An exciting new discovery has been made in England. A man tromping through his fields stumbled into a rabbit hole that concealed a secret. The hole was in fact a narrow tunnel leading to a door. Behind it was a small series of caves, hollowed out by the medieval military order called the Templars. This […]
Month: August 2017
Part 1 of our Swahili Coast articles mainly discussed the role of Arab and Persian merchants in East African commerce. But the Indian Ocean was an integrated whole, with extensive trade among all peoples on the coasts. Objects from India appear in the archaeological record from as early as the 7th century AD, and trade colonies […]
Archaeologists in Vietnam have discovered a 4,500-year-old trading network. The network stretched hundreds of miles across several river systems, down to the Mekong Delta. Several stone tools quarried in the Southeast Asian highlands were found at the site in southern Vietnam, where such stone is completely absent. Long-distance trade in the ancient world was usually associated […]
A 55-kilometer stretch of an ancient Roman road has been discovered in western Turkey. The road connected Smyrna (modern Izmir) on the coast with Manisa, an inland town. An archaeologist working on the project observed: It is noteworthy that the road is as solid as the first day it was built. Our examination showed that large […]