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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Babylon: The City That Published Its Laws
A city that wrote its laws down and displayed them in public. What the Babylonian legal texts show, and what they leave out.
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The Fall of Constantinople 1453: How the City Fell
Seven thousand defenders held fourteen miles of wall for 53 days. What broke them, and what actually ended in 1453.
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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 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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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.