Where the Record Ends and the Story Keeps Going
There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from loving old things in a fast world.
Tales From Time exists because history is usually taught as a sequence of dates and a ranked list of emperors, and almost never as what it actually was: real people, as afraid and in love and confused as we are, working out how to be alive. The dates are only the scaffolding. The story is the person standing inside it, and that is the part this site is interested in.
Most writing about the ancient world online arrives in one of two shapes. There is the thin summary that tells you nothing you could not have guessed, and there is the breathless mystery piece that treats every unanswered question as proof of something hidden. This site tries the harder third thing: to take the story seriously as a story and the evidence seriously as evidence, and to show you exactly where the two part company. The articles are long, they name what they are built on, and they are willing to end on “nobody knows” when that is the honest ending.
I write all of them. The voice does not change from piece to piece because there is only one person here, and nothing on this site is spun out of somebody else’s summary.
What you will find here
Everything published is filed across three core sections:
Documented human struggles, crises, and historical realities — from the Great Fire of Rome to the Knights Templar, ancient trade networks, and imperial collapse.
Holds the places. Petra, cut into rock by the Nabataeans. Aksum, which minted its own coinage. The Library of Alexandria, and what archaeology can genuinely settle.
Holds the stories and texts: Ragnarok, the Trojan War, King Arthur, Atlantis, Medusa, Robin Hood, and the Oracle at Delphi. Where the story comes from and when it was written down.
The full list is on the archive page and is kept current. I am not going to print a number here that goes stale the week I publish again.
Planned next is Indian mythology and Vedic philosophy: the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the Puranas and the Upanishads. Nothing on those is published yet, and this page will not pretend otherwise. When the first one goes up it will be in the archive with everything else, and you will be able to find it there rather than only in a promise.
How I research these
Each article starts with the primary material. Where I quote a primary text I name the translation, because a myth read in one translation is not quite the same myth read in another.
Beyond that: peer-reviewed scholarship, excavation and site reports, and museum, university and archive publications, rather than whatever happens to rank first in a search. Where historians genuinely disagree, the article says so and sets out the competing readings instead of choosing the tidier one.
And the line between recorded myth and documented history is drawn every time. An article can tell you what the Poetic Edda says about the end of the world without implying that anyone wrote it down as it happened.
Corrections are welcome. I make them and note them rather than quietly absorbing them, and the log is on the corrections page. The full standard is set out in the editorial policy.
Who writes this
Saurav Sinha
Saurav Sinha is a novelist, scriptwriter and essayist from Bhagwatpur, a village in Bihar, where he grew up among the stories and oral histories that shape his work. Writing since the age of twelve, he is the author of the In Her Sixteen duology. On Tales From Time, he explores lost civilisations, myths and the questions that have followed humanity through every age.
I write fiction as well. My novella In Her Sixteen: Part One is published and available on Amazon. Part Two is also available on Amazon and finishes the story. There will not be a third. I have also completed an epic fantasy trilogy called Arsalan, set in an invented world. It is written and revised and currently going out to agents and publishers. It is not published yet, and I will say so here on the day that changes.
Professionally I write for screen and for publication. My own writing has long circled Indian mythology, Vedic philosophy and ancient history, which is where this site is eventually headed. There is more on the author page, and I post as authorsaurav on Instagram.
Get in touch
Questions, disagreements, corrections and article suggestions all reach the same inbox, and it is read by the person who wrote the article. Email sauravsinha@talesfromtime.com, or use the form on the contact page. Corrections are opened first.