The Journal of Historical and Mythical Tales
Ancient and medieval history and myth, from primary sources, saying plainly where the evidence runs out.
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Ragnarok: The Norse Myth of the End
Ragnarok is not only destruction. The full sequence, which gods die, and the rebirth most retellings leave out.
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King Arthur: History, Legend, or Both?
No contemporary source mentions Arthur. Where the legend came from, what each century added, and what Tintagel really produced.
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The Lost City of Petra
The Nabataeans built a city of 20,000 in a desert getting 150mm of rain. How their water system worked, and why it failed.
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Ancient Egyptian Mummification: How and Why
Seventy days, forty in salt, and one organ deliberately left inside. The full process, and the belief that made it necessary.
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Why the Roman Empire Collapsed
One historian counted 210 proposed causes for the fall of Rome. What the evidence supports, and why the question keeps producing new answers.
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The Trojan War: What the Archaeology at Troy Can and Cannot Settle
A Bronze Age ruin, a poem four centuries younger, and a long silence in between. What the archaeology at Troy can and cannot settle.
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The Vikings Who Reached America in 1021
A solar storm in 993 left a signature in tree rings that dates a Norse camp in Newfoundland to exactly 1021, 471 years before Columbus.
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The Mystery of the Nazca Lines
A German mathematician swept the desert with a broom for most of her adult life to preserve them. What the geoglyphs are, and why flight was never needed to make them.
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How the Silk Road Changed the Ancient World
It was never one road, and nobody who used it called it that. How the network really worked, and why its ideas outlasted its cargo.
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The Kingdom of Aksum: Africa’s Forgotten Superpower
A third-century writer ranked Aksum beside Rome, Persia and China. The story of the Red Sea empire that minted its own gold.
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What We Really Know About Atlantis
Every Atlantis theory traces back to two dialogues by Plato and nothing else. What the evidence shows, and why the myth refuses to die.
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The Library of Alexandria: Rise, Fall, and What Was Really Lost
It was never destroyed in one fire. How the ancient world’s greatest library actually declined, and what genuinely disappeared with it.