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LEONARDO DA VINCI's masterpiece the Mona Lisa has captivated art lovers for centuries - but now, a scientist who analysed every inch and layer of the famous portrait has discovered hidden details beneath the painter's brushstrokes.The early 16th Century painting is arguably one of da Vinci’s most famous works and currently resides in the Louvre, in Paris. It’s estimated that 80 percent of their annual 10.2 million visitors attend to see the Mona Lisa. Scientist Pascal Cotte was asked to digitise the painting using a specialist camera, which was able to capture hidden layers beneath the portrait. From his multispectral...

CNA Staff, Sep 23, 2020 / 12:00 am MT (CNA).- After fire toppled the iconic spire and destroyed the roof of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France in April 2009, heated debates ensued about whether the reconstruction should use the church’s original design, or use a more modern design and technique. Some proposed futuristic ideas included a rooftop swimming pool and a greenhouse atop the 850-year-old cathedral. Last year, the French Senate passed a bill mandating that Notre-Dame be rebuilt as it was before the fire, with lumber and medieval carpentry techniques, which were highlighted in a public demonstration...

A "nationally significant" Anglo-Saxon cemetery with 200 graves dating back to the 7th Century has been revealed. The graves were uncovered in Oulton, near Lowestoft in Suffolk, ahead of construction of a housing development. The burial ground contained the remains of men, women and children, as well as artefacts including brooches, small iron knives and silver pennies... A spokesman said the site "lies within the Kingdom of the East Angles, made famous by the royal burial ground at nearby Sutton Hoo". Sutton Hoo, discovered in 1939, included two cemeteries from the 6th to 7th centuries and a ship burial full...

...the research team extracted and analysed DNA from the remains of 442 men, women and children... from archaeological sites in Scandinavia, the U.K., Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, Estonia, Ukraine, Poland and Russia, and mostly date to the Viking Age (ca. 750-1050 AD). The team's analyses yielded a number of findings. One of the most noteworthy is that contrary to what has often been assumed, Viking identity was not limited to people of Scandinavian ancestry -- the team discovered that two skeletons from a Viking burial site in the Orkney Islands were of Scottish ancestry. They also found evidence that there was...

A SUNKEN ship has been found in almost perfect condition despite spending 400 years underwater. Divers made the mysterious discovery while exploring the Baltic Sea off the coast of Finland. The divers, from the non-profit Badewanne team, have come across shipwrecks before but never one as old and undamaged as the Dutch merchant vessel. The ship has been dated back to the 17th century. It dates back to a time when the Dutch Empire spanned five continents, becoming an economic superpower that was single-handedly responsible for half of Europe’s shipping by 1670. The ship is called a 'fluyt', a type...

On this date in 1459, the former Doge of Genoa Pietro di Campfregoso was stoned to death by his city’s enraged populace. This Pietro (English Wikipedia entry | Italian) succeeded his cousin to the merchant oligarchy’s head in 1450. Genoa resided in a crab-bucket of rival peninsular and Mediterranean powers, and Pietro was distinctly out-scuttled in the 1450s. Genoa unsuccessfully supported the Byzantine Empire when it was decisively conquered by the rising Ottomans in 1453, and the Genoans found themselves consequently rousted from a number of Aegean and Black Sea possessions. Meanwhile, fickle Italian fortune brought Neapolitan troops to the...

Rewilding is not about restoring the past, but about proactively seeking solutions for a world in environmental crisis. There is something deeply heartening about an extinct native species being reintroduced to its former habitat. In the United Kingdom, there are several of those stories. The last time storks were recorded breeding in the UK was way back in 1416 on top of a cathedral in Edinburgh. This year, nests on the Knepp Estate in West Sussex produced the first wild-born chicks in 600 years. The parent birds were bred in captivity and released into the wild as part of a...

Imagine Shakespeare walking into his local pub and there is his ole friend and competitor Ben Johnson. They have a few drinks while discussing who is the better poet. Drinks are flowing and the conversation gets heated so they decide to have a poetry rap/slam contest to determine the winner. Word play as sword play and an insult competition... like a Dean Martin Roast among poets. Here is what it might have looked like if it happened today in England. Note: Both Harry Baker and Soweto are Oxford students. Harry Baker is also a Christian and does Ted Talks. Some...

It is now generally accepted the Leif Eriksson sailed from Greenland across the Davis Strait and made landfalls on the North American continent almost a thousand years ago, but what happened in this vast area during the next five hundred years has long been a source of disagreement among scholars. Using new archeological, scientific, and documentary information (much of it in Scandinavian languages that are a bar to most Western historians), this book confronts many of the unanswered questions about early exploration and colonization along the shores of the Davis Strait. The author brings together two distinct but tangential fields...

Modern banking has its auspicious beginnings in the early to mid Middle Ages. Primitive banking transactions existed before, but until the economic revival of the thirteenth century they were limited in scope and occurrence. By the dawn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, bankers were grouped into three distinct categories: the pawnbrokers, the moneychangers, and the merchant bankers. But with these economic specializations came religious denunciation and backlash. However, these bankers persevered and a new industry was born. After the collapse of the Roman Empire in the late fifth century, there followed centuries of deep economic depression, sharp deflation of...

Two battle axes used in hand-to-hand fighting at the Battle of Grunwald over 600 years ago have been found by detectorists during a sweep of the famous battle site in northern Poland. The find, which has astonished archaeologists, is all the more important as the melee weapons are in remarkably good condition. According to Dr. Szymon Dreja, director of the Museum of the Battle of Grunwald, the discovery of the battle axes are an archaeological sensation. "In seven years of our archaeological research we have never had such an exciting, important and well-preserved find," he stressed. According to the director,...

In 1280, victorious Teutonic Crusaders began building the world's largest castle on a hill overlooking the River Nogat in what is now northern Poland. Malbork Castle became the hub of a powerful Teutonic state that crushed its pagan enemies and helped remake Medieval Europe. Now, ancient pollen samples show that in addition to converting heathens to Christians, the Crusaders also converted vast swathes of Medieval forests to farmlands. In the early-13th century, Prussian tribes living in the south-eastern Baltic became a thorn in the side of the Monastic State of Teutonic Knights, which was formed in 1224 in what is...

Travel: The mosaic of East Poland By : SANTHA OORJITHAM The Tartar Trail in Poland is off the beaten track, even for locals. SANTHA OORJITHAM meets the descendants of the nomads from the tablelands. “THIS is the end of the world,” says Dzenneta Bogdanowicz as she surveys her rustic restaurant, horses in the paddock and traditional Tartar “jurta” hut in which tourists can stay. Kruszyniany in northeastern Poland, 16km from the Russian border, is not a village you “pass through on your way to somewhere else”. But during the “Sabantuj” harvest festival in June, the bubbly Tartar entrepreneur attracted some...

Beowulf: A New TranslationThe first thing I need to tell you is that you have to read it now. No, I don't care if you've read Beowulf (the original) before. No, I don't care if you loved it/hated it, if it traumatized you, if it ruined and/or energized the English language for you, or ruined you for translations or whatever. I don't care what you think of when you think of Beowulf in any of its hundreds of other translations because this — this — version, Headley's version, is an entirely different thing. It is its own thing. A remarkable...

The Serce Port shipwreck, on display at the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology in southwestern Mugla province, offers a glimpse into the popular 11th-century trade route between the Middle East and Europe. Popularly called the "Glass Wreck," the exhibit hosts hundreds of items reflecting the ship's historical and archaeological importance. The ship is believed to have set sail from Lebanon's Port of Beirut... in the 11th century and sunk at a depth of 33 meters (108 feet) in Serce Port, Marmaris, in southwestern [Anatolia]... Among the artifacts exhibited along with the ship are gold Islamic and copper Byzantine coins, scales,...

Alfred the Great, King of Wessex from 871 and King of the Anglo-Saxons from 886 to 899, is widely touted as establishing England's first Royal fleet but research led by Flinders Medieval Studies Ph.D. candidate Matt Firth has found evidence that the Anglo-Saxons' first recorded naval victory occurred 20 years before Alfred was crowned King of Wessex and 24 years before his first recorded naval victory... Using a combination of tenth-century historical texts and the growing archeological evidence for medieval ship design, the new research shows that Alfred was not the first English monarch to coordinate a fleet to defend...

On this date in 1305, Scottish knight Mel Gibson — er, William Wallace — was hanged, drawn and quartered at Smithfield for treason to a British crown he refused to recognize. Well, close enough. Some wags have alleged one or two historical liberties in Braveheart. Among the lesser (but more pertinent here): that they weren’t — you knew this already — offering the former Guardian of Scotland the opportunity to reduce his suffering with a public submission, or use the stage for theatrical defiance. Hanging, drawing and quartering was a brand new execution Edward I was experimenting with for emasculating,...

A rare, fully intact sword from the 10th century has been found at the bottom of a lake. The sword which is decorated with a cross and has the remains of its leather scabbard, was discovered along with artefacts dating back to the times of the first Piast by archaeologists exploring Lednica Lake, between Poznan and Gniezno... The younger bridge dates back to the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries, while the older to the beginning of the 10th. The wood used for its construction was cut down in the years 913 and 914... Underneath the bridges' remnants, the...

Among the finds are manuscripts possibly used to perform illegal Catholic masses, silk fragments and handwritten musicWhile most of England was on lockdown amid the COVID-19 pandemic, archaeologist Matt Champion was working solo at Oxburgh Hall, a moated Tudor mansion in Norfolk. As part of the site’s £6 million (roughly $7.8 million USD) roof restoration project, workers had lifted the floorboards in the estate’s attic for the first time in centuries. Probing the recesses beneath the boards with gloved fingertips, Champion expected to find dirt, coins, bits of newspapers and detritus that had fallen through the cracks. Instead, he discovered...

Researchers have long clashed over the circumstances of the 1495 European syphilis epidemic. The so-called Columbian theory posits that Columbus and his crew carried the bacterium, or an earlier progenitor of it, when they returned to Europe in 1493 after their American journey. Skeletons of Native Americans who died prior to Columbus's arrival show bone lesions from Treponemal diseases, including yaws and bejel, and some researchers suspect syphilis was also present. However, other researchers believe syphilis itself circulated in Europe for centuries and became more virulent in the late 1400s. They point to a growing body of archaeological evidence: skeletal...