Fallen Empires

Documentaries on the rise and fall of history's greatest empires. New episodes every week.

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Full episode: https://t.co/B3JOAjuNAR

[Fallen Empires @FallenEmpiresHQ]

A tomb entrance sealed with a slab of protective spells. Later, someone built a chapel and a four-column shrine right over the door.

The announcement mentions no human remains. Who buried him? Who came back?

#AncientEgypt #Egyptology
Full episode in the reply 👇

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@archaeologymag The Romans did this everywhere — the Tiber had its god Tiberinus. A river meant harvests and life, so they gave it a face, reclining and laureled. Great find at Aspendos: its theater is among the best-preserved in the Roman world, and now a river god in mosaic.

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@ancientorigins Tested in 2016, the iron blade's nickel signature confirmed it: meteoric iron from the sky. Egyptians literally called iron "bi-a-n-pet" — metal of heaven. To arm a pharaoh with sky-metal for the afterlife... we explored that worldview in our new episode this week.

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@ancientorigins Archaeologists actually excavated that pit. 46 bodies, 5th-6th century BC — every one aged 18 to 35. Not a single infant bone. The remains point to prisoners and traitors thrown in as punishment. Plutarch's story makes a great legend; the bones tell a different one.

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Full episode: https://t.co/B3JOAjuNAR

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19 lines of Greek poetry, painted in red ink on a tomb stele in Egypt.

Its closing: a son, Sarapion, begging his dead father — "Listen, father!"

Even the man's name is uncertain. The press spells it six ways.

#AncientEgypt #Archaeology
Full episode in the reply 👇

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@archaeologymag This is the kind of detail that makes a tomb come alive — the bows and maces aren't grave decorations, they're a résumé. We're telling an Egyptian-tomb story in tonight's episode, and the same logic ran through it: everything buried had a job to do.

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@ancientorigins Norden's 1737 sketch is the key evidence — the nose was gone 60+ years before Napoleon's guns. The question is motive: in Egypt, removing a statue's nose was rarely random vandalism. The nose was how the image “breathed” — destroying it was believed to ritually kill its power.

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Watch on YouTube: https://t.co/Pbz1xD13ca

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A pharaoh declared the Hittite Empire dead. He was wrong. #AncientHistory

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Watch on YouTube: https://t.co/t1254c3QVU

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Trapped behind enemy lines, Hittite generals wrote begging their king for rescue — then refused to take the blame. #Hittites

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Full episode: https://t.co/zcfWwDatve

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One figure in the tomb's central chamber, skull stained red with sacred pigment. Probably not royalty — goods too modest for a king. One expert's guess: a priest. And some bones are missing — taken back by the living for veneration.

Link in the reply 👇
#Chimu

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Full story: https://t.co/BDldwk9EcZ

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In 1900, electric cars outsold gasoline cars in America. Then the Model T, the electric starter, and cheap Texas oil killed them by 1935. Two days ago, Tesla's thruster Roadster drove upside down. The car that died in 1920 is back.

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Full episode: https://t.co/zcfWwDb1kM

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The Chimú buried their dead curled up, knees drawn in. That was the rule for centuries.

In the new Chan Chan tomb, 37 of the 38 follow it.

One lies stretched out flat among the curled — and the archaeologists say they don't know why.

Link in the reply 👇
#Chimu

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Full episode: https://t.co/zcfWwDb1kM

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For 500 years, treasure hunters stripped every elite tomb at Chan Chan.

They missed one.

Last month, archaeologists opened a funerary platform sealed for 600 years — 38 people inside, untouched, exactly as they were left. 🧵

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The first unlooted elite Chimú tomb ever found.

Full episode in the reply 👇
#Chimu #Archaeology #Peru