HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-08-06T09:04:13.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Wanderlust: Bettany Hughes on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
items: “Africans have been starved of historical figures from their own lands that they can look up to”: Paula Akpan on female African leaders
items: Ptolemy XII: Cleopatra's father from hell
items: The history of Africa: why we need to look much deeper than slavery and colonisation
items: 5 things you (probably) didn’t know about medieval West Africa
items: Is the mummy's curse real? False tales about ancient Egyptian mummies (plus some true ones)
items: “Impaled on a stake and left to die”: crime, punishment and law enforcement in ancient Egypt
items: War and pieces: 5 games from history that were about much more than fun
items: Britain’s war on the slave ships: how the Royal Navy policed the Atlantic in the 19th century
items: The seven Cleopatras who shaped the ancient world

Wanderlust: Bettany Hughes on the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
type: item
date: 2025-08-01T12:00:07.000Z
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
description: The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were daring and dazzling constructions that have burned bright in the human imagination right up to the modern day. Bettany Hughes follows in the footsteps of the ancients to tell their remarkable stories
encoded: Crawling underneath Egypt’s Great Pyramid, 70 metres down, is an unforgettable experience. On hands and knees in the sand, as the descending tunnel gets narrower and deeper, the bedrock of the Giza Plateau presses in so close you can actually taste it. The rock is salty, because 50 million years ago this was all sea. I am not the first to have had this visceral, time-travelling experience. As well as the Greek and Roman tourists who left graffiti here, this subterranean tunnel, and the chamber which it led to, was described by the ‘father of history’ Herodotus, and some 2,300 years later was explored by the Italian tomb-raider Giovanni Battista Caviglia. Other passages in the Great Pyramid – a huge burial place for Egypt’s King Khufu – were charted by medieval Arabic scientists and desecrated by off-duty Napoleonic soldiers. Built more than 45 centuries ago, this pyramid, the oldest of the famous Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, has always been a catalyst for awe. And it is not alone. Across time, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World – the Pyramids at Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Pharos Lighthouse of Alexandria – have really mattered. They mattered so much that, in the epoch after Alexander the Great’s death, a bespoke catalogue, the Laterculi Alexandrini, was generated to group them together. Written in papyrus about 150 BC, it is our oldest extant evidence for a catalogue. We are not sure who created the list, but we do know that it was copied and shared, and that it has inspired poetry, prose and works of art for millennia. Don't miss... Bettany's new three-part docuseries Seven Wonders of the Ancient World is airing on Channel 5 from Saturday 2 August 2025 The precise entries vary a little: in some versions, the walls or an obelisk of Babylon are included; later, the Colosseum is mentioned; the Lighthouse has sometimes bee…

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“Africans have been starved of historical figures from their own lands that they can look up to”: Paula Akpan on female African leaders
type: item
date: 2025-06-13T08:00:30.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
description: Paula Akpan speaks to Danny Bird about powerful African woman leaders and the complexities of interrogating historical narratives, colonial biases and these women’s own flaws
encoded: Danny Bird: At the heart of your book are a dozen African women, many of whom held immense power and high social standing. Who were they, and when did they live? Paula Akpan: I’ve traced the lives of 12 formidable women over the past millennium. The earliest was Princess Mọrèmí of Offa, who rose to rule in Ilé-Ifẹ`, in what’s now Nigeria, in the 12th century. From there, we journey through time and across regions, weaving together stories of power, resistance and legacy. Another key figure is the 17th-century Queen Njinga of Ndongo and Matamba – territories today in northern Angola. A master strategist and diplomatic force, they blurred gender conventions: they insisted on being addressed as both king and queen, asserting their sovereignty in a male-dominated world. We also encounter Ranavalona I of the kingdom of Imerina, encompassing much of the island of Madagascar. History remembers her as a fearsome ruler vilified even by her own people, largely due to her aggressive stand against Christianity and European imperialism – policies that reportedly resulted in the population of her realm plummeting by half during her reign in the 19th century. Yet the narrative is not solely about feared rulers. Other women are revered as icons of resistance: Nana Yaa Asantewaa of present-day Ghana, for example, who led the people of the ancient Asante town of Edweso in defiance of British colonisers. Her fight to protect the sacred Golden Stool, a symbol of Asante sovereignty, remains a powerful moment in the anti-colonial struggle. These stories are as varied as the women themselves. Some are celebrated today as symbols of strength and inspiration; others have been pushed to the margins of collective memory, their legacies forgotten or deliberately erased. Ririkumutima of Burundi, for instance, played a pivotal role in shaping key treaties in the early 20th century, yet her childhood home was demolished last century and her story was largely scrubbed from ‘official’ history. What…

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Ptolemy XII: Cleopatra's father from hell
type: item
date: 2025-02-26T11:18:27.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: The tragic fate of Cleopatra has long overshadowed her predecessor, Ptolemy XII. But, as Diana T Nikolova explains, it’s impossible to understand the daughter’s downfall without exploring the father’s hapless reign.
encoded: It's one of the most famous episodes in all of ancient history. Cleopatra VII, Egypt’s formidable queen, ends her life and creates a legend. Following the suicide of her lover, Mark Antony – and with Octavian’s armies closing in – she concludes she has nothing more to give and succumbs to the poison. For all the drama surrounding her final moments, Cleopatra’s demise was, in reality, an ignominious one. When she killed herself in 30 BC, Egypt was in dire economic straits, its wealth pillaged, its people shocked and confused. The future of this once extraordinarily powerful kingdom lay in subjugation. Read more | Cleopatra, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony: how the last pharaoh's love affairs shaped Ancient Egypt's fate So how had it come to this? How did Egypt, with all its material riches and even richer cultural heritage, arrive at a point where it was subsumed into the Roman empire? One answer to these questions lies in the legacy of Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII, a man who sought to shore up his position by funnelling funds to Rome’s politicians, but in so doing bankrupted his country and alienated his own elite. Ptolemy is not a man who comes down through the years with much credit. The Greek geographer, philosopher and historian Strabo, writing in Geographica, dismissed Ptolemy as one of the worst of the dozen Egyptian rulers to bear this name. Not only did Ptolemy descend from a line “corrupted by luxurious living” but he was a man of “general licentiousness”. A telling detail is that Ptolemy’s nickname, ‘Auletes’, literally meant ‘flute player’ and reflected his eccentric habit of joining the musicians in Dionysian revels. The philosopher and lawyer Cicero was equally damning in his pithy assessment, dismissing Ptolemy as a man lacking “any royal disposition”. Parlous position So that’s it then. Case closed. Ptolemy XII was a terrible ruler whose daughter never stood a chance. And yet his hapless reign invites a further question. Given the parlous position of…

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The history of Africa: why we need to look much deeper than slavery and colonisation
type: item
date: 2025-02-20T17:10:19.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Slavery
description: Slavery, exploitation and racism. These tragedies have long dominated histories of Africa. But there’s another way to tell this story, argues Luke Pepera. And it’s one that puts Africans right at the centre of their continent’s extraordinarily rich and vibrant past
encoded: In 1414, in the Chinese city of Nanjing, a giraffe caused a stir. Amid a crowd of shocked, noble spectators, an official, leading the creature via a rope tied round its face, presented it to China’s Yongle emperor. His officials said it was a qilin – an auspicious unicorn – which his sage governance had made appear. This giraffe was a gift from the sultan of Bengal. But it had originally come from Africa – specifically, the city-state of Malindi in today’s Kenya. In 1415, ambassadors from Malindi and Mogadishu sailed to China. In a special ceremony, the Malindi ambassadors gifted the Yongle emperor another giraffe. Delighted at having received his second qilin, the Yongle emperor gave an order. His senior eunuch, Zheng He, whom he’d charged with overseeing the construction of a 200-strong fleet of treasure ships, was to sail to Malindi to obtain more giraffes and other goods. With the holds of his ships full of treasures, including gold, silver, silk and ceramics, Zheng He set sail for Malindi in 1417. He exchanged what he had for goods including live animals such as leopards and zebras, frankincense and ivory. Sometime between then and 1423, Malindi’s king himself sailed to China to meet the Yongle emperor in Nanjing. He made it as far as Fujian, a province in south-eastern China, where he died, seemingly succumbing to illness. He was buried in Fujian, and the Yongle emperor decreed that his grave be given a small sacrifice every year. This is an intriguing story. But for Africa, it’s not extraordinary. For at least 2,000 years, African civilisations have been plugged into international trade networks. Third-century AD Nubia (now northern Sudan and southern Egypt) exported goods including gold, ivory and ostrich feathers to Rome and Yemen. Along Africa’s eastern coast, from northern Somalia to southern Tanzania, east African merchants exchanged similar goods for date syrup from Persian traders, swords from Yemenis and carnelian beads from Indians. Chinese pottery a…

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5 things you (probably) didn’t know about medieval West Africa
type: item
date: 2024-12-23T11:44:11.000Z
subject: Medieval
subject: Period
description: From super rich rulers and complex belief systems to an Iron Age brought about by pot making, OO Sangoyomi reveals surprising facts from the history of West Africa
encoded: It is uncommon to see West African histories in mainstream media, and even more unlikely to come across West African histories from pre-colonial times. This lack of resources makes it all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking that recorded history in Africa began with colonisation. A European explorer in the 19th century even dubbed Africa the “Dark Continent”, implying that this was a vast and undiscovered land just waiting for outsiders to impose civilisation. This could not be further from the truth. The continent has seen countless complex civilisations, with indigenous peoples in West Africa in particular having begun the development of their societies at least as far back as 40,000 years ago. The diversity of West Africa – and the continent in general – makes it impossible to give a generalised history without watering down many unique cultures and their stories. But scratch the surface of this region in medieval times and you’ll find a rich history – literally. Here are five fascinating facts about medieval West Africa… 1. Medieval West Africa was a global trading hub Between the eighth and 16th centuries, West Africa experienced a dynamic period of cultural, intellectual and economic growth. This was, in large part, thanks to the success of the extensive Trans-Saharan trade routes. Crossing over the vast Sahara Desert, these routes connected the Mediterranean with the West African savannah, which enabled sub-Saharan Africa to trade its much-coveted metals, ivory and salt. More than economic gain, they also allowed people to escape conflict, and, in the process, spread customs, traditions and languages. Read more about Africa’s medieval golden age This period was typified by a passionate exchange of knowledge. The region’s emphasis on education was seen best at Timbuktu: the city, now located in modern-day Mali, was not only a centre of commerce, but of scholarship. In the 14th century, it became the home of the University of Sankore, which is still func…

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Is the mummy's curse real? False tales about ancient Egyptian mummies (plus some true ones)
type: item
date: 2024-11-22T10:31:02.000Z
subject: Ancient Egypt
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Death
description: Booby-trapped tombs, eviscerated corpses and terrifying curses – countless ‘facts’ swirl around the burial practices of ancient Egyptians. But which are based in fact, and which are a tissue of lies? Campbell Price unwraps the truth about mummies
encoded: FALSE (sort of): the aim of mummification was preservation Generations of schoolchildren have been taught that ancient Egyptians treated the remains of high-status individuals to preserve them for the afterlife. Yet this idea is shaped by modern – which is to say modern western – cultural expectations of what the dead should look like, linked to the fact that the first Europeans to investigate ancient Egyptian mummies in the 18th century were themselves interested in embalming techniques. These researchers were keen to preserve their own dead just as they had been in life – so they looked as if they had simply fallen asleep. Even today, people take comfort from this approach. The ancient Egyptians, however, did not intend their dead to be seen by the living, and were apparently less concerned with preserving the transitory appearance of a human during their lifetime. Rather, they focused on transforming the body into an enduring and perfect effigy resembling one of their immortal gods. Read more | How to make an Egyptian mummy in 6 steps None of the gory details of mummification are depicted in Egyptian art. Instead, our knowledge comes from the Greeks and Romans, both morbidly fascinated by mummies, who left accounts of a practice they thought weird. They describe how mummification dehydrated the body, made it hard and brittle. Once anointed with scented oils, the body resembled the expensive woods from which sculptures of the gods were carved. In ancient texts, Egyptian deities are said explicitly to have flesh of gold, bones of iron or silver and hair of lapis lazuli, a blue semi-precious stone. So those who could afford it might be supplied with a gilded mask and a blue-painted hair covering to emulate these divine features. The facial appearance of a mummy mask is the product of the shaping of plaster and linen on an idealised and reusable mould – so was never intended to be an accurate likeness of the deceased. In inscriptions, the dead are often referred to i…

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“Impaled on a stake and left to die”: crime, punishment and law enforcement in ancient Egypt
type: item
date: 2024-10-11T14:13:03.000Z
subject: Ancient Egypt
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: How did law enforcement work in ancient Egypt? Arienne King explains how anti-crime forces came to be organised, the types of crimes worthy of punishment, and what life was like inside an ancient Egyptian jail
encoded: In the second century BC, an Egyptian scribe named Menches and his brother Polemon were accused of poisoning a high-ranking policeman. They were brought to trial before the royal scribe and chief of police. The potential sentence for attempted murder? Hard labour or even execution. Both men were acquitted due to lack of evidence, but were persecuted afterwards by local police. Fearing for their lives, Menches wrote a letter to Pharaoh Ptolemy VIII (who ruled c170–116 BC) protesting their innocence and asking for protection. This letter was part of a village archive that archaeologists uncovered in 1899, offering a view into just one aspect of law enforcement in ancient Egypt. Did ancient Egypt have a police force? In most ancient societies, there was no law enforcement – though some would have had, for example, a city watch that responded to disturbances. In these societies, victims of crimes would have been solely responsible for defending themselves and lodging legal charges against criminals. Ancient Egypt was one of the only civilisations in the ancient world to have had a professional police force (from the Middle Kingdom onwards). Described by historian John Bauschatz as “a smoothly functioning machine that provided options not only to victims of crime but also to police officers,” the police of the Ptolemaic Dynasty dealt with all aspects of crime prevention, investigation and punishment. But who were the predecessors of such a force? In early periods of Egyptian history, hired guards and soldiers protected the royal family and kept the peace. Specialised military units patrolled the roads and desert frontiers on horseback to intercept bandits and provide early warning of invasions. Other units guarded sacred spaces like temples and tombs. Read more | Are your neighbours spying on you? In the 17th century they had the power to destroy your life One such unit was a caste of Nubian warriors called Medjay, created in the Second Intermediate Period (1700–1550 BC)…

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War and pieces: 5 games from history that were about much more than fun
type: item
date: 2024-08-30T11:49:01.000Z
subject: General History
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Education
description: Far from idle pursuits, games have transformed the way societies have made sense of life and death, order and conflict for centuries. Kelly Clancy picks five examples that reveal how playtime has often been a serious business
encoded: Games are among our most enduring cultural technologies. They persist, in part, because they’re a way for our brains to serve themselves pleasure for free. The Greek historian Herodotus, for instance, wrote about the Lydian people, who reportedly suffered an 18-year famine. He claimed they alternated between eating food one day and playing games the next – play, in other words, lessened the sting of hunger. But games aren’t just fun: they are also essential education. Animals play to practise for the serious demands of adulthood: kittens chase yarn to drill hunting skills, and young kangaroos rough-house to prepare to box their way up the social hierarchy as adults. Read more | Ancient board games: which ones did people play for fun in the past? With the invention of games, humans brought play into the realm of thought, because games exercise various mental functions. Games are especially crucial for developing social skills. Plato believed they were the foundation of civic education, arguing that children who learned to follow game rules would grow up to be law-abiding citizens. And Plato wasn’t alone: scholars across history have lauded games for a range of educational virtues. As a result, people often endowed games with cultural principles they hoped to transmit to future generations. Games are messages from the past, and can reveal the values and beliefs of the people who play them. Senet, ancient Egypt The ancient board game that served as a map for players to pass to the afterlife Senet – likely the ancestor of backgammon – is one of the world’s oldest known board games. It originated in ancient Egypt in around 3100 BC as mammoths still roamed Siberia’s Wrangel Island, hieroglyphic writing was just emerging, and camels were first being domesticated. Senet means ‘passing’, possibly referring to the game’s race-like mechanic: players vied to be the first to move all their pieces across the board by casting sticks or knuckle bones. In the earliest known record o…

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Britain’s war on the slave ships: how the Royal Navy policed the Atlantic in the 19th century
type: item
date: 2024-08-22T15:26:16.000Z
subject: Georgian
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Slavery
description: In the early 19th century, a Royal Navy squadron was sent to west Africa to hunt down ships carrying enslaved people to the Americas. The operation was hailed as an act of “pure unselfish philanthropy”. Yet, writes Mary Wills, the reality was far more tangled
encoded: In March 1821, the Royal Navy vessel Tartar exchanged fire with a Spanish ship, Anna Maria. Such a tussle was not unusual in this period of British naval supremacy, fewer than 20 years after victory at the battle of Trafalgar. Yet this was an intervention in a very different kind of war, unlike anything British naval personnel had previously encountered. For Anna Maria was a slave vessel, with more than 400 enslaved African men, women and children crowded on board. The Anna Maria had just embarked from the river Bonny in what is now Nigeria; its human cargo intended for forcible transportation to the Americas’ plantations. In a report to the Admiralty, the Tartar’s captain, Commodore Sir George Ralph Collier, a veteran of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, struggled to put into words the human suffering he had witnessed on boarding such slave vessels. “No description I could give would convey a true picture of its baseness and atrocity,” he reported. This was neither the first nor the last time that Collier would witness such horrors, for he belonged to the West Africa Squadron, a detachment of Royal Navy vessels formed to enforce the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, passed by Britain’s parliament in 1807. From its formal establishment in 1818 to its disbandment in the 1860s, the squadron pursued and captured around 1,500 slaving ships along 2,000 miles of west African coastline – all with the aim of suppressing the prolific trade in human lives prosecuted by other nations. It was an endeavour that set London at loggerheads with a number of rival powers and saw its sailors engaged in a series of cat-and-mouse battles with the slavers. What’s more, it’s an episode that shines a light on Britain’s view of its place in the world in the first half of the 19th century. The dominant force That British sailors were hunting slaving ships at all in the 1820s is remarkable, given their nation’s deep and enduring links with transatlantic slavery. Just a few…

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The seven Cleopatras who shaped the ancient world
type: item
date: 2024-07-03T15:29:50.000Z
creator: Matt Elton
subject: Ancient Egypt
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones talks to Matt Elton about the seven queens who shared the name Cleopatra, and how they were able to shape the ancient world in their image
encoded: The fact that there were multiple Cleopatras perhaps shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me — but it did. Why do you think the existence of the other Cleopatras is overlooked? It’s because of the dominance of Cleopatra VII – the Cleopatra, the indigo-eyed, Liz Taylor Cleopatra. That’s who we think of when we think of Cleopatra. The way in which her identity has been constructed has led us to see her as a lone wolf, a unique woman in the ancient world. The idea of one woman stepping out of the patriarchy to achieve amazing things has been very persuasive. Read more | Was Cleopatra really so beautiful? But she was not a lone wolf at all. There was a whole family of women behind her who formed the template for what she was able to become. Without the other six Cleopatras, it would have been impossible for Cleopatra the seventh to do what she did. So although her life and ambitions are remarkable, they are nonetheless better observed in the context of the dynasty that produced her. You write in your book that the history of the Cleopatras begins not in Egypt, but further to the east. What was the empire into which the first of the Cleopatras was born, and what do we need to know about the geopolitical situation at the time of her birth? By the second century BC, the Hellenistic period had already been going for about 150 years. It was a world forged following the death of Alexander the Great, and his empire being split up between rival generals. Cleopatra I was born into the house of Seleucus, which owned essentially all of what’s now Syria, Palestine, Israel and swathes of Mesopotamia as well. The first Cleopatra was the daughter of a man named Antiochus III, who even in his lifetime was known as ‘the Great’. He was a formidable man who extended his empire as far as he could – as far as the border with Egypt, which at the time was a superpower ruled by the Ptolemies. They were the descendants of Ptolemy, another of Alexander’s generals, and the Ptolemies and the Seleu…

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