Archaeologists in Egypt have uncovered a mudbrick residential settlement at Ain el-Sabil in the Dakhla Oasis, revealing a planned Late Roman or early Byzantine community with streets, houses, a basilica church, defensive structures, written documents, and coins.

The discovery was announced by Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities after excavations by an Egyptian mission affiliated with the Supreme Council of Antiquities. The site lies in New Valley Governorate, in Egypt's Western Desert, where the oases preserve some of the clearest archaeological evidence for daily life outside the Nile Valley during Late Antiquity.

A planned mudbrick settlement in the Western Desert

According to the ministry's statement, all of the newly uncovered buildings were made of mudbrick. The settlement follows an organized urban plan, with main streets running north to south and smaller cross-streets running east to west. These created open spaces and squares within the settlement, while a basilica-style church stood near the center, facing one of the main roads.

The layout matters because it suggests more than a loose cluster of houses. The settlement appears to have combined domestic, religious, and defensive spaces in a structured plan.

Mahmoud Masoud, General Director of Dakhla Antiquities and head of the mission, said the settlement included the main architectural elements expected in a functioning residential community: houses with large halls and vaulted ceilings, bread ovens, kitchens, grain-grinding tools, two watchtowers at the edges of the site, and a fortress with thick walls.

TEHRAN - French archaeologist François Desset has decoded the 4,000-year-old Linear Elamite writing system from ancient Iran, unlocking one of the last undeciphered scripts of the ancient Near East after years of research.

Desset, a researcher at the University of Liège in Belgium, said his breakthrough came after studying newly accessible inscriptions on ancient silver vases from the Mahboubian Collection in London. The additional texts enabled him to identify recurring royal names that provided the key to understanding the script, according to France 24.

Linear Elamite, a writing system consisting of 77 geometric signs, was used during the Bronze Age by the Elamite civilization, which flourished in what is now southwestern Iran. The script was first rediscovered in 1903 during French archaeological excavations at the ancient city of Susa but remained undeciphered for more than a century because of the limited number of surviving inscriptions.

Desset said his interest in the script began in 2006 while participating in excavations in southern Iran, where Linear Elamite tablets were unearthed. He spent years attempting to decipher the inscriptions before gaining access to ten previously unavailable texts that proved decisive.

"The key to deciphering a script, as is so often the case, lies in proper names: names of places, gods, kings," Desset said.

Wanna see something weird? Get a load of this:

Not so weird? OK, how about this?

Not getting it yet? Then try this!

Are you starting to get the picture? Then, feast your eyes on this:

And this:

And even this:

4,000-year-old sealed cuneiform letters from ancient Anatolia have been read without breaking their clay envelopes, thanks to a mobile X-ray CT scanner designed to bring advanced imaging directly into museum collections.

The study, published in npj Heritage Science, marks an important step for Assyriology and cultural heritage science. Many cuneiform tablets from Southwest Asia remain sealed inside clay envelopes, making their texts inaccessible unless the outer shell is destroyed. For decades, that was the only way to read them. It also meant losing seal impressions and other traces left by the people who sent, handled, and protected the documents.

They're old fashioned. They were never supposed to be this popular. I saw why they're only getting bigger.

Even in a boom time for games, the decidedly old-fashioned puzzles are more popular than ever. I went to the best place on Earth to understand why.

What are puzzles for? They boom at times of trouble. During the 1930s, the New York Times dithered about whether to make its crossword puzzle a regular, serious feature of the paper. Then came the attack on Pearl Harbor. Margaret Farrar became the paper's first crossword puzzle editor after writing to the Times' publisher in the aftermath of the attack. "I don't think I have to sell you on the increased demand for this type of pastime in an increasingly worried world," she wrote. "You can't think of your troubles while solving a crossword."

The first crossword had been written a few decades earlier, by a Liverpool-born man called Arthur Wynne, and published in the New York World newspaper in 1913. Wynne thought he ought to patent his invention, but the paper demurred, because the patent would have cost almost $100, a decision that probably kept some executives awake every night of the 1920s, when crosswords became a full-blown worldwide fad. Newly free of the burdens of the First World War, the leisure classes latched on to crosswords, which were published widely thanks to a rapid increase in newspaper circulation at the time. Musicals were written about them, a new class of people called "celebrities" gushed over them, and one library in England even had to remove dictionaries from its reading room because they were getting worn to shreds by crossword nutters. By the end of World War II, most newspapers included their own crosswords or syndicates.

Among the key men involved in the American Revolution and the following periods, we find an oft-repeated concern that may seem foreign to us today — the threat of standing armies. This was a heritage of British legal thought and history, and it became an underappreciated part of American political thought and experience.

Why were peacetime standing armies viewed as such a threat?

To many Americans of this period, peacetime standing armies posed a threat not only because they could be used by the state to overthrow liberty, but because they tended to reshape society and government itself. A permanent military establishment could develop interests distinct from those of the people, become an instrument for enforcing unpopular or unconstitutional policies, and concentrate power in the hands of central authorities.

Standing armies also required permanent taxation, debt, and bureaucracy, fostering what later historians would call a fiscal-military state. This process also creates vested interests. Once careers, contracts, pensions, and bureaucracies depend upon military expenditures, peace may no longer seem desirable by many.

Archaeologists working in the Dutch city of Nijmegen have uncovered the largest Roman bathhouse complex ever found in the Netherlands. The structure stood in Ulpia Noviomagus, a Roman city along the River Waal, and covered at least 4,900 square meters. The size of the complex points to the importance of Nijmegen during the Roman period.

Teams from RAAP and BAAC began excavations in September at a redevelopment site in the Waalfront district, an area once occupied by industrial buildings. Their work exposed far more than a bathhouse. Researchers identified streets, residential blocks, large houses, and a tower, allowing them to reconstruct part of a prosperous urban neighborhood from the second and third centuries CE.

The bath complex was much larger than similar public bathhouses known elsewhere in the Netherlands. The bathhouse at Forum Hadriani, near modern Voorburg, covered about 2,200 square meters. The one at Coriovallum, in present-day Heerlen, measured around 2,500 square meters. The Nijmegen complex was more than twice the size of the former and nearly double the latter.

In 1961 Washington and Moscow agreed to abolish war. Then the men who meant it died.

There are certain episodes in Cold War history that modern conservatives are expected to treat as either sinister fantasy or liberal delusion. The McCloy-Zorin Accords of 1961 occupy a curious place. Explain the concept today and half of the audience assumes you are describing a proto-globalist fever dream hatched in Manhattan conference rooms full of Scandinavian furniture and earnest men in rimless spectacles.

Yet for a brief moment — and this is the part that ought to unsettle both the utopians and the cynics — the United States and the Soviet Union formally agreed that the ultimate goal of international politics should be the abolition of war itself.

Not metaphorically. Literally.
The "Joint Statement of Agreed Principles for Disarmament Negotiations," better known as the McCloy-Zorin Accords, was negotiated between American statesman John J. McCloy and Soviet diplomat Valerian Zorin in September 1961 and endorsed unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1961. It envisioned phased and verified general disarmament under international control, including the eventual elimination of national military establishments and the creation of a United Nations peace force.

It's often seemingly hopeless to try to convince people that the Middle Ages was anything other than the caricature often found in popular culture and eighteenth-century commentary. As historian Ralph Raico has noted, other than the Industrial Revolution, there is probably no historical topic in which the general public is more propagandized and more generally wrong than the topic of the Middle Ages. Raico has described how no matter how often he told his students that medieval princes and kings were subject to the law, and constrained in their powers by a variety of religious and political institutions, his students overwhelmingly stated in exams that medieval lords ruled as autocrats.

Although the general public still thinks of the Middle Ages in terms of images from popular culture, actual historians have long since moved on. This is partly why historians virtually never use the term "the Dark Ages" anymore. And if the term is used, it refers only to the early Middle Ages, due to the fact that there is a dearth of documentary and textual evidence from that time period. The High Middle Ages — the time of the great cathedrals and urbanization in Europe — was hardly a Dark Age, of course, and the idea that the Middle Ages was a time of unchanging stagnation was jettisoned long ago.

Radiocarbon dated to around 5,000 years ago, the discovery reveals evidence for the earliest known alignment with the solstice in the Stonehenge landscape.
As thousands flock to Stonehenge ahead of summer solstice celebrations on June 21, a team from Wessex Archaeology led by Phil Harding has announced the discovery of an ancient structure that may have served as an early 'prototype' for the alignment with the solstice at Stonehenge.

Radiocarbon dated to around 5,000 years ago, the discovery reveals evidence for the earliest known alignment with the solstice in the Stonehenge landscape, showing that ancient people were using this feat of astronomical engineering to celebrate the solstice here at least 500 years before the alignment of the stones at Stonehenge.

Located 5km from Stonehenge in Bulford, Wiltshire, the site is contemporary with the earliest phase of Stonehenge when the first earthworks were built. Excavated as part of the Ministry of Defence's Army Basing Programme, the site was likely a focus for major religious gatherings, with extensive evidence of feasting and large-scale gatherings as people came together to celebrate the solstices much as they still do today at Stonehenge.

The structure at the heart of the discovery would have consisted of two wooden poles 120 metres apart, which ancient builders positioned to form a line pointing directly at the rising sun during the summer solstice and at the setting sun during winter solstice.
Little is now left of the structure except the pits in which the poles once stood, which are not accessible to the public, but their alignment with the solstice was confirmed in analysis conducted for Wessex Archaeology by leading skyscape archaeologist, Dr Fabio Silva, who used reconstructions of the ancient sky, landscape, and horizon to show how the structure would have aligned with the solstices to within an accuracy of one degree.

This relatively simple construction would have served as a place for ancient peoples to celebrate the solstices before more permanent, complex monuments could be built. The team suggests that a similar structure may have been present during the earliest phase of Stonehenge, although any traces would have been erased by later work.