They had crossed most of Persia, climbed snowbound mountains and fought tribes that hurled stones at them from the cliffs.

A dig beside the famous Greek temples of Agrigento, in Sicily, has uncovered a previously unknown neighborhood of the ancient city of Akragas, with walls that collapsed when Carthage besieged it in ...

In AD 52, Emperor Claudius staged a naval battle with condemned prisoners to celebrate a tunnel that 30,000 workers had dug through a mountain by hand. The tunnel only half worked, and Lake Fucino was ...

A team excavating Augusta Raurica, a Roman colony near Basel in Switzerland, has unearthed a complete iron window grille 1.7 meters (5 ft 7 in) underground, with five bars and two nails still in place ...

In 2006, the Carabinieri, Italy’s national military police, raised the alarm about illegal digging in a forest of oaks and chestnuts near Vetralla, in the province of Viterbo, north of Rome. The ...

At the narrowest point of the Karmsundet, the channel that separates the island of Karmøy from the mainland on Norway’s west ...

Neanderthals left plenty of traces in the western Pyrenees, the mountain range that separates Spain from France. Stone tools, ...

About 13,800 years ago, Magdalenian hunters in northern Spain were still visiting the cave of Altamira, famous today for its painted bison. (The cave’s entrance would collapse around 13,000 years ago.

Around 400 BC, Europe was changing, though not in a single direction. Athens had just lost the Peloponnesian War (404 BC), and Roman tradition says the Gauls would sack Rome around 390 BC. Farther ...

Around 4,200 years ago, in the dry south-east of the Iberian Peninsula, a society began building cities on hilltops, ...

Ancient geographers listed many cities called Arsinoe, from Cyprus to Cilicia (in what is now southern Turkey), from Ephesus ...

Around 1200 BC, the eastern Mediterranean fell apart. The great empires of the Bronze Age collapsed, many cities were ...