For decades, one question has nagged at specialists in ancient Mexico: did Teotihuacan — the city that dominated central Mexico from roughly the first to the sixth century AD, with a population that may have reached 125,000 — actually have a writing system, or were its symbols just decorative emblems? The stakes of that question […]

Galileo Galilei is remembered for pointing a simple two-lens tube at the sky and changing astronomy forever. What he is not remembered for is a four-lens telescope built more than a decade before historians thought such instruments existed — and yet that is exactly what a manuscript unearthed in Spain’s National Library now suggests he […]

In 1648, as Swedish troops looted Prague Castle at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, someone carried off among the spoils a volume that weighed 75 kilos and required two people to move. It was a book, the largest surviving illuminated manuscript of the entire Middle Ages, an object so disproportionate for its time […]