Features

Dental decay was a serious problem in ancient Egypt, and tattoos were already being inked on skin by the 8th century AD. These are just two of the discoveries uncovered by new techniques used to virtually unwrap eight mummies, revealing unprecedented detail about their age, diet and health. Curators at the British Museum collaborated with medical experts and other scientists in a project that used computerised tomography (CT) scanning and 3D visualisation to gain new insights into life and death in the Nile Valley up to 5,500 years ago. The team studied a diverse selection of eight individuals from the museum’s collection of 120 mummies retrieved from Egypt and Sudan. Among the eight – who lived at various points between 3500 BC and AD 700 – are a young female temple singer, a man of high status and a child from the Roman era. Non-invasive scanning techniques were employed to determine the age of each one at death, the health problems they’d suffered, and the manner of mummification.

From skeleton puppets to Elvis’s soiled underpants, we’ve featured some unusual images over the years. Here, we’ve rounded up some of our favourites...  

Ahead of a new exhibition marking the 300th anniversary of the beginning of the Georgian era, Lucy Worsley gives us a practical guide to etiquette in the snake pit that was the Georgian royal court. This article was first published in the May 2010 issue of BBC History Magazine.

This April, IWM North launches its First World War centenary programme with an exhibition that explores the lives and experiences of people from the North West of England during the conflict

It housed Britain’s central decryption centre during the Second World War, and is credited with shortening the conflict by at least two years. Now, the heroism and espionage witnessed at Bletchley Park is to be explored in a lecture at Cambridge Literary Festival. On Sunday 6 April Sinclair McKay, the author of The Lost World Of Bletchley Park (Aurum Press) and The Secret Listeners, will consider the role played by the code-breaking centre. He will co-host the lecture, ‘Bletchley Park remembered’, with Elisa Segrave, the author of The Girl from Station X – a memoir which recounts her discovery of her mother’s hidden wartime life in intelligence.

Official accounts of 1914 take a too “cosy and comfortable” view of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and fail to acknowledge its shortcomings, historian Adrian Gilbert has claimed. In a new book, Challenge of Battle: The Real Story of the British Army in 1914, Gilbert reexamines the opening campaigns in France and Belgium, and, amongst other things, notes instances where British troops broke and ran from the field of battle. He considers failures at the battle of Le Cateau – normally described as a valiant British delaying action – and the St Quentin Surrender.