New Clues to Ancient Mysteries (2026)

For regular videos on ancient cultures and forgotten civilizations, please subscribe. Today we're looking at ten ancient mysteries and the new discoveries helping us to solve them. Some of these questions have baffled researchers for centuries, others have emerged from recent excavations, but I brought together ten stories from around the world to show you what researchers have found, how they figured it out, and how close we are to an answer. At Sida, on Turkey's southern coast, the ancient people who lived there wrote in an alphabet that we still can't fully read. The language is called SIDETIC. Its script was used from roughly the 5th to the 2nd century BCE, and survives on coins and a small collection of inscriptions. What did the people of Sida write in these inscriptions? Scholars did find bilingual inscriptions containing both Greek and SIDETIC in 1914 and 1949. The Greek gave scholars readable material to compare with the unfamiliar letters. Other finds gradually enlarged the collection. Although successive researchers revised the proposed alphabet and proposed sound values for many of the letters, so much remains uncertain, including the language's grammar. But a paper published in October 2025 moved our understanding of SIDETIC further forward. It presents, first of all, the most recent finds, texts on stone and bronze. One came from a marble block that later builders had reused in masonry. Researchers had to remove mortar from its inscribed face. Underneath were 26 lines of SIDETIC and recognizable words borrowed from Greek. The authors compared recurring names and forms and identified Greek civic terms borrowed into SIDETIC. One was Ekklesia, from the Greek word for an assembly. Another referred to a decision made by a vote or a decree. The researchers also identified vocabulary associated with benefaction. Together, these words suggest that the inscription records a civic decree honoring benefactors and their gifts. They still can't translate the whole text, but they can begin to identify what it was about. The word for assembly also helped them check the alphabet. Its spelling confirmed that one SIDETIC letter represented the sound K. Other Greek borrowings confirmed further sound values. Another stone, found near the Temple of Serapis at Sida, carries 14 lines of Greek and 11 of SIDETIC. The two sections aren't matching translations, but in the SIDETIC section, researchers identified names and monetary amounts. In a June 2026 interview, the excavation director described the inscription as evidence of contributions toward building a temple. That is a much better glimpse of what these people were writing down, even though the language remains only partly understood. The known alphabet now contains 31 signs. This is a step forward, but the paper reports no further breakthrough in grammar. Researchers are getting closer to what the people of Sida actually said, but they still have a way to go. The Shackled Men of Philearon In 2016, archaeologists investigating an ancient cemetery beside Philearon Bay, on the coast south of Athens, uncovered a disturbing group of burials. The excavation was on the site of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center. This was part of a much larger burial ground, containing ordinary graves, as well as unusual evidence of violence. 79 men had been laid in three rows. Many still had metal shackles around them. These were people from the early history of Athens, before its famous democracy. They've been dated to the 7th century BCE. Who were these men, and why were they sent to their graves still in shackles? Were they enemies captured from outside Athens, or victims of a violent struggle within it? Researchers have spent the decades since the discovery trying to connect their remains with that history. One proposed explanation involves Coulon, Cylon in English, an Athenian who tried to seize power around that time. Ancient writers described the failure of his coup and the killing of his followers. Could the men in this cemetery be some of his followers? But ancient authors described the coup long after it happened, and left conflicting accounts of its aftermath. Historians therefore struggled to reconstruct exactly what happened to Cylon's followers, let alone connect them with these particular graves. However, their geographic origins offer another way to narrow the possibilities. A study publicized this summer investigated where these men had lived. Researchers examined strontium isotope ratios and remains from 66 of them, and compared the results with 97 other people buried at the same cemetery. Strontium is an element that enters our bodies through food and water. Its isotope ratios can reflect the geology of the places supplying that food and water. Researchers can compare these ratios with the region's expected range to investigate whether someone may have come from elsewhere. They had predicted that a substantial proportion of the shackled men would come from outside Attica. 64 of the 66 men who were tested had values consistent with Attica, the region around Athens. As a group, they weren't significantly different from the cemetery's other inhabitants. So the results support the idea that most of these men lived in the surrounding region. The authors interpret them as evidence of violence against a largely local population. But it can't tell us who ordered their deaths or why. Cylon's failed coup remains one possible explanation, but there are other possibilities. What were Roman dodecahedra for? A Roman dodecahedron is a hollow, 12-sided metal object with holes through its face and little knobs at its corners. People in the ancient Roman world designed and made these objects for a reason. We still don't know what that reason was. What Roman activity required 12 perforated faces and a set of projecting knobs? No known Roman text or image explains how these objects were used. Researchers have proposed measuring devices, gaming pieces, and ritual objects without establishing their original function. Consider the complete example found at Norton Disney in England in 2023, thought to date to the 3rd or 4th century CE. The excavators reported that it lay in a large pit and appeared to have been deliberately placed there. They considered a ritual explanation and planned further excavation of the surroundings. Independent researcher Greg Lamb's proposed answer is that this was a tool for shaping wax. In an experiment published in May 2026, he put a replica to work to see whether its peculiar shape could produce regular wax forms. His first attempts didn't reliably enclose the cord. It could become exposed and potentially slip free without breaking the wax. He revised the method, putting one half of the softened wax behind the cord's knot and the other half on top, then pressing it with a dodecahedron. This enclosed the knot. The corner knobs limited how far the tool could descend. Wax rose into the hole, forming a central boss. A little olive oil helped prevent sticking. A larger opening let him reach inside with a finger and push the wax free without damaging its shape. In a separate trial without cord, he made 10 wax tokens in about five minutes. A coin and a small metal charm used as stand-ins for signet rings didn't produce readable impressions, so the experiment demonstrated wax shaping rather than effective sealing. You could make a similar object by hand, as Lamb also demonstrated, so why use a dodecahedron? Well, the proposed advantage is a more regular shape, but the experiment doesn't establish that Romans used their dodecahedron this way. It just is a reasonable possibility. We still would need an archaeological connection with wax working before we can say we've recovered this object's lost purpose. What lies inside Japan's giant Kofun tombs? From above, some of Japan's ancient burial mounds look like enormous keyholes, a rounded part joined to a rectangular projection surrounded by moats. These monuments are called Kofun. There are more than a hundred and sixty thousand Kofun tombs in Japan, but between 740 and 790 of them are imperial tombs, and guess how many of these have been excavated archaeologically? Zero. Here, access to the tombs is restricted because they're treated as sacred, and the Imperial Household Agency seeks to preserve their peace and dignity. Some of the imperial tombs have suffered from looting or natural disasters, but even these have been banned from full excavation. Who commanded the resources to build these immense tombs, and who lies inside them? What was buried with the dead? We have tentative answers to these questions, but we don't know for sure because the identifications are just traditions, and no one has gone inside. Daisen in Osaka is maintained as the tomb of Emperor Nintoku. People did see inside a chamber there in 1872 after part of the mound collapsed. They documented the chamber and its furnishings before it was covered again. Traditional accounts place Nintoku's reign between 313 and 399 CE, and that Nintoku lived to 109. While archaeologists date the mound to the middle of the 5th century, according to recovered pottery and haniwa clay objects. Maybe this tomb belonged to someone else, or maybe the traditional dates for Nintoku's reign are wrong. The objects that were taken from the tomb in 1872 were lost, and all we had were drawings of them. But just recently, objects associated with the 1872 opening were identified in an old collection. These include a knife, a sheath, and fragments of armor. The announcement came in June 2025 with further public presentations afterward. Researchers at Kokugakuin University in Tokyo, working with Sakai City and Nippon Steel Technology, were able to examine details that drawings alone couldn't establish. The knife has an iron blade and a sheath decorated with copper covered in a thin layer of gold. The armor fragments also preserve gilded copper, which the team identified as covering for iron plates. So these were pieces of iron armor with a gold covered copper exterior. The fragments are too small to tell which part of the armor they came from, but they preserve evidence of how it was constructed and decorated. The investigation included x-ray CT scans of internal structure and x-ray fluorescence analysis of composition. We now have physical evidence of the materials used to make and decorate the burial furnishings. Hashihaka Inara has another possible royal occupant, Himiko, the 3rd century queen of Yamatai, whom ancient Chinese records describe as a ruler with religious powers. The Imperial Household Agency designates it as the grave of Princess Yamato Totohi Momosohime, a figure in Japan's ancient chronicles. Some scholars propose that this princess and Himiko were one and the same. That identification remains disputed, and we still don't know who lies inside Hashihaka. At Hashihaka, repeated flooding has damaged the remains. Archaeologists place Hashihaka's construction around the middle to later part of the 3rd century CE. A 2011 study tested wood, seeds, and charred residues on pottery from Hashihaka and related sites. Combining those results with the excavation evidence, the team estimated that the period just after the mound's construction fell between 240 and 260 CE, so it isn't the right time period for the proposed identifications. But in February 2026, researchers reported finding an earthen barrier in a moat immediately beside the mound. You can get permission to excavate around it. A comparable feature had been found in 1998, but with stone facing. This suggests that several barriers divided this moat. It would seem that barriers held water in separate sections at stepped levels around the sloping ground. These embankments could also provide crossings. So researchers are recovering details of these royal burials without opening the restricted chambers. They're learning about how water may have been controlled around Hashihaka, and what some Dyson burial furnishings were actually made of, but we still can't securely identify the occupants, and much of what their burial chambers contain remains unknown. Reconstructing a Roman tax corruption scandal. In 1745, the traveler Richard Pocock documented a fragmentary ancient inscription at Mylasa, in what is now western Turkey. It was a copy of a Roman decree issued in 480 CE. Copies were found at two other cities in the region, The decree concerns tax abuses on estates belonging to Placidia. She was a daughter of Emperor Valentinian III. The decree comes from the Praetorian Prefect of the East, a senior Roman official named Dionysus. It demands action against the tax collectors, instructs a special envoy to deal with the abuses, and threatens local governors and other officials who allow them to continue. But the broken inscriptions left researchers with an incomplete record of the decree. Then, in 2024, excavators at Stratonicea found more pieces. Epigraphist Pavel Novikovsky, of the University of Warsaw, and Mustafa Adak, of Akdeniz University, identified missing passages of the decree. The tax collectors issued receipts that didn't even say how much someone had paid, whether in money or goods. The incomplete receipts concealed the amounts involved. Novikovsky thinks they collected more than they reported to the authorities in Constantinople, then kept the difference. These officials were required to issue proper receipts. Complaints reached the authorities around 465, but the collectors apparently ignored orders to stop. Fifteen years later, the Prefect Dionysus gave an envoy four months to act, threatening to confiscate his property if he failed. The collectors faced death. Governors and city defenders who tolerated the abuse faced heavy fines. Why threaten execution over tax receipts? Novikovsky suggests that defying imperial authority on an imperial estate could have looked like rebellion. But the death threat may have served to frighten officials into obeying. Novikovsky and Adak reasoned that the envoy must have reached the region and acted on the order. Otherwise, we wouldn't have this inscription recording the decree. That suggests the mission went ahead. The new fragments also let the researchers compare more of the decree's local wording. The Stratonicea and Mylasa versions differ, suggesting that people preparing or carving the copies could alter the text. The recovered passages add to the ancient record of the scandal, and this new explanation shows how the suspected fraud could work. But did the crackdown end it? And did anyone actually suffer the threatened punishment? Locating Egypt's lost city of Messin. Ancient Egyptian texts preserved the name of a city called Messin. But we don't really know where the city was, except that it was somewhere on the eastern frontier. But which of the ruins surviving in Egypt's eastern frontier belonged to Messin? One promising candidate is Tel Abu Saifi, near Kantara East in northern Sinai, along the ancient route known as the Way of Horus. Earlier inscribed blocks from the site referred to Horus of Messin, and researchers had proposed that a temple to the god stood here. But it's also possible the reference is to a temple elsewhere. So the site's identification remained a hypothesis. Then, in August 2026, excavators announced another inscription with Messin's name, part of a sandstone lintel, the stone that spans the top of a doorway. The lintel contains writing on three sides, including the royal titles of Ramses II and a reference to restoring a statue of Horus, Lord of Messin. So the new inscription adds another piece of evidence that the settlement was Messin itself. And a temple was found at the site, which could be the temple to Horus of Messin. The temple reached its greatest architectural development under the Ptolemies. In the 3rd century CE, people converted parts of the complex into a Roman military camp. The discovery strengthened the identification of the site with Messin, but further excavation and research are needed to confirm it. Possible Hittite artifacts in a Czech cave. In 2023, researchers found two puzzling stone fragments in Katarzynska cave in Moravia, Czechia. The cave had already yielded prehistoric drawings and ornaments. These pieces showed figures resembling a procession in Hittite art. The Hittites lived in what is now Turkey during the 2nd millennium BCE. The images couldn't help but be compared with the rock sanctuary at Jezelekaia. But how could objects resembling Hittite sacred art have ended up in a cave so far from the Hittite world? Maybe it's a coincidence. According to Petr Zajicek of the Czech Caves Administration, laboratory tests of the two fragments composition indicated that their stone came from the region around Jezelekaia. That suggests a real connection with the Hittites. But Zajicek raises the possibility that someone could have brought old objects from Turkey and buried them in the cave as a hoax about 150 years ago when researchers began exploring it. So how can we figure out if it was put there recently or in ancient times? In early October 2025, researchers checked soil they'd already excavated and sifted. They were reviewing the material because dirt-covered shell ornaments were easy to mistake for little stones. During this second look, they discovered writing on a small stone fragment. The marks look like cuneiform, the wedge-shaped script used for several ancient languages, including Hittite. This new piece has the same thickness as the earlier fragments, suggesting they may once have belonged to one object. But a physical join to the other pieces has not been demonstrated, and the writing on the new fragment is difficult to interpret. At this point, we still have to establish whether the objects are genuinely ancient, and separately, when someone brought them into the cave. So the mystery continues. Cleopatra's tomb hunt. Cleopatra and Mark Antony both committed suicide individually after Rome defeated them in 30 BCE. The ancient writer Plutarch says Cleopatra was buried with Antony, yet no surviving tomb has been securely identified as theirs. Where were two of the ancient world's most famous rulers laid to rest? Their tomb has been very difficult to find. Alexandria, Egypt, the ancient capital in the days of Cleopatra, is a good place to start, but it has changed enormously, and part of its ancient royal district is now underwater. It doesn't look much like it did in Cleopatra's lifetime. Archaeologist Kathleen Martinez has pursued another possibility since 2005. Taposiris Magna. Taposiris Magna is about 50 kilometers, 30 miles, west of Alexandria. She proposes that a temple there could have received the royal burial, partly because of its association with Isis, the goddess with whom Cleopatra identified. Years of excavation there have produced ancient artifacts, but none securely identify Cleopatra's tomb. In 2022, the team announced the discovery of a long tunnel, partly flooded. And in September 2025, they reported evidence of an ancient port beneath the sea. Sonar surveys and dives had revealed structures, columns, anchors, and transport jars. The stone and metal anchors of different sizes and numerous jars date to the Ptolemaic period. The team interprets the remains as a port connected with Taposiris. Martinez argues that the port strengthens her proposal that Taposiris could have received Cleopatra's burial. At one underwater structure, called Salaam 5, divers found a basalt base resembling statue pedestals at the temple. That gives the team a promising structure to examine beyond the general discovery of maritime activity. So the search for Cleopatra's tomb has expanded into the water and the work continues apace. But the port's connection to her burial spot remains a hypothesis. Did ships bring Cleopatra's body to Taposiris Magna? I hope we find out. Why did the Harappan civilization collapse? The Harappan civilization, sometimes called the Indus Valley Civilization, built well-organized cities. And its remains, in what is now Pakistan and northwestern India, reveal an elaborate and in many ways advanced urban society. Yet around 4,000 years ago, this civilization began to collapse. People left its great cities for smaller settlements. Why did one of the ancient world's great civilizations unravel? What brought them down? The old idea that it was a massive invasion is unsupported by the evidence and no longer holds water. The Harappan writing system still can't be read with confidence, so we don't have a readable account from the inhabitants explaining what happened. Archaeologists have to compare settlement histories with evidence preserved in the ground. Researchers have considered changes in trade and society, shifts in rivers, and a weakening monsoon. One major investigation published in 2012 combined satellite mapping with sediment samples from ancient river systems. It linked the decline of cities and an eastward population shift with weakening monsoon rains and changing river conditions. But that was just a start. In a study published in November 2025, researchers combined evidence of past climate, including lake sediments and cave deposits, with computer simulations. They then modeled river flow at 17 locations to estimate how water availability changed. The reconstruction points to drought lasting for generations. It identified four prolonged dry intervals, each lasting more than 85 years. The most severe lasted about 164, near Kottiji and Gunwurriwala. The model indicates flows around 12% below the earlier period. But the pattern wasn't uniform. The estimated losses were smaller at the stations in Sarashtra, farther south, than at the hardest hit Indus locations, particularly during the earlier dry intervals. The authors connect these regional differences with the movement of settlements toward places with more dependable water. The most severe of the four droughts came after the main urban phase had already ended. It could have prolonged the crisis, but it can't by itself explain how the urban collapse began. These results suggest that Harappan communities faced water shortages stretching across generations, putting their urban civilization under prolonged pressure. The reconstruction helps explain both the loss of the great cities and the survival of communities elsewhere. But this may have just been one factor in an explanation for the collapse. It doesn't necessarily answer all questions. So we will wait to see what other information can be found. Why was Thoth portrayed as a baboon? Did you know that the ancient Egyptians kept baboons in temples, mummified them, and buried them? An obituary of a baboon buried at North Saqqara in 168 BCE has even been found. Thoth, the god of wisdom, writing in the moon, could take the form of either a sacred ibis or a Hamadryas baboon. A long-legged bird with a curved bill and a large monkey seem an unlikely pair. What made both of them suitable animals for the same god? This is not explained in any surviving Egyptian texts. In 2024, a study of Thoth's name proposed that his Egyptian name, Jehuti, derived from words meaning white or bright. This makes sense, considering he is the moon god. Scholars have proposed several explanations for the ibis. Its curved bill resembles a crescent moon, and its black and white feathers might suggest the moon's changing phases. But that doesn't explain the baboon. Baboons weren't native to ancient Egypt, you know. Egyptians imported them, and they had two species to choose from. Archaeologists have recovered the remains of both olive and Hamadryas baboons. Yet the Hamadryas was the one associated with Thoth. In July 2026, researchers at the University of St. Andrews tested a hypothesis that both the ibis and the baboon had a lunar appearance. They examined museum specimens of six Hamadryas baboons, six olive baboons, and five sacred ibises. They used an instrument called a spectrometer to measure how strongly the animal's hair and feathers reflected each wavelength of visible light. Plotting these measurements produces a curve, which they compared with a curve showing the mixture of wavelengths in moonlight. The curve for the Hamadryas baboon's forehead hair closely resembled the moonlight curve. The olive baboon's curve had a different shape, dropping toward the red of the spectrum. The ibis' white plumage also produced a curve resembling moonlight. And the Hamadryas' forehead hair reflected about 65% more light than the olive baboon's. Mature male Hamadryas baboons develop conspicuous white cheek hair and a long gray shoulder mane. Females and younger animals look browner. The researchers argue that the adult male's bright, silvery appearance helps explain why Egyptians chose that particular animal to embody their moon god. That gives us evidence for a single explanation connecting the bird, the baboon, and the moon. But it isn't proof that this is what determined the choice. Some ancient accounts connect baboon behavior with the moon. So it's not the only possibility. So there you have them. Ten new clues to ancient mysteries. Which one appealed to you the most? And are there others you think I should have included? Let me know in the comments. If you enjoyed these stories, please give the video a thumbs up. Thank you for watching. You might like my little e-booklet, Why Ancient History Matters. It's designed to persuade people that the subject is important, even in the modern world. You might also wish to use it to help spread the word. So feel free to share it with someone you know. It's free for anyone who wants it. I've left a link in the description box below the video for you to grab a copy. Catch you later.