HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-09-04T11:47:28.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: On the steps of a sacred temple, Cleopatra's feud with her sister came to a blood-soaked end
items: Paint your own pot, like an ancient Etruscan
items: How much do you know about Cleopatra?
items: Drink, dance, death: wine in ancient Egypt
items: From excess soil to resurrection: the many ways Egyptians used wine
items: Cleopatra, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony: how the last pharaoh's love affairs shaped Ancient Egypt's fate
items: A history of the Bible: who wrote it and when?
items: Did aliens build the pyramids? The real history that debunks the conspiracy
items: “The first historical document in the world”: what exactly is on the Narmer Palette?
items: How much do you know about ancient Egypt?

On the steps of a sacred temple, Cleopatra's feud with her sister came to a blood-soaked end
type: item
date: 2025-09-04T11:47:28.000Z
creator: James Osborne
subject: Ancient Egypt
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Discover / Apple News
description: Cleopatra persuaded Mark Antony to order the execution of her sister Arsinoe IV on the steps of one of antiquity’s greatest temples, breaking the sacred law of sanctuary and leaving behind a mystery that still unsettles historians today
encoded: At the peak of its glory, the Temple of Artemis towered above the ancient city of Ephesus standing as a vast sanctuary of marble and gold that drew pilgrims from across the Mediterranean. Counted among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, it was famed not only for its size and splendour but also for its role as a place of inviolable refuge. Today, the site in modern-day Turkey is hauntingly empty. “People go to Ephesus today and there is pretty much just a single column that’s left standing,” says historian Bettany Hughes, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “It’s a bit marshy, it feels a little bit neglected. But what you are looking down on is just the inner sanctuary of this extraordinary temple.” Earthquakes and centuries of decay might have reduced it to crumbled ruins, but in the 1st century BC, the temple was one of the most sacred places in the ancient world – which makes what happened there to Cleopatra’s younger sister, Arsinoe IV, all the more extraordinary. Cleopatra and Arsinoe: a dynasty built on blood The Ptolemaic dynasty, which ruled Egypt from the death of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC until Cleopatra’s own fall in 30 BC, was notorious for its brutality. Brothers and sisters often married each other in imitation of the ancient pharaohs of a bygone era. But such intimacy didn’t prevent family members from murdering, exiling or poisoning one another to secure power. Read more | The face of Cleopatra: what did she look like, and was she really so beautiful? The Ptolemaic dynasty was infamous for turning siblings into rivals. Cleopatra herself had to fight her own brothers and sisters to secure the throne. Her younger brother Ptolemy XIII initially ruled alongside her, but the two soon fell into open conflict. In 48 BC, Julius Caesar arrived in Alexandria while pursuing his enemy Pompey during Rome’s civil war. Drawn into Egypt’s dynastic struggle, he chose to support Cleopatra’s claim. The city erupted into what became known as the Al…

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Paint your own pot, like an ancient Etruscan
type: item
date: 2025-07-27T09:00:19.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove
subject: Ancient Egypt
subject: Ancient Greece
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Historical people
description: Silence your inner critic and forget about perfectionism. That's the life lesson we should learn from the Etruscans and their artistic habits, Dr Lucy Shipley tells Dr David Musgrove
encoded: There’s a place I used to go to with my children where you could unleash your creative zing by painting a pot. You picked your pot, you painted your pot, and then they fired it for you and you came back and retrieved your handiwork a few days later. I’m no artist, so my pot designs were always distinctly average. But I enjoyed it, and so did my kids, and in that, we were unwittingly drawing on the mindset of the ancient Etruscans. Dr Lucy Shipley is an expert on this overlooked people, and her life lesson that we should draw from them is simple: paint your own pot. The overlooked Etruscans Before we go into that, let’s have a quick recap of who the Etruscans were. They are the people who lived in parts of what is now Italy, particularly in Tuscany and Umbria, in the period before the rise of ancient Rome, in the first millennium BC. They were neighbours and rivals of the Romans and the Greeks. They lived in cities spread across the region, and from their ports they traded widely across the Mediterranean. The Etruscans pop up in ancient sources quite often, but we only ever have accounts of them from an outside perspective, because their own texts do not survive beyond short inscriptions and one religious text. We have to rely on those accounts, along with archaeology, to get to grips with who they were and how they lived. Most of their cities are hard to excavate as they sit under modern settlements, but new excavations are revealing more of their world. Read more | The history of Florence: Italy's Renaissance powerhouse Etruscan tombs also provide a fascinating insight into Etruscan culture, and some feature remarkable wall paintings. These paintings show scenes from everyday life, religion and myth, but also some graphic sexual acts, which has surprised modern eyes (I’ll come back to that). Though Etruria was eventually subsumed into the Roman empire in the fourth and third centuries BC, echoes of their culture persisted. According to Shipley, there is something a…

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How much do you know about Cleopatra?
type: item
date: 2025-07-25T07:30:15.000Z
creator: Lauren Good
subject: Ancient Egypt
subject: Period
description: From her first husband to theories surrounding her death, test your knowledge on Cleopatra...
encoded: View Riddle on the source website

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Drink, dance, death: wine in ancient Egypt
type: item
date: 2025-06-02T08:00:24.000Z
creator: Matt Elton
subject: Ancient Egypt
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: Islam Issa explores the cultural significance of this alcoholic beverage to the long-standing ancient superpower
encoded: From merriment to mummification, new year revelries to funerary rites, wine played a key role in ancient Egyptian culture. Islam Issa speaks to Matt Elton about why the alcoholic drink was so important – and how it inspired everything from a wine vending machine to the Festival of Drunkenness.

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From excess soil to resurrection: the many ways Egyptians used wine
type: item
date: 2025-05-20T08:00:30.000Z
creator: Professor Islam Issa
subject: Ancient Egypt
subject: General ancient history
subject: Membership
subject: Period
description: To the ancient Egyptians, wine played a pivotal part in mythology, ritual and the natural processes that enabled their survival. Islam Issa explores six key roles it fulfilled in their society over the millennia
encoded: Fermenting change Today we associate it with relaxation and refinement, ritual and religion, even industry and investment. And the varied uses of wine are nothing new. After grapes arrived in Egypt, over 5,000 years ago, wine made major, lasting – and often surprising – impacts on its society and culture. The earliest vineyard remains in Egypt date from the fourth millennium BC. The oldest wine jar yet discovered was made c3000 BC – and jars continue to be found. Following the introduction of grape cultivation from the Levant sometime before 3000 BC, grapes became the main ingredient fermented to make irep (wine), which was typically red. For lengthy periods, wine made from the fruit (dates) or sap of palm trees was more affordable, and other fruits such as figs and pomegranates were also fermented with sugar to make wine. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/05/BAL501122cmyk-16147f1.jpg" width="3420" height="2278" alt="To the left of the image, 5 people are harvesting grapes from the vine, while another person appears on the right, bending over a well" title="Grape harvesting is shown in a tomb painting in Thebes dating from at least the 14th century BC – perhaps two millennia after vines were first cultivated in Egypt" /> Wine was both a staple and a valuable commodity to be bought and sold. Vineyards were largely owned by nobles who could also enjoy wine on an everyday basis, while ordinary people typically drank it only during festivals, or might receive it as a work bonus. Scenes of the grape harvest appear in several tombs, the earliest from the Old Kingdom in the third millennium BC. Some tomb depictions show the whole winemaking process from harvesting, treading and pressing to fermentation. In these illustrations, wine is most often presented in a small round cup. Read more | Life in Ancient Egypt: what was it like? Over time, Egyptian wine began to be exported, particularly after Alexandria, founded in the fourth centur…

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Cleopatra, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony: how the last pharaoh's love affairs shaped Ancient Egypt's fate
type: item
date: 2025-04-03T09:35:11.000Z
subject: Ancient Egypt
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Evergreen
description: Cleopatra's relationships with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony had fundamental consequences for both Egypt and Rome...
encoded: Cleopatra was a daughter of Egypt – part of the Macedonian-Greek-Ptolemaic Dynasty that had ruled since the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC. Queen of Egypt, Cyrene and Cyprus, she was renowned for her passionate nature, beauty, intellect and determination to advance the interests of the Ptolemaic legacy. They were masters of ancient Rome – powerful, ruthless military generals who had expanded the sphere of Roman influence, seizing power for themselves and seeking to add the vast Egyptian empire to Rome’s ever-expanding list of conquests. The relationships between Cleopatra VII, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony were love affairs, and power struggles, that would change the course of Egyptian and Roman history, forever. Cleopatra and Caesar: how did their love affairs begin? It was Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII, who had effectively opened the door to the Romans. When Ptolemy XI was killed in 80 BC, his only male heirs were Ptolemy XII and his younger brother – the illegitimate sons of Ptolemy IX. Ptolemy XII was crowned in 76 BC but, soon after, the question of his legitimacy was raised in Rome, where anti-Senate politicians claimed to be in possession of a will, written by Ptolemy XI, that bequeathed Egypt to the Romans. Fearing the loss of the throne and an end to his dynasty, Ptolemy took a huge risk: he struck a deal with Rome. Read more | Your guide to the Roman Republic Desperate to retain his kingship, Ptolemy asked Caesar and Pompey to recognise him as Egypt’s legal ruler and a comrade and ally of Rome. This they did, for the price of 6,000 talents – an enormous amount, of which some was borrowed from Roman moneylenders. When Rome moved in on the Egyptian territory of Cyprus the following year, Ptolemy did nothing. The Egyptian people were outraged, and banished their Pharaoh, leaving his wife and eldest daughter to rule in his stead. Ptolemy XII: Cleopatra's father from hell The tragic fate of Cleopatra has long overshadowed her predecessor, Ptolemy XII.…

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A history of the Bible: who wrote it and when?
type: item
date: 2025-01-16T08:30:36.000Z
creator: Spencer Mizen
subject: Ancient Egypt
subject: General ancient history
subject: Medieval
subject: Period
subject: Roman
subject: Evergreen
description: The origins of the Bible are still cloaked in mystery. When was it written? Who wrote it? And how reliable is it as an historical record? Spencer Mizen charts the evolution of arguably the most influential book of all time
encoded: In 2007, Time magazine asserted that the Bible “has done more to shape literature, history, entertainment, and culture than any book ever written.” With phrases like “an eye for an eye” and “thou shalt not kill” embedded in our language and over five billion copies sold worldwide (swollen by a further 100 million every year given away for free), its impact is undeniable. Though, while its cultural influence is clear, the history of the Bible is much less so. Questions about who wrote the Bible, when, and why have fascinated and perplexed scholars for centuries. These are the thorniest of questions, made all the more tangled by the Bible’s great age, and the fact that some, or all of it, has become a sacred text for members of two of the world’s great religions – Judaism and Christianity – numbering more than two billion people. Where does the Bible originate? Archaeological discoveries and the study of written sources, such as Merneptah's Stele, have shed light on the history of both halves of the Bible: the Old Testament, the story of the Jews’ highs and lows in the millennium or so before the birth of Jesus; and the New Testament, which documents the life and teachings of Jesus. These findings may be incomplete and they may be highly contested, but they have helped historians paint a picture of how the Bible came to life. For centuries, the Old Testament has been widely interpreted as a story of disaster and rescue – of the Israelites falling from grace before picking themselves up, dusting themselves down and finding redemption. Nowhere is this theme more evident than in Exodus, the dramatic second book of the Old Testament, which chronicles the Israelites’ escape from captivity in Egypt to the promised land. Read more | On ancient battlefields, the world's oldest civilisations turned beloved pets into weapons of war The Bible tells us that Moses led the Israelites out of their captivity in Egypt (whose population had been laid low by ten plagues inflicted on the…

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Did aliens build the pyramids? The real history that debunks the conspiracy
type: item
date: 2025-01-14T08:00:51.000Z
creator: Jonny Wilkes
subject: Ancient Egypt
subject: General ancient history
subject: Period
subject: Evergreen
description: Are the pyramids too awesome to have been the work of the mere mortals of ancient Egypt? If so, does that mean they were built by aliens? Rob Attar speaks to Professor Joyce Tyldesley about the origins of the pyramid conspiracy, and unveils what evidence we have for how these monuments were really constructed
encoded: Of all the examples of pyramids in Egypt, the most famous is certainly the Great Pyramid of Giza. It was the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the only one still surviving, and for nearly 4,000 years it stood as the tallest human-made structure in the world. Now, more than 50 pyramids remain in Egypt: colossal feats of architecture and lasting monuments to the ancient civilisation of the pharaohs. But the complexity of the pyramids poses a significant challenge to archaeologists studying ancient Egypt. How, exactly, did this civilisation construct such magnificent and technically precise monuments? As with the likes of Stonehenge, there are many challenging theories that seek to answer these questions of who built the pyramids, and how. A pyramid conspiracy even exists, and poses the provocative question: did aliens build the ancient Egyptian pyramids? Were the pyramids built by aliens? The conspiracy theory explained So the theory has it, the pyramids were not the result of decades-long construction projects involving tens of thousands of people, gigantic logistical and administrative efforts, near-inexhaustible supplies of stone, and master architects and engineers. Instead, they were built by aliens, or at least aliens showed humans how to build them. Extra-terrestrial interference has not been the only theory to explain how an ancient civilisation boasted such awesome monuments. The people of Atlantis have received similar credit. Much about the pyramids, from how they were made to what is inside them, remains unknown to this day, so perhaps unsurprisingly there are many misconceptions as well as conspiracy theories attempting to explain legitimate lingering mysteries. Conspiracy: A HistoryExtra podcast series Member exclusive | Was the moon landing faked? Did Shakespeare actually write his plays? Were the pyramids built by aliens? Expert historians offer their perspectives on history's biggest conspiracy theories. Listen to all episodes now T…

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“The first historical document in the world”: what exactly is on the Narmer Palette?
type: item
date: 2024-12-24T16:04:56.000Z
creator: Jonny Wilkes
subject: Ancient Egypt
subject: Period
subject: Evergreen
description: A depiction of the unification of ancient Egypt? Or a powerful piece of propaganda for an early pharaoh? Here’s what we know about the 5,000-year-old ceremonial artefact…
encoded: Although lesser known than Tutankhamuun’s golden mask or Nefertiti’s bust, the Narmer Palette is a hugely significant artefact from ancient Egypt. The reason: it boasts a pair of firsts. To begin, it features some of the oldest hieroglyphic inscriptions yet found, leading the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, where the palette is on display, to describe it as “the first historical document in the world”. Next, the carved reliefs represent the earliest-known depictions of both Egyptian kingship and of the style of art now so synonymous with the civilisation. From its visualisation of the human form to how different elements of an image are placed and sized, early artefacts like this one established the artistic template used throughout the dynastic period over three millennia. What is the Narmer Palette? Measuring 64 by 42cm and made of flat grey-green siltstone, the Narmer Palette was, as the name suggests, a ceremonial palette resembling the kind that most Egyptians kept in their homes to make their cosmetics. They did so by mixing and grinding coloured minerals and oils together before applying the result to the skin. Makeup held not only aesthetic significance in ancient Egypt, but spiritual. Beauty was a sign of holiness, so the meaning of using ceremonial palettes like this one to depict something important, kingly even, would be widely understood. When was the Narmer Palette found? British archaeologists James Quibell and Frederick Green unearthed the Narmer Palette in near-perfect condition during their 1897-98 excavations. They were digging in the temple of Horus in Nekhen (or Hierakonpolis), which used to be the political and religious heart of Upper Egypt, when they came across an impressive cache of objects. This ‘Main Deposit’ had been ritually buried and included hundreds of artefacts, including statues, ivories, and the so-called Narmer Macehead – a decorative stone mace head. Who is depicted on the Narmer Palette? The Narmer who is thought to be depicted on t…

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How much do you know about ancient Egypt?
type: item
date: 2024-12-19T08:30:16.000Z
creator: Lauren Good
subject: Ancient Egypt
subject: Period
description: From pharaohs to mummification, test your knowledge on ancient Egypt with this quiz…
encoded: View Riddle on the source website

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