This 1600 year-old scripture - 8 lines of ancient Coptic script - has the line “Jesus said, ‘my wife’.” Could the fragment be a modern-day forgery, or does it add to the growing body of evidence that suggests Mary Magdalene could have been Jesus’s wife, and an early leader of the church?
Locked in a vault at Yale University in Connecticut is an extraordinary document that, if real, could rewrite the history of the Western world.
Believed by some to be the actual cloth placed over the body of Jesus Christ after the crucifixion, The Turin Shroud is claimed to show the only true image of Jesus that exists anywhere in the world.
Egypt is home to some of the world’s great ancient treasures and the Sphinx is one of the greatest of them all.
For centuries, the myth of El Dorado has attracted explorers and treasure hunters to the Colombian Andes in search of gold.
Unlocking the mysteries of the most recognizable statues on earth. How were the thousand giant stone heads of Easter Island made, and why? Why did the Islanders topple all of them, except one?
Armed with a four and a half thousand year old diary, and a radical new approach. Engineer Peter James and leading archaeologist Mark Lehner set out to solve Ancient Egypt’s greatest mystery. How was the Great Pyramid built?
The extraordinary story behind one of the most famous images from the ancient world. Who was Queen Nefertiti? Who made the blue-crowned bust which turned her into a modern icon? Could the Nefertiti bust be a fake?
Off the coast of North Carolina, nautical archaeologists, historians and scientists study the artifacts of a 300 year old shipwreck. Positively identified as Blackbeard’s flagship, our investigators set about to uncover what the ship’s remains can tell us about history’s most notorious pirate.
The hunt for the truth about the most famous lost treasure of them all. Did the Ark of the Covenant really exist? What it did look like? What was the power that it was said to hold? And what happened to it? Where is it now?
In a search that spans four countries and 20 centuries, we investigate the legend of the Spear of Destiny. First mentioned in the New Testament, the spear is said to have pierced the side of Jesus. Believed to have special powers, kings and conquerors from Charlemagne to Hitler tried to possess it.
For centuries Troy was believed to be a mythical city. Now, a leading team of American archaeologists have discovered an ancient thriving city, and evidence of a real Trojan War.
Over a thousand years ago a great civilisation built a thriving metropolis in the heart of North America. It was larger than Paris, London and Rome at the time and was known as Cahokia. This vast city is one of the best kept secrets of western archaeology, but using cutting edge technologies like LIDAR Secrets: World's Greatest Pyramid can finally unravel its mysteries. Our investigators trace the rise and fall of this mighty civilisation which exploded into existence in 900 AD but vanished less than four hundred years later. Archaeologists John Kelly and Tim Pauketat explore the artifacts decades of excavations have unearthed at the site and what they teaches us about the culture and beliefs of the people here.
Archaeologist Danny Harman retraces the footsteps of the original 1952 expedition and visits the very cave where the heavily oxidized scroll was discovered. Rare archive footage reveals the tense moment scientists opened the fragile scroll for the first time in 2,000 years and Professor Lawrence Schiffman, an expert in ancient Hebrew guides us through the text which lists 64 hiding places of vast quantities of treasure - and he reveals why the original translation might not have been as accurate as originally thought.
Ramesses II was the most powerful pharaoh ever to rule Egypt, and his capital city, Pi-Ramesses, was his crowning achievement. It was the biggest building program since the pyramids, but somehow, this metropolis completely vanished from history. What happened? Where did it go? And where was it built to begin with? Join us on the hunt for the lost city of Ramesses the Great, a story of dramatic ruins that misled archaeologists for decades and the brilliant detective work that finally uncovered the fate of this magnificent city.
Since its discovery nearly a century ago, archaeologists have been trying to unlock the secrets of King Tut's tomb, but many questions remain. Why does the tomb appear to be so hastily built? Why is there a strange, black mold peppering the walls? And most intriguingly, does the tomb also house the mummy of ancient Egypt's most iconic queen, Nefertiti? Travel with us to the Valley of the Kings, where Howard Carter made his spectacular discovery in 1922, as we use the latest in digital technology to solve these puzzling mysteries.
The quest for the Holy Grail has consumed knights and crusaders, and has inspired legendary tales and Hollywood blockbusters. Could it be that the epic search is finally over? One church in Spain says they have found the sacred chalice, and that they have evidence to prove it, but some experts believe this is just the latest in a long line of false claims. Our team traces the extraordinary story behind this ultimate relic and uses forensic and historic analysis in an attempt to solve this 2,000-year mystery.
Around 360 B.C., the Greek philosopher Plato recorded the legend of Atlantis, the great civilization swallowed by the sea. For centuries, adventurers and archaeologists have searched in vain for the lost city. But now, an international team of experts has uncovered evidence of an epic catastrophe that wiped out a technically advanced and wealthy Mediterranean civilization 3,500 years ago. Join us as we detail a devastating natural disaster and the cataclysmic events that changed history and inspired a myth.
The Tower of Babel is one of the most famous stories in the Bible. But was the vertigo inducing structure that incurred the wrath of God and spawned the multitude of languages that exist around the world actually real? Did a lost ancient wonder- an actual sky-scraping tower that existed before the fantastical story was written give the basis for this story?
The ancient city of Petra, hidden in the barren desert of southern Jordan, has captured the global imagination. Its breath-taking ruins spread over one square mile with temples, a great theatre and hundreds of tombs half built and half sculpted straight from the desert's rocky cliffs. But Petra also holds a mystery that has long puzzled historians: What could have led such a grand and elaborate city to be abandoned?
Stonehenge is a 5,000 year-old mystery. Despite years of investigation, archaeologists can't agree about why or how this stunning and mysterious monument was built. Some argue the world famous monument, with its careful alignment to the midwinter solstice, was a giant calendar or observatory. Others insist it was cathedral to some unknown gods. One widely held theory is that Stonehenge had spiritual significance for healing sick pilgrims. But now the discovery and dating of an ancient mass-grave at the Stonehenge site is overturning all of these assumptions and suggesting that this iconic site began as a Neolithic graveyard.
It was one of grizzliest finds in Roman archaeology. The decapitated remains of over 80 battle scarred skeletons, all buried in the same plot, in the same ritualistic manner nearly two thousand years ago. So who were these people? The macabre discovery took place in 2004 when archaeologists were excavating a plot of land in the Historic city of York in North East England. Within days of unearthing the first skeleton, the body count had reached double figures - and kept rising.
The ten plagues in the Bible's book of Exodus is one of the greatest and strangest stories ever told. A tyrannical pharaoh holds an army of Israelites captive. God orders Moses to warn that ten plagues will sweep across Egypt unless the slaves are released. But pharaoh refuses. So Moses turns the River Nile into a torrent of blood, sends frogs and flies into the Egyptians' houses, blights the livestock with disease and the people with boils; hail, fire, locusts and darkness descend upon Egypt. And still pharaoh refuses to release the captives. Until the final, cruelest plague of all: the death of all first born. Finally, Pharaoh relents, releasing the captives and triggering the exodus of the Israelites to the Promised Land.
They're macabre curios that captured the imagination of intrepid nineteenth century explorers and collectors: decapitated human heads shrunk to a fraction their original size. Displayed in museums and locked away in private collections, there are thousands of these shrunken heads around the world.
In 1950, three Danish farmers came across a grizzly find - a body, buried in a peat bog. It was a murder, but the police will never catch the killers. This crime took place more than 2000 years ago. The victim was named "Tollund Man", and he is a so-called "Bog Body" - a naturally mummified corpse buried in a peat bog during Europe's Iron Age. From Ireland to Russia, hundreds of Bog Bodies have been discovered in these soggy environments on the margins of civilization.
The story of how Adam and Eve came to be thrown out of their paradise is one of the most famous in the world. For many the story is considered an allegory; a moral lesson not based in fact. But for others, the possibility of God's Paradise on Earth being a real place remains, fuelled by the Bible's intriguingly specific description of its location somewhere in the modern Middle East. Now the discovery of a huge complex of ancient stone monuments in southern Turkey, between the headwaters of the Biblical river of the Tigris and Euphrates, has sparked the interest of those in search of a physical Eden. Just like the story of Adam and Eve's fall from grace, the monument records the moment of humanity's conversion from a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence to its eventual settlement in agricultural communities - from a life in harmony with nature to a life of hard toil in the fields.
A tomb inside a Sunni mosque called the Mosque of the Prophet Yunus, which is Arabic for Jonah, in Mosul site is said to be the burial place of the prophet Jonah, who was swallowed by a whale or great fish in the Islamic and Judeo-Christian traditions. Biblical scholars are divided on whether the tomb in Mosul actually belonged to Jonah. In the Jewish tradition, he returns to his hometown of Gath-Hepher after his mission to Nineveh. And some modern scholars say the Jonah story is more myth than history. But others believe that Jonah actually existed.
Archaeologists have discovered a new tomb, a 3000-year-old mummy of an unknown Egyptian princess, in the Valley of the Kings.
What finally defeated the seemingly invincible Viking nation? A new remarkable discovery reveals the last days of the Vikings. Golden riches, a missing body, and a grave created for a warrior's horse expose how a new overwhelming force engulfed and finally replaced the old pagan world of the Vikings.
One of the most remarkable finds in modern archaeology was the discovery of a giant statue of a pharaoh, buried in the suburbs of Cairo. This was a pharaoh about whom little was known - until now. He was a leader who brought a new golden era to ancient Egypt and left a legacy that shaped western civilisation for millenia.
King Solomon, famed for his wisdom and the Bible's richest ancient ruler. He amassed a fortune without equal in the Old Testament. For centuries adventurers have hunted for the source of Solomon's wealth. Now, new evidence has revealed an industrial complex that could have been the origin of his riches.
It was a discovery that mystified the archaeological world. Buried among the ruins of Egypt's oldest city, a 6000-year old cemetery containing Egypt's first kings and the remains of wild and exotic animals. But these were not the bones from just any animals, they were the ancestors of Egypt's iconic gods. Have archaeologists finally found the source of ancient Egypt's religious imagery?
Experts examine a theory that treasures from Tutankhamun's tomb were meant to prepare him for an epic afterlife battle.
The chilling story of how a warrior tribe was brutally murdered by their rivals in a power struggle which would eventually lead to the rise of the Vikings.
Experts examine the underground world and political intrigues in the Roman city of Pompeii before it was buried in ash by Mount Vesuvius.
Ancient records marked a modest Tunisian coastal town as the location of a one-time thriving Roman metropolis called Neapolis, but for centuries there was little archaeological evidence to support such a claim. That all changed when a massive storm exposed the ruins of ancient streets and buildings beneath in the Mediterranean Sea.
A massive volcanic eruption in 44 B.C. may have hastened the end of the ancient Egyptian empire.
The discovery of an executed man in Northern Italy reveals the truth behind the Roman practice of crucifixion.
Canopus was a sacred city, beloved by Cleopatra and shaped not only by ancient Egyptians, but by Greeks, Romans, and Christians for millennia. And then it was gone...submerged beneath the waves by a series of earthquakes, floods, and rising seawater. Now, thanks to a unique, cutting edge excavation, the lost city of Canopus has been found, startling the archaeological world and revealing new secrets about this bustling, brilliant city and the saints, sinners, pharaohs, and emperors who occupied it.
In 2015, an archaeological investigation of an ancient Scottish battlefield uncovered a vast array of ballistic weaponry. X-ray scans revealed it came from a secret weapon called a manuballista, the Roman Empire's equivalent of an assault rifle. Military experts believe it was more accurate and more deadly than any other in the ancient world, but does reality match the legend? Join us as we reconstruct this terrifying killing machine to test its true power and to demonstrate how it stamped out resistance and paved the way for Rome's domination.
The discovery of a submerged, 9,000-year-old stone circle may reveal the mysterious origins of Stonehenge.
No single civilization has had more impact on history than the ancient Greeks. But how it all started has always been shrouded in mystery. But now, a remarkable new discovery is revealing the mysterious origins of one of history's greatest cultures. See how the discovery of a 3,500-year-old tomb of a warrior-king plus a hoard of treasures from the age of myths and legends is helping a team of archaeologists piece together the story of how ancient Greece sprang into life and destroyed the even older Minoan civilization in the process.
The discovery of 51 strangely shaped skulls at a 1600-year-old Hungarian gravesite is changing the narrative of the decline of the Roman Empire.
A gruesome new discovery reveals a little-known period of Ancient Egypt's history, when the country was fighting for its very survival.
