Early maps of the Americas made by indigenous people are rare—extremely rare. This map, dated 1593, is one of fewer than 100 such documents that have survived the ravages of time. It provides a ...

Think “poinsettia” and you think “Christmas,” right? Well, think again. At the time of the first Christmas, the closest poinsettia to the little town of Bethlehem was 8,000 miles away, clinging to ...

In order to learn the location of a fabled Aztec treasure a professor kidnaps his colleague the only man able to read the ancient Aztec script that is supposed to reveal the location of the treasure ...

Everybody knows the story of the Pontiac Aztek, a vehicle widely considered to be one of the ugliest ever put into production—and a perfect example of an automaker bungling what seemed to be a great ...

Egypt is celebrating the bicentenary of the decipherment of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and the creation of Egyptology with a batch of new events and a social media campaign To mark one of the most ...

For decades, one script embedded in the Dead Sea Scrolls resisted all efforts to unlock its meaning. Known as Cryptic B, the ...

A 2,000-year-old code that once looked like random scratches on parchment has finally given up its secret, turning a handful of obscure Dead Sea fragments into a new window on one of antiquity’s most ...

Page from the Aztec codex Matrícula de Tributos(History and Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo) Before the Spanish arrived in 1519, the highest officials of the Aztec Empire could count on the provinces ...

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In 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and 400 of his men marched into the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan and knew at once they were in a strange and wondrous place. Even before their arrival, ...

At a glance, the fall of the Aztec empire in the early 16th century seems like one of history’s clearest before-and-after moments: a powerful empire crushed almost instantly by a handful of Spanish ...