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: Roman frescoes
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
Pompeii Quiz
In which year was Pompeii buried under pumice and ash following the devastating eruption of Mount Vesuvius?
This week: Royal residences
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
This week: Tutankhamun
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
This week: the ‘Qurna Queen’
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
This week: Dunkirk
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
‘The Year 1940’ Quiz
Which day in 1940 saw the German invasion of France and the Low Countries, bringing the so-called Phoney War to an end?
This week: Roman silver
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
This week: Public executions
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
Crime and Punishment Quiz
To which debtors’ prison was Charles Dickens’ father sent in 1824, when the novelist was 12 years old?
This week: Danish treasure
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
Denmark Quiz
Denmark’s current monarch, Queen Margrethe II, traces her lineage back to which 10th-century king?
This week: Ancient writing
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,
Historic Texts Quiz
In which Roman fort were the wooden tablets found that contain the earliest handwriting ever discovered in Britain?
This week: Archaeogenetics
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.
This week: Mithras
There are some things we can say with certainty about the Roman god Mithras. We know, for instance, that this wonderfully enigmatic deity flourished between the 1st and 4th centuries AD, but
