The Mystery of Cyrus the Great: What We Actually Know About History's Most Elusive Conqueror
He built the largest empire the world had yet seen, stretching from the Aegean coast to the edge of India. He is praised in the Hebrew Bibl…
All Articles
Every article published on Pythous, newest first: history, science, mystery and technology.
The Constitution of Medina: The Document That Founded a Community
In 622 CE a group of migrants from Mecca arrived in an oasis town four hundred kilometres to the north. They had no land, no tribal protect…
How the Nabataeans Built a City Where There Was No Water
Petra is usually sold as a facade. The photograph everyone knows is the Treasury seen through the narrow slot of the Siq — rose sandstone, …
Zaynab bint Ali: The Woman Who Carried Karbala Into History
Battles are decided by armies. What a battle means is decided later, by whoever survives to tell it.On the tenth of Muharram, 61 AH — 10 Oc…
Iram of the Pillars: The Lost City Buried Beneath the Sands of Arabia
There is a stretch of desert in southern Arabia where the dunes run for six hundred kilometres without a village, a well, or a road. The Be…
The Malwiya Minaret of Samarra: The Spiral Tower of the Abbasid Caliphate
There is no other building in the Islamic world quite like it. Rising from the flat brown plain north of Baghdad, the Malwiya Minaret is a …