As any Asterix fan will tell you, the siege of Alésia occupies a special place in the French psyche. The climactic action of Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul took place in September 52 BC – two years before the adventures described in Goscinny and Uderzo’s indomitable tales – and is…
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 Great really? We know that he was born in 356 BC, in Pella, the capital of the ancient…
Which Persian king did Alexander defeat at the Battle of Gaugamela?…
Over the past few centuries of European history, we have grown used to the notion of the artist as celebrity. As far back as the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo and Michelangelo were famous in their own lifetimes. More recently, we can see from the careers of many modern artists – Picasso…
In which year was Pompeii buried under pumice and ash following the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius?…
They are sometimes said to be the nation’s real crown jewels: the various palaces, castles and other grand houses which for centuries have formed the backdrop to royal life in the United Kingdom – from Sandringham and Windsor in England to Hillsborough in Northern Ireland, and from Balmoral and Holyrood…
Which king was the last to live at the Palace of Westminster?…
In which year is Tutankhamun thought to have been born?…
He died while still in his teens, and his tomb was the smallest of any pharaoh in the Valley of the Kings. Yet Tutankhamun remains without doubt the most celebrated figure to emerge from ancient Egypt, and arguably one of the most famous people in all human history. One hundred…
It is a curious coincidence that the 100th and 200th anniversaries respectively of perhaps the two most famous events in Egyptology should both fall in 2022. First up, in September, came the 200th anniversary of the decoding of the Rosetta Stone by the French philologist Jean-François Champollion – a breakthrough…
Which powerful queen was co-ruler of Ancient Egypt for 22 years from around 1473 BC?…
The events of late May and early June 1940 have long been the stuff of patriotic British legend, celebrated in classic war movies (most recently Christopher Nolan’s 2017 blockbuster), and hailed by Winston Churchill as a ‘miracle of deliverance’. For generations of Britons, this miraculous narrative has run along conventional…
Which day in 1940 saw the German invasion of France and the Low Countries, bringing the so-called Phoney War to an end?…
Back in 1919, when the spectacular Traprain Hoard was unearthed at an Iron Age hillfort outside Edinburgh, it must have been tempting to view this unmatched assemblage of Late Roman ‘hacksilver’ (silver items and objects which have deliberately been cut, chopped and crushed into fragments) simply as evidence of the…
These days in Britain, we like to think of public executions as belonging to a distant and more barbaric age – one far removed from the modern world in which we now live. It is sobering, therefore, to reflect that when crowds flocked to see the last public execution in…
To which debtors' prison was Charles Dickens' father sent in 1824, when the novelist was 12 years old?…
No written records exist to explain why people in early medieval Europe chose to bury collections of their most valuable objects or artefacts – known to archaeologists as ‘hoards’ – though logic suggests that burying your treasures at moments of danger may have seemed like a sensible precaution at the…
Denmark's current monarch, Queen Margrethe II, traces her lineage back to which 10th-century king?…
Today, we live in a world of too much information: one in which a staggering 231,400,000 emails are sent out on average every single minute, according to the consumer data company Statista, along with countless million more text messages and social-media updates, and even the occasional old-fashioned letter. Against this…
In which Roman fort were the wooden tablets found that contain the earliest handwriting ever discovered in Britain?…
In the decades since the cracking of the human genome, the study of ancient DNA – known as archaeogenetics – has had a dramatic effect on our understanding of the distant past. The analysis of genetic material preserved in archaeological remains, such as bones and preserved tissues, has provided us…