Features

Dig & Delve

Why spend your summer vacation on your hands and knees or crawling up ladders and down into trenches when you could be lounging by the pool, sipping piña coladas? Well, many archaeology enthusiasts imagine unearthing a tarnished coin last touched by an ancient Athenian as he bought bread in the marketplace, or uncovering a […]

Nawamis of Sinai
Exploring 5,000-year-old desert tombs By Avner Goren

They look like flattened igloos—mysterious ancient round burial tombs, called nawamis, in southern Sinai. To Canadian archaeologist Charles Currelly, who studied them in 1904 as part of British archaeologist Flinders Petrie’s expedition to Sinai, these 6-foot-high sandstone structures resembled beehives scattered across the desert floor. 020 Their name, nawamis, means mosquito. According to […]

Italy’s Top Antiquities Cops Fight Back

It’s a problem acknowledged by all. There is no room to store them—the piles of antiquities recovered in both legal and illegal excavations in Italy. There is simply too much. “We ought to dump the excess,” said Angelo Bottini, superintendent of antiquities for the region of Tuscany, at a recent conference on the […]

Warriors of Hatti
The rise and fall of the Hittites, Turkey’s splendid Bronze Age civilization By Eric H. Cline

Just who were the Hittites?

Departments

Origins: Signs of Life
Over thousands of years, the ancient Mesopotamians developed a written script out of aningenious counting system By Denise Schmandt-Besserat
Past Perfect: Sacred Shadows
Florence Nightingale in Egypt
Ancient Life: The Dog-Demon
Rabies in Ancient Mesopotamia
The Forum
Our readers get worked up over some ancient, and sexually explicit, paintings.