Posts tagged "history"

Sep 18, 2026 from Daily Medieval

The Nika Riots, Part 3

Emperor Justinian's plan to end the Nika Riots involved bribes. One difficulty about the Riots was that two large and influential rival factions, the Blues and the Greens, had joined together again...

Sep 18, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

Earth Isn’t a Perfect Sphere — But It’s Changing Shape Faster Than Expected

Earth has never been a perfect sphere. It bulges slightly at the equator and flattens slightly at the poles, a shape geodesists call an oblate spheroid — think of a basketball very gently squeezed ...

Sep 18, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

A 1,800-Year-Old Roman Iron and Bronze Workshop Almost as Big as a Villa Uncovered in Switzerland

Workers were preparing to build a block of flats in Ligornetto, a small town in the canton of Ticino, right on the border with Italy, when they hit the remains of a Roman factory built almost two t...

Sep 18, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

The Day Julius Caesar Was Assassinated, Half the City Was Drunk Because It Was the Feast of an Obscure Roman Goddess: Who Was Anna Perenna?

While Brutus and his allies were stabbing Julius Caesar to death, a good chunk of the Roman working class was having a picnic. They drank wine, pitched makeshift tents out of branches and cloth, an...

Sep 17, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

Laser Scans Reveal 23 Hidden Ship Carvings on a 3,000-Year-Old Cyprus Temple — Made From the Bronze Age Collapse to the Age of Homer

Forty years ago, archaeologist Lucien Basch and researcher Michal Artzy published a set of 19 ship graffiti carved into the walls of Kition Kathari, an archaeological site beneath the modern city o...

Sep 17, 2026 from Daily Medieval

The Nika Riots, Part 2

Let's look at how Emperor Justinian managed to stop the Nika Riots and save Constantinople. We saw yesterday how the Blue and Green factions were angered over the treatment of some of their own peo...

Sep 17, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

A 328-Foot Underground Aqueduct Discovered in the Sabine Hills Shows Rome Wasn’t the First to Master Water Engineering

In the district of Monteleone Sabino, a town of under 1,300 people in Italy’s Rieti province, a team of cavers has made its way through a passage first cut into the mountainside more than two thous...

Sep 17, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

Mosaic floors worthy of a palace discovered in the classroom where Aristotle taught Alexander the Great

Some 40 miles (65 km) from Thessaloniki, a teenager who would go on to reshape the ancient world once sat listening to lessons on physics, ethics and politics under stone colonnades. That teenager ...

Sep 17, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

How a Tiny Danish Colony Ruled a Piece of India for 225 Years

Tharangambadi is a fishing village on India’s Coromandel Coast, in the state of Tamil Nadu. Its name means “place of the singing waves,” a nod to the Indian Ocean lapping at its shore. It isn’t muc...

Sep 16, 2026 from Daily Medieval

The Nika Riots, Part 1

Constantinople during the reign  of Emperor  Justinian I (482 - 565) saw a tumultuous week in 532. The catalyst was a little earlier, when in 531 the city prefect, Eudaimon, arrested some citizens ...

Sep 16, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

A 3,200-Year-Old War Horse’s Tomb Turns Up Inside a Ramesses II Border Fort

Under Ramesses II, who ruled Egypt between 1279 and 1213 BC and is remembered as one of its most powerful pharaohs, the kingdom kept a chain of garrisons along its western frontier, watching for ra...

Sep 16, 2026 from The Public Domain Review

Veronese's Dogs

“Oh, if I could only pray”, Luther once said of his dog Tölpel, “the way this dog watches the meat”. Attending to attentive canine figures in half a dozen paintings by Paolo Veronese, Thomas W. Laq...

Sep 16, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

Massive 6,000-Year-Old Kiln in Romania Ran Hot Enough to Melt Bronze Centuries Before Anyone Cast It

A team of archaeologists digging at the site of Ursoaia, in Romania’s Iași County, has uncovered a nearly 6,000-year-old pottery kiln unlike anything previously found in the region. Described in a ...

Sep 16, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

Not All Roads Led to Rome: Scientists Discover Byzantium Was the Empire’s Real Hub

All roads lead to Rome. It’s one of the oldest sayings in the Western world, and according to a new study in Nature Communications, it isn’t quite true. Led by Adam Pažout, a researcher at the Auto...

Sep 16, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

Why Nothing in the Universe Can Reach -459°F or Absolute Zero — Not Even Empty Space

There’s a temperature nothing in the universe has ever touched. It’s called absolute zero, equal to -273.15°C (-459.67°F), the point at which the particles that make up matter would lose all their ...

Sep 16, 2026 from Case Vault — EN

The Great Train Robbery

United Kingdom · 1963 · Heist — A criminal gang tampered with track signals to stop a Royal Mail train in Buckinghamshire, making off with over £2.6 million in cash before abandoned clues at their ...

Sep 15, 2026 from The Public Domain Review

It’s “A Cat-astrophe”! (1919)

“A Cat-astrophe” came on the tail end of an odd 1918 boom in cat-themed music.

Sep 15, 2026 from The Emu Café Social

Pook-Emu Bee: Links For 09-15-26

My posting out-put has been subpar of late, but today the Pook-Emu Bee links return for the first time since September 10. 1 | 25 Years Since the Worst Day in My Lifetime (Andrew R. Arthur for Cent...

Sep 15, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

North Africa’s Oldest Fort Outside Egypt Rose in Step with Bronze Age Spain

Before Rome existed, before Phoenician ships ever reached the western Mediterranean, and around the same time the first fortified villages of the Argaric culture were rising in southeastern Iberia,...

Sep 15, 2026 from Daily Medieval

The Blues and Greens

People love sports, and people love their sports teams, and rivalries abound. 'Twas ever thus, and Ancient Rome was no exception.In Rome and the later Byzantine Empire, chariot races were extremely...