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. Every one of them is researched and written by the same person, so the voice does not change from piece to piece, and nothing here is spun out of somebody else’s summary.

What You Will Find Here

As of 22 August 2026 there are twelve published articles, filed across two sections, Myths & Legends and Lost Worlds. That is the whole archive, and it falls into a few honest groups.

• Myth and where it came from. Ragnarok and the Norse end of the world, the Trojan War, King Arthur, and Atlantis. Stories held up against the texts that carry them, to see what the texts actually claim.
• Lost cities, and what archaeology can genuinely tell us. Petra, cut into rock by the Nabataeans, and the Nazca Lines of southern Peru.
• Why civilisations fall, and what is lost when they do. The collapse of the Roman Empire, the Kingdom of Aksum, and the long undoing of the Library of Alexandria.
• Contact and exchange across long distances. The Silk Road, and the Norse voyages that reached North America in 1021.
• Belief and practice. How and why the ancient Egyptians mummified their dead.

Planned next is Indian mythology and Vedic philosophy: the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the Puranas and the Upanishads. Nothing on those has been published here 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 These Articles Are Researched

Each article starts with the primary material, and where a primary text is quoted the translation is named, 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, and they are made and noted rather than quietly absorbed. The full standard is set out on the Editorial Policy page.

Who Writes This

Tales From Time is founded, researched and written by Saurav Sinha, in New Delhi, India. He is a published author, of the novella In Her Sixteen and the epic fantasy trilogy Arsalan, and he works as a senior content writer and editor. His own writing has long been about Indian mythology, Vedic philosophy and ancient history, which is where this site is eventually headed. There is more about him on the Author and Founder page, and he posts as authorsaurav on Instagram.

A Note on Illustrations

The illustrations on this site are AI-generated, and they are labelled as such. They are interpretations, made to set a mood at the top of an article, and they are not photographs of real artefacts, sites or people. Please do not read them as evidence for anything. Where a real object, inscription or place matters to an argument, the article describes it in words and names the source it comes from.

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 Us page. Corrections are opened first.

This page was last updated on 22 August 2026.