mycenaean's dialects. The true ethnic origin of the mysterious Hyksos that were able to take control of the power of a considerable part of Old Egypt, during centuries XVII to the XVI before Christ, has been always a true challenge for the Egyptologists. However, the generalized opinion more for a long time has been that the Hyksos would be Semitic towns, fundamentally coastal inhabitants of the strip Syrian-Palestine, that is, Canaanites or proto-Phoenicians....

While some depict the Bible’s Passover meal and Jews’ Exodus from Egypt as a fable, archeological and other evidence squares with the Bible’s account.Tonight begins Passover, or Pasach, celebrated worldwide by Jews. As recounted in Exodus 13:3-10, this ritual meal marks their ancestors’ escape from Egyptian captivity.About three weeks earlier, Christians celebrated Easter to commemorate Jesus’ Resurrection. Judaism and Christianity share not merely monotheism, but also recount their miraculous foundations as history.Together they form the moral foundation for Western culture, a foundation that is collapsing, in part due to post-Enlightenment critiques of the historicity of these religions. But, as a...

The tip came from a lawyer, a faithful reader from Brooklyn named Harvey Herbert- An Egyptian hieroglyphic papyrus now in the Brooklyn Museum mentions an Asiatic slave named Shiphrah. Shiphrah, of course, is the name of one of the Hebrew midwives (the other is Puah) whom Pharaoh summoned to carry out his order that all boys born to the enslaved Israelites be killed (Exodus 1-15)... And here was an Asiatic slave with this same name mentioned in an Egyptian papyrus written in hieroglyphics... All I can do is report what to some (surely, to me) are previously unknown facts that...

A team of archaeologists digging at Tel-Habuwa, near the town of Qantara East and three kilometres east of the Suez Canal... chanced upon a cachet of limestone reliefs bearing names of two royal personalities and two seated statues of differing sizes. The larger statue is made of limestone and belongs to a yet unidentified personage, but from its size and features archaeologists believe that it could be a statue of Horus, the god of the city. In 2001 archaeologists unearthed remains of a mud-brick temple dedicated to this deity. The second is a headless limestone statue inscribed on the back...

For over a century, everyone believed that The Devil's Checkmate (1831), the famous painting by Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch, depicted the ultimate defeat of the human soul at the hands of the devil -- a dark scene with no apparent way out. But in 1888, chess champion Paul Morphy saw the painting... and noticed something no one else had. According to the story, he studied the board, analyzed the position of the pieces, and revealed that the young man wasn't lost after all -- he still had one move left. This discovery not only changed how we look at the...

The clay tablet is part of a guide to exorcising ghosts held in the collections of the British Museum, reports Dalya Alberge for the Observer. Irving Finkel, a curator in the London museum’s Middle Eastern department and the author of the forthcoming book The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies, says the image on the tablet is only visible when viewed from above under a light. The museum acquired the artifact in the 19th century, but it has never been exhibited.

An amateur metal detectorist profoundly believes in that maxim and it came true when he uncovered up to 15,000 Roman coins buried in a hoard that could be Wales' biggest-ever treasure find.The BBC reports David Moss, 36, from Cheshire, made the discovery that left him in disbelief after he dug up up two clay pots in an undisclosed northern part of the country.But the epic find in a muddy field left him fearing they could be stolen, so he slept with the treasure in his car for three days before taking the coins to experts, the BBC notes.The coins are...

Possible identity of "Mona Lisa of the North" has been revealed by a British art historian.A mysterious girl with a pearl earring from Johannes Vermeer's famous painting was likely the daughter of the painter's commissioner, a historian has revealed. The 17th-century Dutch painter Vermeer worked almost exclusively for Pieter van Ruijven and Maria de Knuijt, a Dutch husband and wife in Delft. This has been revealed by Andrew Graham-Dixon, the art historian and TV presenter, claiming the girl wearing the pearl earring in the renowned oil painting is likely the couple's daughter, Magdalene. The wealthy family were members of a...