It was the ancient version of a last stand: Twelve clay bullets lined up and ready to be shot from slings in a desperate attempt to stop fierce invaders who soon would reduce much of the city to rubble.

Fellow-Citizens of the Senate and House of Representatives:

In the midst of unprecedented political troubles we have cause of great gratitude to God for unusual good health and most abundant harvests.

Maria Cristina Valsecchi in Rome

Archaeologists say they have unearthed Lupercale—the sacred cave where, according to legend, a she-wolf nursed the twin founders of Rome and where the city itself was born

By Randolph E. Schmid

The intriguing possibility of a biplane dinosaur -- named Microraptor gui -- is suggested by Texas Tech University's Sankar Chatterjee, who says that the legs of the 2-pound creature could have been held below the body in flight, creating two staggered wing sections, the upper one slightly ahead of the lower one.

A magic spell to keep snakes away from the tombs of Egyptian kings, adopted from the Canaanites almost 5,000 years ago, could be the oldest Semitic text yet discovered, experts said Tuesday.

The invention of a brassiere, commonly referred to as a bra, was immensely important in terms of women’s health. The bra liberated women from the corset which had inflicted irrevocable damage to health over the course of many centuries. It is rather difficult to tell when exactly this most popular form of underwear for the upper body was invented.

by William Loyd Allen

On August 4, 1934, thousands of delegates to the Baptist World Alliance congress in Berlin filed into the Tagungshalle, where Adolf Hitler had recently addressed as many as 15,000 Germans. John W. Bradbury, delegate and Boston pastor, wrote of his journey into the Fatherland:

By Colin Nickerson

COLOGNE, Germany -- Genialinius Gennatus was one fine duck hunter.

In the third century , he recorded his prowess in high Latin on a stone tablet that he dedicated to Jupiter. That and a hefty donation probably ensured that the tablet won display in the temple to the Roman god in the settlement then called Colonia.

by Paul Chan

From the perspective of conventional archaeological and anthropological thinking, the origins of humankind and the emergence of civilisation from the Stone Age remain enigmatic. We have incontrovertible proof our ancestors could not have built the Great Pyramid with the tools and methods they possessed.

Could explain Dubya's heredity

A 40,000-year-old skull found in a Romanian cave shows traits of both modern humans and Neanderthals and might prove the two interbred, researchers reported on Monday.

NASA put a man on the moon - then lost the videotape. A grizzled crew of ex-rocket jockeys are on a star-crossed mission to find it.

Hands over her eyes and her face gripped with terror, the woman's fear of death is all too obvious.

Unearthing the mystery of the priestly city of Nob

By Ran Shapira

The first biblical reference to the city of Nob is in Samuel I. During King Saul's reign, after the destruction of Shiloh, priests from the house of Eli resided in Nob, and the tabernacle was located there. After Saul discovered that one of the priests, Ahimelech ben Ahituv, gave David Goliath's sword, which was also kept in Nob, and that David had managed to escape, the king ordered all of Nob's inhabitants killed.

JEREMY WATSON

GLOBAL warming is one of the greatest threats to present day civilisation but work by a team of Scots scientists suggests the ancient Egyptians may have been earlier victims of climate change.

Like cell phones or the Internet in recent history, the telescope's introduction in the early 17th Century had a swift and lasting impact on the world. Telescopes revolutionized military strategy and within months showed the father of astronomy, Galileo Galilei, that Earth is not the center of the universe.

Do you believe that humanity could have sprung from ancient astronauts? Is it possible that ancient Sumerian tablets clearly contain an illustration of our solar system? Is there even the slightest possibility that Stargate was based on a true story?

Was Atlantis A Center Of Advanced Civilization

Michael Tsarion

New research suggests that climate change led to the collapse of the most splendid imperial dynasty in China’s history and to the extinction of the Maya civilisation in Central America more than 1,000 years ago.

The ancient Andean empire built great cities but left no written records – except perhaps in mysterious knotted strings called khipu. Can an anthropologist and some mathematicians crack the code?

By Gareth Cook

By Ahmed Maged

CAIRO: Egypt announced Sunday the discovery of a carving dating back to the 12th century BC which could hold the key to valuable information on Karnak Temple, the largest ancient religious site in the world.

By Stavroula Kourakou

A survey of ancient Greek sources reveals the surprising properties of certain wines that continue to provoke the curiosity of scholars today

Brian Handwerk

A team of archaeologists has discovered what it says is evidence of humankind's oldest ritual.

In the Neolithic period the Levantine Fertile Crescent ushered in one of the most profound cultural revolutions in the history of the Mediterranean basin. This environmentally blessed cradle of civilisation played host to modern humans as they made the crucial transition from hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers to emerge as proto-urban societies.

2007 marks the sixtieth anniversary of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, arguably the most influential archaeological discovery of the 20th century. Ever since a naive Moses Shapira tragically took his own life in Rotterdam after his Deuteronomy Scroll - allegedly found on the east of bank of the Dead Sea in 1883 - was denounced in London as a forgery, the scrolls have courted vast controversy.

Evidence mounts that the centerpiece of its antiquities collection, acquired despite several warnings, was looted.

By Ralph Frammolino and Jason Felch

Liberated from its shipping crates, the ancient statue drew a crowd of employees when it arrived in December 1987 at the J. Paul Getty Museum's antiquities conservation lab.

Kentucky has a rich and varied archaeological heritage, with archaeological sites being located in every county of the Commonwealth. To date, archaeologists have recorded more than 19,000 archaeological sites in Kentucky. Prehistoric sites include seasonal camps, villages, burials mounds, and earthworks. Native Americans occuppied some of these sites more than 12,000 years ago, while they occupied others less than 300 years ago.

TAMIL culture - contribution to world civilisation
Nadesan Satyendra

"There is no doubt that the culture of the Tamils belongs to the great and immortal treasures of the world's civilisation..." Dr. Kamil.V. Zvelebil

ATHENS, Greece (AP) -- Unlike its larger, postcard-perfect neighbors in the Aegean Sea, Keros is a tiny rocky dump inhabited by a single goatherd.

But the barren islet was of major importance to the mysterious Cycladic people, a sophisticated pre-Greek civilization with no written language that flourished 4,500 years ago and produced strikingly modern-looking artwork.

The pages of a medieval prayer text also contain words of ancient Greek engineer Archimedes. It takes high-tech imaging to read between the lines.

By Jia-Rui Chong, Times Staff Writer

A statue belonging to the Roman era was found in an olive depot located in Gemlik, Bursa.

Police have raided an olive depot after being notified about an illegal historical artifact trade. A statue of two women holding a globe in their hands is assumed to belong the Roman era was captured.

The Adena Mounds

About 1000 B.C. we can mark the beginning of a new period for man in North America. This period, which lasted until about 700 A.D., is called the Woodland Period. It is during this time that a new culture emerged and made significant settlements in what is now known as West Virginia.

When its existence was announced in the Summer of 2004, Range Creek Canyon triggered worldwide interest in a special parcel of land wedged in a remote corner of Utah.

There is much talk these days of there being no Santa Claus; and it seems to me there is an over-anxiousness of those who hold this view to convince the rest of us of the absolute correctness of such nonsensical talk.

We take a look at the origin of certain Christmas symbols and explain how this season is celebrated in Russia, wishing all our readers the happiest of Christmases.

by Steve Bhaerman

At the darkest time of year, it's worth remembering a flash of "enlightening" that happened in a war that would kill fifteen million soldiers -- and what that beacon of light means today.

Six incised limestone slabs are known to have been found in Middle Tennessee since 1874, and all were found in Davidson County, Sumner County and Trousdale County. They are extremely rare artifacts. Archaeologist Tracy Brown is looking for No. 4. Here are details of the six:

By Meron Rapoport

The first 10 minutes at the excavation site passed in silence. The moment we saw the high walls and the large, well-preserved rooms dug into the ground between the olive trees, the archaeologists in the group started to bound from wall to wall, to delve into the rooms.

By THOMAS CAHILL

The Cult of the Virgin and Its Consequences

The story of Jesus held a special place within early Islam. There is no need for a clash of civilisations

Karen Armstrong

Will Dunham

The fossilised remains of a gargantuan plant-eating dinosaur, one of the largest animals ever to walk the Earth, has been found in Spain.

The giant would have been up to 38 metres long and weighed as much as seven elephants.

Stefan Lovgren

Strange specimens of natural glass found in the Egyptian desert are products of a meteorite slamming into Earth between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, scientists have concluded.

The glass—known locally as Dakhla glass—represents the first clear evidence of a meteorite striking an area populated by humans.

By Ran Shapira

In one of his detailed accounts of the Essenes, Flavius Josephus (Yosef Ben Matityahu), described one of the many laws that shaped the Jewish sect's way of life during the Second Temple period. While the Essenes sat in a circle, Josephus wrote, it was forbidden for them to spit into its center. Like many other laws outlined by Josephus, the details of this law appear in the Dead Sea Scrolls found in caves along the northern end of the Dead Sea. These scrolls are attributed to the Essenes.

by Nicolas Cheviron

ALACAHOYUK, Turkey (AFP) - In this central Turkish village, peasants and archaeologists celebrate a unique achievement -- a 3,246-year-old dam, once buried under mud and slime, is back in service to irrigate farmlands.

Egypt announced the discovery of a carving dating back to the 12th century BC which could hold the key to valuable information on Karnak temple, the largest ancient religious site in the world.

By Nic Fleming

Stonehenge was the Lourdes of its day, to which diseased and injured ancient Britons flocked seeking cures for their ailments, according to a new theory.

For most of the 20th century archaeologists have debated what motivated primitive humans to go to the immense effort of transporting giant stones 240 miles from south Wales to erect Britain's most significant prehistoric monument.

As we all know the Sumerians and Assyrians went to great detail to preserve the memorials of 270,000 years or seven previous ages, but not any independent evidence outside of the Bible exist showing that Abram ever even lived. Even the Hebrew scholars had to assume he was born at Ur about 2,000 B.C.

Hanukkah, which means "dedication" and is also referred to as "The Festival of Lights", is a Jewish festival which begins on the Hebrew date of the 25th of Kislev and lasts eight days, through the 2nd of Tevet.

Our Christian friends are often quite surprised at how enthusiastically we Pagans celebrate the 'Christmas' season. Even though we prefer to use the word 'Yule', and our celebrations may peak a few days BEFORE the 25th, we nonetheless follow many of the traditional customs of the season: decorated trees, carolling, presents, Yule logs, and mistletoe. We might even go so far as putting up a 'Nativity set', though for us the three central characters are likely to be interpreted as Mother Nature, Father Time, and the Baby Sun-God. None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who knows the true history of the holiday, of course.

Saturnalia
In Rome, where winters were not as harsh as those in the far north, Saturnalia—a holiday in honor of Saturn, the god of agriculture—was celebrated. Beginning in the week leading up to the winter solstice and continuing for a full month, Saturnalia was a hedonistic time, when food and drink were plentiful and the normal Roman social order was turned upside down. For a month, slaves would become masters. Peasants were in command of the city. Business and schools were closed so that everyone could join in the fun.

A Story from the Past