Heritage

A new study published in the journal Science has revealed that the world once experienced a remarkable "golden age" of linguistic diversity, with researchers estimating that tens of thousands of languages were spoken between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago.

The tragic story of a Cambridgeshire woman accused of witchcraft more than two centuries ago is shedding light on how fear, superstition and social exclusion continued to fuel violent persecution long after Britain's witch trials had officially ended.

Recent record-breaking temperatures and prolonged dry weather have dramatically revealed the hidden outline of a spectacular 17th-century formal garden beneath the South Lawn at Chatsworth House, England, offering a rare glimpse into one of the estate's earliest landscape designs.

A newly published study has uncovered fresh evidence that the Nazi SS likely misidentified the remains of a medieval woman as those of King Henry I in an attempt to bolster its ideological campaign during the 1930s.

An international expedition has captured the first detailed 3D images of the wreck of Terra Nova, the final ship of British Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott, using advanced Canadian underwater imaging technology.

A team of Chinese researchers has successfully reconstructed a long-lost Ming Dynasty goldsmithing technique, shedding new light on the remarkable craftsmanship behind some of imperial China's finest jewellery.

A fifteenth-century manuscript held for decades in the collection of Heidelberg University Library has been identified as part of the famed Bibliotheca Palatina, one of the most important libraries of the Renaissance.

New research suggests Dante Alighieri’s Inferno may have done more than shape literary history — it may also have anticipated concepts in planetary impact science centuries before modern meteoritics emerged.

Researchers in the UK say they have reconstructed 42 missing pages from a major early Christian manuscript, using imaging and dating techniques to reveal text unseen for centuries.

A royal seal from the reign of Edward the Confessor, long thought lost, has been rediscovered in the French National Archives, offering historians a remarkable new window into the final years of Anglo-Saxon England.

Writing might feel easy to overlook today, with so much communication happening through voice notes and video. But for most of human history, it has been one of the main ways people stored knowledge and told stories. Without it, much of what we know about the past would simply be gone.

A remarkable discovery in the archives of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology has brought to light thirty previously unknown verses by Empedocles, offering an unprecedented glimpse into the work of one of ancient Greece’s most enigmatic thinkers.

The Odyssey is one of the foundational works of ancient Greek literature, set during the archaic period of Classical antiquity. It is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to the poet Homer.

A page long believed to be missing from the famed Archimedes Palimpsest has been rediscovered at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Blois, France, offering scholars new opportunities to study one of antiquity’s most important mathematical manuscripts.

A rare late medieval “one-and-a-half-handed” sword has been unveiled at the Museum of Miechów Landm, Poland, after being donated anonymously.