Editorial deep dives into the ancient world.
At its peak, Teotihuacan was the sixth largest city in the world. It had streets on a precise celestial grid, a pyramid almost as wide as the Great Pyramid of Giza, and a sealed tunnel beneath its oldest temple containing rivers of liquid mercury. We still do not know what the people who built it called themselves, their city, or their gods.
In 2012 and 2015, researchers flew LiDAR sensors over 1,900 square kilometres of Cambodian jungle. What the data showed reshaped everything known about the Khmer Empire: Angkor was not a cluster of famous temples. It was the largest preindustrial urban complex in world history.
The terracotta warriors of Xi'an are among the most recognisable archaeological discoveries in history. Yet the burial mound they were built to guard — the sealed tomb of China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang — has never been opened. Mercury surveys, Sima Qian's description, and muon tomography all suggest what is inside. The decision not to excavate may be the most consequential choice in modern archaeology.
Sometime between 1628 and 1600 BCE, the island of Thera erupted in one of the largest volcanic explosions of the last 10,000 years. The town of Akrotiri was buried beneath 60 metres of ash. When archaeologists found it in 1967, the buildings were two storeys high, the frescoes were still on the walls, and nobody had been left behind to die.
Using volcanic stratigraphy, bone isotope analysis, and the two letters Pliny the Younger wrote to the historian Tacitus, we can reconstruct the 79 CE eruption of Vesuvius with extraordinary precision. The timeline is not what most people expect.
When the Birecik Dam began filling in 2000, teams had weeks to rescue masterpieces from a Roman city that had survived eighteen centuries underground.
In 1994, a shepherd kicked at an odd stone protruding from a hillside near Şanlıurfa. Below lay Göbekli Tepe — a site that would force scholars to rethink the very foundations of human civilization.
From Göbekli Tepe — the world's oldest temple — to the Hittite capital of Hattusa and the wonders of Ephesus and Cappadocia, here are 12 of the most remarkable ancient sites in Anatolia, ranked by global interest.
The Persian prophet Mani, writing in the 3rd century CE, listed the four great powers of the world: Rome, Persia, the Kushans — and Aksum. The Ethiopian empire controlled the Red Sea trade route between Europe and India, converted to Christianity before Rome did, and launched a military campaign across the Arabian Sea to defeat a kingdom that was persecuting its co-religionists. Western history largely forgot about it.
Two thousand years before the clinical trial, patients at Epidaurus slept in a sacred hall and waited for a god to appear in their dreams. The inscriptions recording the cures are matter-of-fact, not mystical. The sanctuary's theatre — one of the acoustically perfect spaces in architectural history — was part of the same complex. The Greeks understood that healing required the whole person.
Around 2650 BCE, an Egyptian official named Imhotep made a decision that had never been made before: he built a royal tomb entirely from stone. The Step Pyramid of Saqqara is not just the oldest pyramid — it is the oldest large-scale stone structure in human history.
Beneath the fairy chimneys of Cappadocia, entire cities extend dozens of meters underground, built by people who needed to vanish completely when enemies rode over the horizon.
Around 1200 BCE, every major civilization in the eastern Mediterranean collapsed simultaneously. What rose from the ashes in Anatolia was stranger and more creative than what came before — and it set the template for the world that followed.
A 540-kilometer trail along Turkey's Mediterranean coast threads through ruined cities, rock-cut tombs, and fishing villages where the ancient world never quite disappeared.
Three cities, six centuries, three continents. The journey between the first Ottoman capitals traces not just a political history but an architectural one — from the intimate wooden city of the early sultans to buildings that rank among the most audacious ever constructed.
The Amazons are one of the most persistent myths of the ancient world. Then archaeology started finding women buried with weapons — and the question of where myth ends and history begins became considerably more complicated.
The best way to see the sunken city of Kekova is from a small wooden boat on a calm morning — drifting over walls and stairways two meters below the surface, watching ancient streets materialize from the green water and dissolve again as the boat moves on.
The Hittites signed treaties with Egypt, defeated the armies of Mesopotamia, and controlled one of the largest territories of the Bronze Age — yet were so completely forgotten that, as recently as the 1880s, most scholars had never heard of them.
The Book of Revelation opens with letters to seven churches — real communities in real cities, each still standing today in western Turkey. Walking the circuit between them is one of the stranger journeys in archaeological travel.
