Best of PastPresenters

Eat like an Olympic victor, circa 700BCE-200CE

Opening an athletic magazine today we are met with diets, supplements, and energy boosters, all designed with excelling at a ...

Pankration: the No Holds Barred Greek Martial Art

The pankration (το παγκρατιον) was quite possibly the most dangerous and physically demanding of all ancient Olympic events. It was ...

No Ancient Greek Ever Won Anything by the Sword

A few days ago, a reader by the name of John wanted to know about the historicity of the swords ...

Move Over Caveman Diet, Here Comes the Gladiator Diet!

The Caveman Diet, also known as the Paleodiet or the Stone Age Diet, came to prominence in a world where ...

Uncovering the ‘Celtic’ Mummies in China

Every now and then a news story comes to light about the so-called Celtic mummies of China. The story has ...

Stone Age

Learning the Ancient Craft of Flint Knapping

Flint knapping is a wonderfully paradoxical craft. It requires next to nothing in terms of material – just a hammerstone and a piece of flint – but takes up towards a decade of hard work to perfect. Anyone can learn to calculate the strike to take off a simple flake, but making a tool is…

Bronze Age

The Six (Five!) Ages of Ancient Greece

Scholars often divide the history of ancient Greece into six relatively distinct periods, but only five of them belong to the history of those ethnically Greek.

Minoan, Helladic and Cycladic

Though often included in Greek history, the Minoan civilisation of Bronze Age Crete and its contemporaries – the Helladic civilisation of mainland Greece and the…

Iron Age

60 Second Celtic Chronicle: The Sack of Delphi

Welcome back for another instalment of Sixty Second Celtic Chronicle the short, fast paced video PodCast where I grossly oversimplify the complexities of Celtic archaeology and history. If I sound funny this week, it’s because I had an awful cold while recording.

If you for some reason have trouble viewing…

Antiquity

Successors of Alexander the Great: Lysimachus, Craterus & Eumenes
This entry is part of a series.

When Alexander the Great suddenly died in 323 BCE without a legitimate heir, the future of his massive empire was uncertain, to say the least. He had left two unborn children, an illegitimate son and a half-wit half-brother, but the real power lay with none of them. The true power was with the generals and…

Late Antiquity

The Emperor who (Almost) Abolished Christianity

Flavius Claudius Julianus ruled the Roman Empire for 19 months. Had his reign lasted longer Christianity might have been a mere footnote in history.

Julianus, known to the Anglophone world as Julian the Apostate, was born in the summer of 332 CE. Though born to nobility, his childhood was one marked by death and fear.…

Medieval

Marriage and Divorce (Social History PodCast)

In today’s PodCast we’re using a few highlights to look at just how much – or how little – has really changed in terms of marriage and divorce from 4,000 years ago until the present.

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