Why is this old piece of parchment considered to be such a powerful symbol of our rights and freedoms? Narrated by Monty Python’s Terry Jones, this animation takes you back to medieval times, when England under the reign of Bad King John. It asks why Magna Carta was originally created and what it meant to those living in the 13th century.

Author: The British Library

For years, students at a high school just steps from the Colosseum in Rome have spun tales of mysterious rooms hidden underneath the gymnasium floor. Now, it turns out those rumors have more than a grain of truth to them.

Students on several clandestine explorations happened upon an ancient structure beneath their school. Upon notifying their teacher, who notified the authorities, archaeologists arrived to take a more detailed look. Following an excavation earlier this year, archaeologists have announced that the dark corridors and dimly lit chambers actually belonged to a luxurious second-century villa.

The Liceo Scientifico Cavour (Cavour Scientific High School) is located in a building near the Colosseum that originally housed a Catholic missionary congregation. When the missionaries' headquarters were constructed in the late 19th century, early archaeological exploration of the foundation revealed part of a "domus" — a large ancient Roman house. This neighborhood is incredibly important in Roman history, as figures such as Cicero, Pompey and Octavian (later known as Augustus) lived there, but is not well-understood archaeologically because of all the modern buildings on top of the ancient layers.

PARIS (AP) — Wilting in the summer sun, a line of tourists waits to climb Notre Dame cathedral and meet its gargoyles.

Four meters (13 feet) beneath them, a team of archaeologists is digging the other way — straight down and back in time, to Roman Paris 2,000 years ago.

In 2019, fire brought Notre Dame’s spire crashing down as the world watched. The cathedral was rebuilt and reopened in late 2024, and now Paris wants to soften the hot, bare square in front of it with trees and shade.

But in a city this old, the soil cannot be turned until what lies beneath it is excavated, in case it is damaged during works.

So a slice of Notre Dame’s forecourt has become an excavation site — an open pit ringed by barriers and crossed by a wooden walkway, a few steps from the line-up.

tværpostet fra: https://feddit.dk/post/22205785

This demotic papyrus is now held in the British Museum ( EA 10845 ). It contains an appeal to the gods by two children who had been abandoned by their father after the death of their mother and his remarriage. The date is probably late in the Ptolemaic period. The translation is taken from G.R. Hughes, in "Studies in Honor of John A. Wilson", pp.43-54 ( PDF )

The Nazis denounced jazz music as "degenerate art," despite its widespread popularity in Germany. Amid crackdowns on freedom of expression, groups of jazz-loving teenagers formed the Swing Youth in rebellion.