From the viewpoint at the chapel of San Marcos, it looks like the work of an army of stonemasons. Two lines of pale limestone, almost vertical, run down a hillside and disappear into the green water of the Canelles reservoir. A half-ruined chapel peeks out between them. Nobody built those walls. They are the Roques […]

Under Ramesses II, who ruled Egypt between 1279 and 1213 BC and is remembered as one of its most powerful pharaohs, the kingdom kept a chain of garrisons along its western frontier, watching for raids by Libyan tribes and, later, the loosely defined coalition of invaders known as the Sea Peoples. One of those tribes, […]

Before Rome existed, before Phoenician ships ever reached the western Mediterranean, and around the same time the first fortified villages of the Argaric culture were rising in southeastern Iberia, a farming community on a rocky ridge in inland Morocco was already digging a ditch and piling up earth. What they were defending against is still […]

In the German state of Brandenburg, barely a hundred meters (about 330 feet) from the border with Saxony-Anhalt, the Havel River curls around a low rise of land that locals call the Pilatsch. For generations, a local legend held that a knight named Pilatus lived there, ambushing boats on the river and locking captured boatmen […]

On May 29, 1108, an Almoravid army crushed the forces of Alfonso VI of León and Castile outside the town of Uclés. Among the dead was Sancho Alfónsez, the king’s only son and heir, a loss so severe that medieval chroniclers ranked it among the worst Christian defeats of the entire Reconquista — the centuries-long […]

Three decades have passed since the collection of gold jewelry appeared in the Šarkamen mausoleum, and now this Roman imperial complex has once again surprised the archaeological community with a discovery of equal significance. Inside the southwest corner tower of the fortified residential palace of the tetrarch Maximinus Daza, an imperial balneum has been located, […]