Past Lives

When Chinese archaeologists opened a tomb in the city of Changsha in 1972, they found an undisturbed burial chamber filled with treasures from the early Han Dynasty. At the center was the body of a woman who looked like...

Around 1800 years ago, a man was bitten by a lion in the city of York, in what is now northern England. Lions aren't native to York, so how did it get there, and why was it biting this man? The answers to those...

Around 270 BC, a woman died of breast cancer in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia. Her tomb, cut into the permafrost, is one of the best-preserved archaeological sites on the planet. Thanks to the ice, everything...

When we think of Scandinavia, it seems to be a long way from the Roman Empire, with hundreds of miles separating the Rhine and Danube frontiers from the bogs of Jutland and Sweden. Why, then, were hundreds upon hundreds...

Professor Peter Mancall is one of the finest historians of colonial America working today, and he's written a banger of a book, the newest entry in the wonderful Oxford History of the United States series. It's entitled...

More than 2,400 years ago, a man living in southern Denmark was hung from a plaited leather cord, then buried in a bog. There he stayed until 1950, when his perfectly preserved face emerged from the peat. We know him as...

Bog bodies - the age-old remains of people who were submerged in bogs - are an eerie sight. Soft tissue remains, often to an even greater extent than mummies, bringing us face to face with people who died thousands of...

Over more than two centuries, the rulers of Bronze Age China's Shang Dynasty sacrificed at least 13,000 people. Who were they? Where had they come from, and what were their lives like? Thanks to new studies, we can...

What can we learn from the past? Professor James Romm, celebrated classicist and prolific author, joins me to discuss his new book Since You're Mortal: Life Lessons from the Lost Greek Plays . We chat about eternal...

More than 3,000 years ago, a queen was buried in the city of Anyang, China. Hundreds of bone, jade, and bronze artifacts were buried with her, and so were sixteen human sacrifices. This was Fu Hao, a priestess, queen...

I've been waiting for someone to write a comprehensive, up-to-date history of the Black Death for years, and if that were all Professor Thomas Asbridge did with his new book The Black Death: A Global History , it would...

Who built the extraordinary tombs for Egypt's rulers in the Valley of the Kings? The residents of the nearby village of Deir el-Medina, where for centuries, a specialized workforce trudged back and forth to the Valley...

Considering the richness of our evidence about ancient Egypt, for much of the country's long history we know surprisingly little about the lives of its least humble residents. At the purpose-built new capital of the New...

Shannon Chakraborty is a bestselling author of wonderful historical fantasy (Daevabad Trilogy, The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, The Tapestry of Fate ). We chat about creating better fantasy worlds, how history has...

Thirty-five hundred years ago, an Egyptian king was killed in ghastly fashion. How and why did Seqenenre Tao meet his end? Using a combination of his mummy, advanced techniques of analysis, and old-fashioned history, we...