The story of Hatshepsut is at first glance simple. She was the daughter of King Thutmose I, wife of King Thutmose II and mother of his daughter, Neferura. Upon her husband’s death (c. 1479 B.C.), she became queen regent of Egypt, ruling in place of the young heir who technically occupied the throne...

064 A 4,000-year-old farm may not sound as exciting to excavate as a palace, but I found that exploring ancient agriculture was just as rewarding as digging up royal treasures. With volunteers from all over the world, my archaeological target was...

045 One of the most dramatic archaeological monuments in Jordan—an admittedly Jewish one—has been repeatedly misidentified. French historian Ernest Will called it the “Finest Hellenistic monument in the Near East”1 and considered it a château.2...

034 On a cold and rainy morning in January 1997, I received a phone call from Orthodoxos Liasides, the foreman of a maintenance crew working on the monumental tombs of Tamassos, 15 miles southwest of Nicosia. The men were insulating the tombs...

056 I suspect that some BAR readers have become hooked, as I have, on the mysterious site in the Golan known as Rogem Hiri (Rujm el-Hiri in Arabic). In the cover story of BAR 18:04 (see “Mystery Circles,”), Dr. Yonathan Mizrachi speculated that...

Recent excavations in Limyra, Turkey, have uncovered a mysterious building near the city’s east gate. Although the structure has been only partially excavated, Jewish iconography and architectural features have already surfaced. Could it be a synagogue?

040 041 A fascinating episode in the history of Roman archaeology in America took place in Kentucky in the early years of the last century. In 1911 Louisville businessman and community leader...

037 In the spring of 1843, Paul-Emile Botta, the French consul at Mosul in present-day Iraq, invited Austen Henry Layard, then 26 years old and the British ambassador’s secretary in Constantinople, to join him at a site Botta thought was ancient...

014 Any choice of the “10 Most Endangered Sites” is, at most, a kind of informed arbitrariness. Although all of the sites on our list are archaeologically important and in imminent danger, some have more value than others and some face greater...

047 The mysterious site of Rogem Hiri (Rujm el-Hiri, in Arabica) was unknown to professional archaeology until after the Six-Day War in 1967 when the Golan Heights became accessible to Israeli archaeologists. It was discovered during the 1967–...

045 Of the approximately one hundred ancient synagogues from, say, 150 B.C.E. to 850 C.E. found in the ancient Land of Israel, an astounding 25 percent are located in the central Golan. How do we explain this? As it happens, one of the earliest...

030 031 “Tophet” is a Biblical word. It is the name of a place that was on the south side of ancient Jerusalem in the Valley of Ben-Hinnom, where the Israelites sacrificed their children by...

016 017 Archaeologically speaking, Beth-Shean refers to two major sites. The first is a tell, a magnificent mound rising from the plain: Biblical Beth-Shean on whose walls the Philistines...

028 029 Ovid’s Ars Amatoria is a “how to” manual, in verse, for amorous young men. The poet spends some 200 lines (1.67–262) naming the best places in Rome to contrive supposedly chance...

022 023 Persepolis is a mystery. The ancient Persian city boasts some of the world’s most impressive ruins, but no one knows exactly why it was built. The ruling Achaemenid Persian dynasty...

038 According to the Gospels, Jesus died and was removed from the cross on a Friday afternoon, the eve of the Jewish Sabbath. A wealthy follower named Joseph of Arimathea requested Pontius Pilate’s permission to remove Jesus’ body from the cross...

How accurate is Luke’s account of the Ephesus riot described in Acts 19:23–41? Excavations at the site bring this Biblical event to reality in a new way—from inscriptions and figurines of the goddess Artemis to the theater where the riot took place.

022 023 According to Leo the Deacon, a tenth-century Byzantine historian, the inhabitants of the Anatolian province of Cappadocia were troglodytes: “They went underground in holes, clefts, and...

047 One of the most mysterious buildings in all of Western architecture—the tomb of Theoderic (454–526 C.E.), king of the Ostrogoths (see the sidebar to this article)—glowers at the end of a tree-lined avenue in Ravenna, Italy. The tomb’s heavy,...