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The Antikythera Mechanism
The Antikythera Mechanism is the earliest surviving geared device known to model astronomical and calendrical cycles.
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Lost Sciences
Techniques and instruments that were once in use and later abandoned, misplaced or superseded.
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Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower
Wardenclyffe was Nikola Tesla’s unfinished attempt to build a commercial global wireless station at Shoreham, Long Island.
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Damascus Steel
“Damascus steel” is an easy name for several different things, and much of its mystery begins there. Modern knife sellers often use the term for pattern-welded steel: layers of different…
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The Baghdad Battery
The object popularly called the Baghdad Battery is a small ceramic vessel associated with Khujut Rabu, near ancient Ctesiphon in present-day Iraq.
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Roman Concrete and Self-Healing Cement
Roman concrete is not one universal miracle recipe. Roman builders produced different mortars and concretes for walls, vaults, foundations and marine works, adjusting lime, aggregate and…
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Greek Fire
Greek fire was a real Byzantine incendiary system, but the familiar name can mislead. The people who used it called themselves Romans, and their texts used terms such as Roman fire, sea…
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Puma Punku’s Precision Cuts
Puma Punku is part of the Tiwanaku monumental complex on Bolivia’s high Altiplano, near Lake Titicaca. Today it appears as a field of displaced sandstone slabs and intricately shaped…
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Egyptian High Voltage — the Dendera Light
In crypts and chambers of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera, several reliefs show a serpent emerging from a lotus and extending inside a long oval form.
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The Nazca Lines and Their Purpose
The Nazca Lines are not a single drawing or one-time project. They are a vast desert landscape of straight lines, trapezoids, spirals and figures representing animals, plants, humans and…
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Fringe Therapies
Practices at the edge of accepted medicine — what has been studied, what has not, and where the record ends.
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Forbidden History
Suppressed records, contested chronologies and the politics of what gets written down.
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Ancient Beliefs
Cosmologies, rites and symbol systems recorded across the ancient world.
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Giants & Mythical Beings
Figures that recur across mythologies — and the archaeology, hoaxes and folklore around them.
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