Posts tagged "history"

Sep 08, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

This Medieval Castle Had More Than 40 Subterranean Ovens — And Bread Wasn’t the Only Thing Baked There

At the foot of Mount Aragatsotn, in the Armenian highlands, sits the site of Aruch — a castle that was never just a castle. Between the 12th and 13th centuries, it housed a high-status residence, c...

Sep 08, 2026 from Daily Medieval

Describing the Plague

There were several people writing during the time of the Justinian Plague (540s CE). One was Evagrius Scholasticus (c.536 - 594), a lawyer born in Syria who wrote an enormous history of the Church....

Sep 08, 2026 from The Public Domain Review

The Ties that Bind: Central Asian Ikat (ca. 19th century)

Vibrant textiles from the dazzling Timurid metropolis of Bukhara.

Sep 08, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

Neanderthals Returned to This Spanish Cave Every Year for Generations — Long Before Homo Sapiens Ever Set Foot Inside

Deep inside Ojo Guareña, one of the largest cave systems in Europe, in the northern Spanish province of Burgos, archaeologists have spent eleven consecutive summers digging through a single Neander...

Sep 08, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

An Egyptian Papyrus from 2000 Years Ago Reveals How Much the Roman Poet Who Inspired Karl Marx Copied Greece

For years, a small fragment of papyrus lay unnoticed in the collections of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo. No one had looked closely at it until, in early 2026, Belgian papyr...

Sep 07, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

A Judge Who Worked 150 Years After the Great Pyramid Just Had His Tomb Opened — and the Paint Is Still Wet-Looking

When the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette surveyed the necropolis at Saqqara in the mid-19th century, he catalogued hundreds of mastaba tombs and marked one more on his map that he never got ar...

Sep 07, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

No, It’s Not Pompeii: This Roman City on the Black Sea Just Revealed a 105-Square-Meter Mosaic

On the Turkish coast of the Black Sea, there is a Roman city called Pompeiopolis. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with the Pompeii buried by Vesuvius in 79 AD. This one takes its name from P...

Sep 07, 2026 from Daily Medieval

The Plague of Justinian

Long, long ago I made a brief mention of the Plague of Justinian, and I've mad many posts dealing with the Bubonic Plague, the Black Death, Yersinia pestis. Researchers looking at ancient DNA from ...

Sep 07, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

Neolithic Cannibalism Wasn’t a One-Off: Spanish Caves Show It Happened Again and Again for 1,500 Years

An international team has re-examined close to a thousand human bones from the caves of Malalmuerzo, Carigüela, and Majolicas, applying direct radiocarbon dating and modern taphonomic analysis — th...

Sep 07, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

All Lions Belonged to the Emperor — And Rome Had the Paperwork to Prove It

Picture the Colosseum, and the image that comes to mind is almost always the same: a lion bursting into the arena, the crowd roaring, a doomed man backing away. Film and popular history have fixate...

Sep 07, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

They Sailed to Constantinople to Guard the Emperor— Byzantium Massacred Them Instead

In the first quarter of the 11th century, a force of Kievan Rus’ warriors sailed for Constantinople hoping to join the Varangian Guard — the Byzantine emperor’s elite personal bodyguard, foreign tr...

Sep 06, 2026 from The Emu Café Social

PSA on RSSAmplifierBot and BriskBot

I discovered two new bots in my server logs last week: RSSAmplifierBot and BriskBot. They come from RSS Amplifier and Brisk News respectively. Bot sites are built by Profullstack, Inc. I discovered...

Sep 06, 2026 from Daily Medieval

Emperor Belisarius

For the sake of ending the Byzantine invasion of Italy to conquer the Ostrogoths and unify the old Western Roman Empire with the Eastern Byzantine Empire, King Vitiges of the Ostrogoths agreed to t...

Sep 06, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

Archaeologists discover that ancient ports were much larger than we imagined: Roman ships did not only dock at the piers

Underwater archaeology is experiencing a silent revolution. For decades, researchers have measured the importance of ancient ports by looking almost exclusively at what they could see: piers, break...

Sep 05, 2026 from Daily Medieval

The Siege of Ravenna

Ravenna, in the far north coast of Italy on the Adriatic, was the capital city of the Ostrogoths. Capturing it could bring the Gothic Wars to a happy conclusion for the Byzantines, whose emperor, J...

Sep 05, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

Spain’s ‘Iberian Pompeii’ Just Unearthed a Face-Smashed Statue Older Than the Roman Empire

The face is gone. Not chipped or worn away by time, but struck — possibly on purpose — until nothing remained of the features that once identified this life-size limestone head, carved roughly 2,40...

Sep 05, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

Ancient Chinese Law Said Cattle Thieves Lost Their Noses— Archaeologists Just Found the Proof

Chinese legal texts have described nasal amputation as a criminal punishment since the Bronze Age. Oracle bone inscriptions from the Shang dynasty even carved the concept into a single character: a...

Sep 04, 2026 from A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

Fireside Friday, September 4, 2026

Hey folks! Fireside this week! Last week’s post was a monster (over 10,000 words compared to our more typically ~6,000) which left me with some non-blog catching up to do. Next week, we’ll be start...

Sep 04, 2026 from LBV Magazine English Edition

Long Before Rome, Etruscan Civilization Engineered Tombs to Alter the Mind

Two tombs, two very different experiences. Walk into one and the space narrows around you, guiding your eyes along a fixed sequence of images. Walk into the other and the sound itself seems to come...

Sep 04, 2026 from Daily Medieval

The Failure at Milan

The insubordination of John the Sanguinary that led to the division in the Byzantine army between the divisions commanded by Belisarius and those commanded by Narses created further problems. The S...