The Day of Ashurais on the tenth day of Muharram in the Islamic calendar and marks the climax of the Remembrance of Muharram. Shiite commemorations of the Day of Ashura have traditionally included rituals which have been condemned by many…
History remembers the winners and losers of war but rarely recognises the people who prevent it. Few people have heard of Stanislav Petrov, but we may all owe him our very existence. As a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air…
Scotch enthusiasts found it hard to swallow recently when a Japanese single malt was named the world's best whisky. But the fact that a Scot played a key role in establishing the hard stuff in Japan may make that news…
The medieval principality of Kiev was the origin of the Russian state, but from before it existed, the area we today call the Ukraine was as much a passageway as a destination: from the north, Vikings (who called themselves Rus)…
Perhaps Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi says it best: “The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between…
People think of beauty as universal to the human experience. But the truth is actually much more complicated. The English word beauty is semantically rich; that is, it has a wide range of meanings and connotations. In everyday speech, this…
Sumer, or the ‘land of civilized kings’, flourished in Mesopotamia, now modern-day Iraq, around 4500 BC. Sumerians created an advanced civilization with its own system of elaborate language and writing, architecture and arts, astronomy and mathematics. Their religious system was…
Since its discovery over a century ago, the Antikythera Mechanism has had scholars scratching their heads over how the Greeks managed to build a mechanical computer a hundred years before the birth of Christ and thousands of years before anything…
A growing number of scholars are openly questioning or actively arguing against whether Jesus lived. Most antiquities scholars think that the New Testament gospels are “mythologized history.” In other words, they think that around the start of the first century…
The question of just how an ancient civilization—without the help of modern technology—moved the 2.5 ton stones that made up their famed pyramids has long plagued Egyptologists and mechanical engineers alike. But now, a team from the University of Amsterdam…
Neanderthals went extinct in Europe about 40,000 years ago, giving them millennia to coexist with modern humans culturally and sexually, new findings suggest. This research also suggests that modern humans did not cause Neanderthals to rapidly go extinct, as some…
If you’ve found yourself on Medievalists.net, chances are you already have a deep and (hopefully) abiding love for the Middle Ages, as I do. Maybe, though, you’re just at the beginning of this love affair with the past, or…
They lived within our borders for years, thousands of miles away from the lives they helped ruin. Serving as cornerstones of America’s post-World War II scientific advancement, they worked for NASA and helped develop our rockets, quietly burying their horrific…
Standard tennis history books have so far focused mainly on the role that tennis played in England and France. These studies were projected in response to the diverse opinions that had developed as to how, where and when tennis originated.…
China and the Soviet Union concluded a 30-year Treaty of Peace, Security and Friendship on 14 February 1950. The PRC, lacking an economic base and administrative-technical skills, was willing to play the role of 'little brother' in the fields of…
This article is about the Gypsies, also called the Roma, Romani, and Sinti, who populate Eastern Europe. They are easily the most unique minority in Europe, and one of its oldest immigrant/ nomadic identities. Popularly reviled by most Europeans, they…
A new study suggests that Hafsa bint ‘Umar, one of the wives of the Prophet Muhammad, had a crucial role in editing and codifying the Qur’an and was likely the one of the first people to have kept a written…
Scientists have discovered examples of “accelerated evolution,” that is, a rate of change in the DNA of a species that far exceeds the expected rate. The number of articles using the term “accelerated evolution” was very low in the 1990s,…
The Islamic caliphates had a long and glorious run, but in the 21st century, they seemed consigned to history. Simply put, a caliphate is an Islamic state led by a supreme religious and political leader, and it has existed in…
The Hakka, sometimes Hakka Han, are Han Chinese who speak Hakka Chinese and have links to the provincial areas of Guangdong, Jiangxi, Guangxi, Sichuan, Hunan and Fujian in China. Although the vast majority of the Hakka live in Guangdong,…