Körtik Tepe: A 12,000-Year-Old Settlement Körtik Tepe is one of the oldest known permanent settlements in Anatolia, located in southeastern Türkiye. Dating to around 10,700–9,500 BC, the site preserves evidence of early hunter-gatherer communities, including stone buildings, burials, decorated stone vessels, and remarkable carved objects.

For generations the people of Derinkuyu in Cappadocia drew water from wells whose shafts passed straight through an underground city they knew nothing about. A resident broke through his basement wall in 1963 and found it.

The serdab at Saqqara is tilted about 17 degrees, matching the slope of Djoser's Step Pyramid. The king's gaze through those two holes runs upward as well as outward, toward the circumpolar stars that never set. The face meeting visitors today belongs to a plaster copy. The original statue left its serdab in the 1920s and now sits in Cairo, the oldest life-size statue known from Egypt..

The granite bank at Santo Stefano near Oschiri in Sardinia carries 21 niches in two rows, 14 below and 7 above, triangular, square and semicircular, with dozens of cupmarks around them. The rock has never been systematically excavated, so its age still rests on comparison with other sites.

Human bone has been coming out of Göbeklitepe in scattered pieces since 1995, 928 fragments across three thousand square meters. The first two intact burials have now been excavated, and they suggest the scatter was made by landslides rather than ritual.

The valley around Su Tempiesu in Sardinia yields only schist and granite, so its builders brought trachyte and basalt in from elsewhere. Every dressed block at the spring, laid around 1300 BC, was carried to the site by deliberate choice. The roof carried something rarer still. Its terminal block once held twenty bronze swords, fixed into the stone with poured lead and standing above the water. What do you think a sword given to a spring was meant to accomplish?

The builders at Gümüşler in Niğde worked downward. They quarried a cube of rock about 15 metres wide and 11 metres deep out of the ground, then cut a church, a dining hall, a kitchen and living rooms into the walls of that open pit. Inside, the fresco known as the smiling Mary may owe her expression to a 1960s restoration, when soot was cleaned away and scratched areas were repainted. Other readings take the smile as original and simply rare. When a retouch is itself sixty years old, how should a site describe what visitors are seeing?

The Nuragic sacred well at Perfugas in Sardinia was built from limestone blocks laid completely dry, with T-shaped and dovetail stones locking the two wall faces together. Eight steps descend to a circular chamber, and it sits in the middle of the old town, facing the parish church..

The Circus Games mosaic in Lyon divides scholars. Its timber judges' box fits an inscription about Lugdunum rebuilding its circus after a fire, while the museum maintains that nothing proves the scene is Lyon's own track. The circus itself has never been excavated. Which reading convinces you?

Made close to 4,000 years ago, this hollow blue faience ball in the National Museum of Scotland shows an Egyptian hedgehog curled into a defensive knot. Snout, ears, paws and tail gather on one side of the sphere, and black dots stand in for quills. Its purpose remains open. The ball was pierced twice before firing, so something once passed through it, yet it is too large for ordinary jewelry and the holes sit off the axis, which makes wearing it awkward. What do you think an Egyptian did with it?

Painted around 6000 BC, this clay vessel from Mursalevo in southwest Bulgaria takes the form of a woman with her hands resting on her belly, the mouth of the jar placed where her head would be. The village that made it met a dramatic end. Nearly every house at Neolithic Mursalevo was destroyed by fire, and scientists have analyzed the burnt clay walls to test whether the burning was deliberate. Why would a farming community some 8,000 years ago set its own homes alight?

This clay figurine from Nova Nadezhda near Haskovo in Bulgaria is roughly 6,000 years old. It was found during rescue digs for a railway line, and its oversized almond eyes are a hallmark of Copper Age art in Thrace.

New Fragment of the Kadesh Treaty Found at Hattusa Excavators at Hattusa, the Hittite capital near Boğazkale in Çorum, have identified a clay tablet fragment from the peace treaty between Hattusili III and Ramesses II. Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy announced the find on 21 September, World Peace Day. The piece came from Büyükkale, the royal citadel, near Building E. A year of study confirmed it as the obverse of one of the treaty's Akkadian copies. Its lines fall within the refugee clauses, which required fugitives to be returned safely, with their families and homes protected. This fragment preserves the promise that their houses would stand. Dated to around 1259 BC, the treaty is the earliest peace agreement surviving in versions from both parties. Egypt carved its text at Karnak and the Ramesseum, while the Hittites kept clay copies at Hattusa. The new fragment joins pieces now held in Istanbul, Ankara, Berlin and St Petersburg, and excavation at Büyükkale continues. Source: Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 21 September 2026.

Around 300 BC a mosaicist named Gnosis signed a lifelike stag hunt at Pella. By the 5th century, the deer on the Stobi baptistery floor had become stylized symbols of the soul thirsting for baptism. What do you think pushed early Christian artists toward symbol over realism?

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