Some 1,900 years ago, a man named Thrasymedes gave a thin sheet of gold to a god who was neither Greek nor Roman. The deity came from the borderlands of what is now southeastern Turkey. The offering was left inside a Roman army fort on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, in modern Georgia, […]

A man in Behbeit el-Hagar, a village in Egypt’s Gharbia province, was working on a plot of land in front of his house when he came across a block covered in carvings. He told the local antiquities inspectorate. What came out of the ground afterwards, according to a statement from Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and […]

Here is how a consultation worked. Anyone with a question (whether to travel, close a purchase, go to court, or wait for a sick relative to recover) walked up to a statue of the god Hermes in the town square, threw a handful of sheep bones onto a table, added up the points and looked […]

An ox, a ram and a pig, surrounded by garlands, festoons and carved ox skulls, share a single block of stone. At some point in antiquity it ended up as paving at one of the main crossroads of Aquinum, a Roman city in central Italy. It is one of two finds that archaeologists from the […]

In a quiet corner of Hadrian’s Villa, wedged between the so-called Amphitheater and a low bench of volcanic tufa rock, sits a marble slab measuring roughly 40 by 35 centimeters (about 16 by 14 inches). It has not moved in some 1,900 years. Two lines of carved capital letters explain why archaeologists are excited: FVLGVR […]