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A Silk Road stopover might have been the epicentre of one of humanity’s most destructive pandemics. People who died in a fourteenth-century outbreak in what is now Kyrgyzstan were killed by strains of the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis that gave rise to the pathogens responsible several years later for the Black Death, shows a study of ancient genomes. “It is like finding the place where all the strains come together, like with coronavirus where we have Alpha, Delta, Omicron all coming from this strain in Wuhan,” says Johannes Krause, a palaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in...

Side by side images of the front and back of the small silver Viking coin that was found. It looks very worn, but on one side you can make out the triquetra in the middle and writing going around the edge. The next image shows the other side of the coin. It is very worn but you can make out some small circles in the top left and bottom right as well as 2 lines going down the middle and writing around the edge.A metal detectorist has discovered a small silver coin marked with the name of a famous Viking...

Curator Irving Finkel recounts a magical adventure with The Lewis Chessmen. Content warning: wizard's chess.Irving Finkel and the Chamber of Lewis Chessmen | Curator's Corner | S 2 Ep9September 24, 2017 | The British Museum<

Excavations were on behalf of HS2 (the purpose-built high speed railway line) near the town of Wendover in Buckinghamshire, England, revealing one of the largest Anglo-Saxon burial sites in Britain that dates from between the 5th and 6th century AD.Most of the burials have been described as containing high-status grave goods, suggesting the site was the final resting place of a wealthy Anglo-Saxon community nearby. The site contains 138 graves, with 141 inhumation burials and 5 cremation burials, in addition to evidence of Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman activity.Many burials were found to contain two brooches in the...

A deadly pandemic with mysterious origins: It might sound like a modern headline, but scientists have spent centuries debating the source of the Black Death that devastated the medieval world. Not anymore, according to researchers who say they have pinpointed the source of the plague to a region of Kyrgyzstan, after analyzing DNA from remains at an ancient burial site. "We managed to actually put to rest all those centuries-old controversies about the origins of the Black Death," said Philip Slavin, a historian and part of the team whose work was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The Black Death...

The men whose centuries-old remains were found buried under a landmark Cork city pub with their hands tied behind their backs “met a violent and gruesome end”, archaeologists have confirmed.And it has also emerged that a second major archaeological discovery, a 1,000-year-old defensive ditch, found nearby on the site of the former Nancy Spain's pub on Barrack Street suggests that the mediaeval city was bigger than previously thought...The nature of the gruesome find made headlines around the world.It has now been confirmed that the skeletal remains of six people in total, all male, were found on the site.Four were dumped...

Dante Alighieri is a symbol of Italy and its poetry, but also of the city he was born, Firenze. A proud Florentine, Dante never kept the love he had for his hometown a secret, so why is he buried in Ravenna? Well, because that’s where he passed, of course, but the matter of where his mortal remains should rest was the cause of mystery and diatribes for centuries. Dante rests, today, in a quiet corner of the Emilia-Romagna town, his marble mausoleum protected by sunlight and heat by the leafy beauty of an oak planted by poet and Nobel laureate...

Excavations of a Viking-era site in Iceland has revealed a previously unknown man-made cave.Archaeologists from the Archaeological Institute of Iceland have been excavating near the small village of Oddi in Rangárvellir, Iceland.Oddi was the seat of the Oddaverjar, a powerful clan in the medieval Icelandic Commonwealth. One of the most famous clan members was Sæmundur the Learned (AD 1056-1133) who wrote the early histories of the Norwegian Kings. The settlement developed into a major centre for culture and learning, with Iceland’s patron saint, Þorlákur Þórhallsson, receiving his education at Oddi from the age of nine (AD 1142-1147).Man-made caves at Oddi...

A 1,600-year-old burial ground discovered in Eastern Bohemia is shedding new light on that era. The site was discovered in 2019 by archaeologists from archaeologists from the Museum of Eastern Bohemia in Hradec Králové (MVČ HK), and the first findings were just made public.The site has been dated to the fifth century AD, around the time of the collapse of the western part of the Roman Empire and the start of the Dark Ages. The era was known for migration and instability...The intact grave chamber, designated grave number two, contained several items of extraordinary historical and artistic quality such as...

From the King of Kings of the East and West, the Great Khan. To Qutuz the Mamluk, who fled to escape our swords. You should think of what happened to other countries and submit to us. You have heard how we have conquered a vast empire and have purified the earth of the disorders that tainted it. We have conquered vast areas, massacring all the people. You cannot escape from the terror of our armies. Where can you flee? What road will you use to escape us? Our horses are swift, our arrows sharp, our swords like thunderbolts, our hearts...

...cutting-edge DNA sequencing of more than 400 Viking skeletons from archaeological sites scattered across Europe and Greenland will rewrite the history books as it has shown:Skeletons from famous Viking burial sites in Scotland were actually local people who could have taken on Viking identities and were buried as Vikings.Many Vikings actually had brown hair not blonde hair.Viking identity was not limited to people with Scandinavian genetic ancestry. The study shows the genetic history of Scandinavia was influenced by foreign genes from Asia and Southern Europe before the Viking Age.Early Viking Age raiding parties were an activity for locals and included...

Vikings Live: a tour from the British Museum | Premiered May 27, 2020 | The British Museum

"Echoes of History: Ragnarök" is a historical podcast inspired by the video game "Assassin’s Creed Valhalla : Dawn of Ragnarök." It’s the second season of Ubisoft’s popular podcast “Echoes of History."The year 1066 has become indelibly linked to William the Conqueror, the Norman King who by his victory at Hastings seized the English throne. But for every event that becomes gilded in history as a turning point, there were thousands of others overshadowed, and one such event happened only weeks before that fateful battle and involved the same English King, but instead of securing everlasting glory, it ended the career...

New ancient DNA analysis has shed light on how the black rat, blamed for spreading Black Death, dispersed across Europe -- revealing that the rodent colonized the continent on two occasions in the Roman and Medieval periods. By analyzing DNA from ancient black rat remains found at archaeological sites spanning the 1st to the 17th centuries in Europe and North Africa, researchers have pieced together a new understanding of how rat populations dispersed following the ebbs and flows of human trade, urbanism, and empires...The study -- led by the University of York along with the University of Oxford and the...

Travel through time by lifting like passengers on the Titanic or swimming like the sixth U.S. presidentWhere you’re going, you don’t need a DeLorean. You’ve already got a time machine: your body. With it, you can do battle with medieval knights, walk on the decks of the Titanic, play ball on the White House lawn, or play a round of tennis with Henry VIII. This is how you really sweat to the oldies. Try these workouts from decades and centuries ago to experience what it was like to live—and move—in the past. Your heartrate will go on with the Titanic...

Located 14 meters (45.9 feet) underground in Germany's Cologne, a 600 meter subterranean tunnel connects two historic sites – a Roman palace and the city's medieval Jewish quarter – in a new, underground Jewish Museum set to open soon.It looks like the tower of a castle, with stairs leading down the wall and a glimmer of black water below. This is the mikvah, the ritual bath of Cologne's medieval Jewish community. The museum, located close to Cologne's famous cathedral, is unlike any other. Called MiQua in reference to the mikvah, it will feature a 600-meter route from the ruins of...

Despite their high status, Anglo-Saxon royalty didn't regularly feast on copious amounts of meat and fish. Rather, these medieval rulers dined primarily on vegetables, just like the commoners they ruled over, according to two new studies.In fact, social hierarchy did not have any bearing on the amount of meat consumed; both royalty and peasants chowed down on large amounts of meat only occasionally, the research revealed. It wasn't until the Vikings settled in what is now the United Kingdom in the ninth century and onward that meat became more common on the menu, the team reported.The findings are based on...

When Mexican police found a pile of about 150 skulls in a cave near the Guatemalan border, they thought they were looking at a crime scene, and took the bones to the state capital. It turns out it was a very cold case. It took a decade of tests and analysis to determine the skulls were from sacrificial victims killed between A.D. 900 and 1200, the National Institute of Anthropology and History said Wednesday. Frontera Comalapa in southern Chiapas state has long been plagued by violence and immigrant trafficking. And pre-Hispanic skull piles in Mexico usually show a hole bashed...

Widsith spoke, unlocked his word-hoard, he who had travelled most of all men through tribes and nations across the earth. Often he had gained great treasure in hall. He belonged by birth to the Myrging tribe. Along with Ealhild, the kind peace-weaver, for the first time, from the Baltic coast, he sought the home of Eormanric, king of the Ostrogoths, hostile to traitors. He began then to speak at length: ‘I have heard of many men who ruled over nations. Every leader should live uprightly, rule his estates according to custom, if he wants to succeed to a kingly throne....

Separated by geography and language, there's not much that might seem to connect India's five dwindling Jewish communities – except praying in Hebrew, and food. ...Kolkata is home to the Baghdadi Jews, who were once abundant enough to warrant five synagogues; now there aren't enough for a minyan (minimum [10] male Jews required for liturgical purposes). Magen David and the smaller Beth El Synagogue were both classified as protected monuments and renovated by the Archaeological Survey of India in 2017. ...The story of disappearing Jewish populations finds echoes elsewhere in India. Jews are believed to have first arrived in India...