This week: Hadrian’s Wall
This week on The Past, we are delighted to celebrate a very special milestone: the 400th issue of our sister publication Current Archaeology – the ground-breaking specialist magazine, first published in March
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This week: Ancient fortifications
The obvious comparison, here in Britain, is with Hadrian’s Wall – the great Roman fortification that stretches for 73 miles across the country from coast to coast. Yet the Great Wall of
This week: The Neolithic
If the past is a foreign country – as the novelist L.P. Hartley famously suggested in the opening line to The Go-Between (1953) – then prehistory is surely a whole other world
This week: Signature style
With no contemporary written record to guide us, we cannot know the precise meaning behind the many depictions of human hands featured in prehistoric cave art around the world – the oldest
This week: Mummies
The ancient Egyptian process of mummification holds a unique place in the popular imagination – inspiring exhibitions, movies, books, and countless school trips. As we learn this week on The Past, however,
St Bartholomew the Great
Packed tightly between Smithfield meat market and the Barbican’s brutalist towers, St Bartholomew the Great (or Great St Bart’s, as it is often called) is London’s oldest surviving parish church, and also
London Churches Quiz
St Paul’s Cathedral was London’s tallest building for more than 200 years. How high is it?
This week: Pacopampa
Understanding burial practices and funerary customs is a vital part of any attempt to understand an ancient culture – for while the need to separate the living from the dead is common
This week: Water in Istanbul
Today, Istanbul – formerly Constantinople – is Europe’s largest metropolis, having grown dramatically in size since the 1970s to reach a population in excess of 17 million. But despite the gleaming modern
Water Features
Outside which French city would you find the Pont du Gard, the tallest of all Roman aqueduct bridges?
This week: Military disasters
It is hard to disagree with the observation, made by the distinguished military historian John Keegan (1934-2012), that ‘all battles are in some degree… disasters’. But if the brutal nature of warfare
Military Disasters Quiz
At which battle in 216 BC did Hannibal lure a much larger Roman army into a deadly trap?
This week: The Harpole Treasure
It was, according to Levente Bence Balázs, the leader of the Museum of London team that made the discovery, a moment that might most accurately be described as ‘an archaeologist’s dream’. On
Early medieval quiz
Born in c.673, which early monk is remembered as the ‘father of English history’?
This week: the year in review
It has been a year of non-stop turbulence in the news – from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the continuing upheaval of Covid-19, and from record-breaking heatwaves to the return of rampant
Anniversaries Quiz
Which Frenchman cracked the code of the Rosetta Stone two hundred years ago in 1822?
This week: A pagan Christmas?
These days, some would have us believe that Christmas has been ‘hijacked’ – that the season of good cheer has been rudely stripped of its religious connotation (of ‘mass on Christ’s day’)
This week: Alexander in the East
He is one of the most famous figures in human history, the subject of countless legends, and a commander regularly claimed as the greatest of all time. But who was Alexander the