Raiding the Slavic forest got you nothing but arrows. So the Scandinavians built a road with hundreds of stops, tolls and boat repairs, and a state grew from it.
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Vikings didn't burn their gods when they turned Christian. They demoted them to heroes of the past and carved Sigurd the dragon-slayer onto church walls.
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Early farmers walked past lands with regular rain and settled where it never came. A historian on why Sumer's dry south may have pushed people to invent.
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Mesopotamians dug canals and invented writing, yet credited the gods. Historian Olga Popova on a mindset with no inventors and almost no named authors.
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The first thing humans ever wrote down was a number. Olga Popova explains how pebbles in clay balls, and a flock of sheep, led to the first writing.
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In the Mesopotamian flood story of Atrahasis, the gods did not punish sin. Humans multiplied, got too loud, and the gods drowned them for some quiet.
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Four thousand years ago a Mesopotamian temple stored the city's grain and lent it out at interest. When debts piled up, the city could not raise an army.
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Early iron was softer than bronze and rusted. It won the Bronze Age collapse anyway: one bronze swordsman cost as much as ten with iron swords.
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Dwarfs with pickaxes, forges and plenty of meat may be a memory of real Bronze Age miners, who dug kilometres of tunnels and paid for their dinner in metal.
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Archaeologist Vasily Novikov on Viking women: they could divorce easily, ran households, did magic, and a man who wanted magic had to dress like one.
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An archaeologist's passing guess: Arthur's sword in the stone may echo Bronze Age chiefs lifting freshly cast swords out of stone moulds.
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A buyer in Ur sent Ea-Nasir a clay tablet demanding his money back for bad copper. An archaeologist's guess: it was a skirmish in a Bronze Age trade war.
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