Explore 10 Historical Discoveries Around the Globe

The best treasures of history always just seem to crop up when you least expect them. Under the sands of every shore, under the soil in each land, buried for a thousand years and more, marvellous things await their man. From ancient cities that once thrived to tombs bursting with golden artifacts, these discoveries have challenged our view of human civilization. Every discovery opens a window into the past, showing us something more about how our ancestors lived, what they did and what they left behind.

The excitement of something buried for thousands of years coming out into the light is seductive and captivates our imagination. These are the ripples in a conversation that spans millennia — moments that remind us that we’re all part of one continuous human story. Let’s take a trip around the world and discover 10 astonishing historical discoveries that rocked the world, changing what we know about everything!

King Tut’s Golden Tomb: Egypt’s Most Famous Discovery

An event in November 1922 was to capture the imagination of the world, this is when British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered something. In Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, his team discovered a sealed doorway after years of searching. Behind it was the tomb of Tutankhamun, a youth who died about 1323 B.C. And unlike many royal tombs that were robbed long ago, this one was nearly untouched.

The tomb itself held more than 5,000 objects, including the famous gold death mask that became one of history’s best-known treasures. Gold chariots, jewels, furniture and even food was contained in the chambers. The find provided scientists and historians with an extraordinary view of how the ancient Egyptians both prepared for their journey to afterlife, and at what must have been a vast treasure trove that followed pharaohs into their tombs.

The timing is what made this find even more special. The entire world was captivated by the excitement of ancient Egypt, and newspapers followed every twist and turn of the excavation. The discovery led to a worldwide fascination with Egyptian culture that endures today. Researchers are continuing to analyze the artifacts, and using modern technology to discover new information about Tutankhamun’s lifestyle, his health and his enigmatic death.

Why This Discovery Matters

King Tut’s tomb gave us proof of how powerfully the ancient Egyptians believed in an afterlife. Each item in the tomb had been meant to serve a purpose — one that would aid the young king in his afterlife journey. The workmanship in these objects made 3300 years ago is incredible proof with art of extremely skilled ancient Egyptian workers.

The Terracotta Army: The Underground Soldiers of China

In March 1974, farmers digging a well near Xi’an in China encountered something they did not expect — scraps of clay pottery. What they had stumbled upon was one of the most remarkable archaeological finds of 20th-century: the Terracotta Army. This immense army of clay soldiers was built to protect China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, in the afterlife.

The site is believed to include 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses and 150 cavalry horses. Individual soldiers are six feet high and four hundred pounds. The most amazing part? Faces are unique to all, nobody has two identical faces. Little soldiers are all unique, with different faces, expressions and details!

The army was interred in 210-209 BCE in underground pits as battle array. Originally, the warriors were colored vividly, although today only patches of paint remain. Archaeologists have only dug out part of the site, suggesting there could be thousands more warriors waiting below ground.

The Emperor’s Eternal Protection

Emperor Qin Shi Huang had united China and was fixated on immortality. It was an army he thought would guard him for all time. It was built over more than 38 years and employed an estimated 700,000 workers. This discovery exposed the emperor’s omnipotence and the amazing organization of ancient Chinese society.

Machu Picchu: The Lost City of the Incas

It’s high in the Peruvian Andes, at 7,970 feet above sea level: Machu Picchu. This site was brought to the world’s attention by American historian Hiram Bingham in 1911, but villagers were aware of it before. One of the most spectacular archaeological sites in the world, this Inca citadel dating back to the 15th century.

Constructed circa 1450 CE by Emperor Pachacuti, Machu Picchu contains more than 150 structures such as temples, houses, and farming terraces. The Incas constructed the city with no wheel, iron or mortar. They sawed stones with such precision that they slide into place without mortar, and many of their structures have survived earthquakes that would make modern buildings crumple.

About 100 years after the construction of the site, it was abandoned, perhaps after conquest by the Spanish or disease. It was so isolated it escaped the Spanish conquistadors and is remarkably well preserved. Today, Machu Picchu gives us a glimpse of Inca engineering, astronomy and daily life.

Mystery of the Mountain City

The exact purpose of Machu Picchu remains a subject of scholarly debate among scientists. Some believe it was a royal estate; others think it was a sacred religious site; and still others speculate that it served as an astronomical observatory. The city’s orientation with the heavens indicates that the Incas were highly advanced astronomers and understood how to plot their calendar around what they saw nightly in the skies.

The Dead Sea Scrolls: Ancient Biblical Manuscripts

Between 1947 and 1956, Bedouin shepherds and archaeologists unearthed about 900 documents from caves near the Dead Sea in the West Bank. These scrolls, which date between 250 BCE and 68 CE, are some of the earliest known surviving copies of biblical texts and other religious writings.

The scrolls contain pieces of every book in the Hebrew Bible (except the Book of Esther) as well as other texts outside the biblical canon. Recorded on parchment and papyrus, these writings endured because of the dry, still climate of the Dead Sea area.

These findings transformed our perceptions about Judaism and early Christianity. They have illuminated how biblical texts were copied and preserved, and shown the beliefs and practices of Jewish communities 2,000 years ago. Some scrolls refer to a community known as the Essenes, which may have lived near the caves where the scrolls were concealed.

Preserving Ancient Words

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls proved that biblical writings have been transmitted with precision for more than two millennia. They also showed differences in early texts, and shed light on religious practices at a time when Judaism was in the making and Christianity nascent.

Pompeii: The City Frozen in Time

On Aug. 24, 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted in one of the deadliest volcanic eruptions in human history with the Roman city of Pompeii buried under more than 20 feet of volcanic ash and pumice. This disaster turned into an archaeological windfall when excavations started in 1748 and uncovered a city frozen in time, providing a photo album of ancient Roman culture.

The ash was a time capsule, encasing buildings, art and objects as well as the shapes of those who perished in the eruption. Archaeologists discovered homes with furniture directly beneath them, bakeries with loaves still in their ovens and taverns where graffiti was scrawled on the walls. The site offers an astoundingly detailed insight into how regular Romans lived, worked and played.

Walking through Pompeii’s streets today is like going back in time. You can glimpse, inside private homes, ancient fast-food joints (thermopolia), bathhouses to socialize and lavish frescoes in theaters and even political campaign slogans painted on walls. The plaster casts made from the hollows left in the ash show Pompeii’s residents as they met their end.

Daily Life in Ancient Rome

Pompeii made it clear that we’re not so very different from the ancient Romans. They liked dining out, attending shows and decorating their homes. The city’s frescoes, in well-preserved condition, offer a glimpse into what they were reading, as does their humor and frustrations expressed through graffiti.

Rosetta Stone: Key to Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs

In 1799, French troops in Napoleon’s expeditionary army stumbled upon a big stone slab near the town of Rosetta (Rashid) in Egypt. Written in three languages, the stone was created in 196 BC to provide a communication of an agreement between yet another African ruler and Ptolemy V, who controlled Egypt at the time.

Once scholars had learned to read ancient Greek, they were at last able to understand Egyptian hieroglyphs — a script that had held its secret for thousands of years. A French scholar named Jean-François Champollion cracked the code in 1822, thereby unlocking thousands of unreadable Egyptian texts.

The Rosetta Stone, in and of itself, is not especially thrilling: It’s essentially a missive about tax exemptions for priests. But insofar as it is a translation tool, its usefulness is immeasurable. It enabled historians to read temple inscriptions, tomb texts and administrative documents, and greatly increased our knowledge of ancient Egyptian civilization.

Breaking the Code

Prior to the Rosetta Stone, no one could decipher hieroglyphs. People offered wild guesses about what the symbols meant. The stone demonstrated that hieroglyphs were not magic spells and esoteric secrets but sounds and ideas. This discovery turned Egyptology from a speculation into a science.

Lucy: Our Ancient Human Ancestor

In 1974 paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson unearthed a 3.2-million-year-old skeleton during an excavation in Ethiopia’s Afar region. They called her “Lucy,” after the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” that was ringing out from their camp the night of the discovery. Lucy is a member of the species Australopithecus afarensis, and one of the most complete skeletons ever discovered for an early human ancestor.

Lucy was about 3.5 feet tall and weighed close to 60 pounds. The find showed that our ancestors walked erect much earlier than their brains became big. Roughly 40 percent of Lucy’s skeleton was found, a lot to have survived for such an ancient discovery. Her bones bore unmistakable signs of bipedalism — walking upright on two legs.

This finding revolutionized our image of human evolution. It revealed that walking on two feet evolved millions of years prior to the making of tools and the use of language. Lucy helped put Africa on the map as humanity’s birthplace and gave scientists vital clues about how human beings evolved from tree-dwelling primates to creatures that walked the ground.

Our Evolutionary Journey

Lucy is a link between apes and people. Her arms were to some extent still capable of climbing trees, but her legs and pelvis were dedicated to walking on two legs. She lived in a period of East Africa’s history when forests were giving way to open landscapes, and early humans needed to travel longer distances between food and water.

The Antikythera Mechanism: Ancient Computer

A shipwreck was discovered by sponge divers off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901. Among the artifacts was an encrusted bronze object that at first appeared irrelevant. But this “Antikythera Mechanism,” which was originally built around 100 BCE, was eventually revealed to be the world’s oldest known analog computer.

This hand-driven contraption incorporated a sophisticated array of gears — at least 30 interlocking bronze cogwheels — to forecast the positions of the sun, moon, and planets up to decades in advance as well as solar and lunar eclipses. It could chart the movement of sun, moon, and planets, and even forecast Olympic Games. So advanced was the technology, nothing comparable would resurface for more than 1,000 years.

Advanced X-ray and CT scanning now reveals engravings and internal workings that demonstrate how much modern Greek engineering was anticipated by the ancients. The device is forcing us the revise our assumptions about ancient technology and to recognize that early civilizations were much, much more scientifically advanced than many have been willing to concede.

Ancient Scientific Achievement

The Antikythera Mechanism proved that ancient Greeks possessed gear technology and understanding of astronomy much more advanced than historians prior thought possible. It’s an indication, it says, that countless other sophisticated devices may have existed and been lost to history, with only faint allusions in surviving texts.

The Cave Paintings at Lascaux: A Glimpse of the Prehistoric Art Gallery

In September 1940, four teenagers and a dog discovered an underground cave network in south-western France. Inside, were more than 600 paintings and some 1,400 engravings dating back about 17,000 years to the Upper Paleolithic. Some of the best examples of prehistoric art can be found in Lascaux cave.

The paintings mostly display large animals – horses, deer, cattle, and bison – that inhabited this area during the Ice Age. The artists used natural pigments, such as iron oxide and charcoal, to achieve the colors; the paintings themselves display highly developed technique, such as shading, for example, and even perspective, demonstrating that the art was born tens of thousands of years ago.

The cave was opened to tourists in 1948 but closed only fifteen years after – in 1963, visitors’ breath and body heat were damaging the paintings. The cave is still closed, and today people visit detailed replicas that allow every person to see a prehistoric art gallery.

Why Did They Paint?

There is little explanation as to why prehistoric people were so devoted to painting those animals. Some scientists believe those paintings were of religious or ceremonial meaning, while others assume that they served as a way to teach, be it magic or hunting for beginners. It doesn’t really matter what their reasons were — because it proves an intrinsic desire for humanity to create.

Göbekli Tepe: The World’s Oldest Temple

In southeastern Turkey, a place now known as Göbekli Tepe, archaeologist Klaus Schmidt began excavating a hilltop in 1995. What he found was astounding – and would change the perception of what early human civilization looked like. The site was built around 9600 BC, 11,600 years ago and over 6,000 before Stonehenge.

The building itself consists of massive standing stones, installed as pieces of a whole, many of them covered in carvings of animals, insects, and abstract patterns. The pillars are also massive – some weigh up to 20 tons. The whole structure suggests that their movement required coordination of a large number of people for little transportation.

And, the most shocking aspect, is that the temple was built before agriculture, written language, pottery, and metallurgy. Such a finding suggests that religion and social gathering might have predated farming communities. In a traditional look of early human civilization, nomadic hunter-gatherers wouldn’t have had plans to stay for so long in one place. No other similar large constructions were ever found on other investigation sites of the same epoch.

Learn more about ancient archaeological discoveries and their impact on our understanding of human civilization.

Rewriting Civilization’s Story

This finding helps rewrite the story of how civilization first developed. The conventional wisdom was that people settling down to farm and developing religion and art was what eventually led to the construction of places such as Göbekli Tepe, said Schmidt. Instead, at least in parts of the world like this lush region of southern Turkey where resources are abundant, “it seems rather that the erection of monumental buildings fosters social complexity.” It demonstrates that our ancestors were capable of complex organization and ambitious building more than a thousand years earlier than we thought.

Comparison of Major Discoveries

Discoveries in the Era of Modern Technology

Today’s archaeologists have at their disposal a range of tools early explorers could only dream about. Satellites can be used to find hidden structures under the jungle canopy or buried in desert sands. Ground-penetrating radar can analyze what is under the ground without digging. DNA elucidates the ancestry of ancient populations and the relationships between them. The 3D scanning captures precise information about artifacts and sites.

What these technologies mean is that we are still making remarkable discoveries. In recent years, Egypt announced new tomb discoveries. Shipwrecks and sunken cities are coming into focus with underwater archaeology. LIDAR has uncovered lost cities in Central American jungles. The age of exploration is not over — it’s accelerating.

Every find also creates new questions. What happened to the people who made these places? Why did they disappear? What other wonders remain to be discovered? Every answer gives rise to yet more mysteries, and history remains thrilling and very much with us.

What These Discoveries Teach Us

The essence of what these 10 discoveries all have in common about human nature is: First, people have always been creative; we’ve created beautiful buildings and art to express beauty. Second, we are curious creatures who have always looked at the stars, developed technology and sought knowledge. Third, human beings have always clustered together in communities and worked on grand projects.

These finds also humble us. Without modern tools, ancient people accomplished the most impressive things. They were designing and moving monuments made of enormous stones, doing complex math, and producing artwork which still moves today. They remind us that intelligence and capability are not the exclusive province of today but are timeless human characteristics.

And finally, these findings link us to our common human history. Whether you were in Egypt or China, Peru or France, and whatever the period of time in which those spaces located you, people had similar questions about life, death and significance. They made and believed and built and dreamed. Their lives enlighten us about ourselves.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the greatest historical find?

“Valuable” is a pretty broad term, but in my interpretation experts say King Tut’s tomb is the most culturally valuable because it was found largely untouched (Oh hey, golden artifacts!) But the Rosetta Stone may be the most intellectually precious, since it decoded hieroglyphics for us and thus enabled thousands more texts to be understood.

Are there any big discoveries in history left to make?

Absolutely! Archaeologists make new discoveries regularly. In recent years, researchers have discovered new tombs in Egypt, lost cities in the Amazon rainforest and ancient cave art deep in the outback. This is something that modern technology through, for example, satellite imaging and LIDAR shows more and more sites of this kind that we otherwise could not find.

How do archaeologists know how old something is?

The scientists employ different methods depending on the material. Carbon-14 dating is effective on material that was once alive (wood, bone, etc.) and independently dated to date for age (up to 50,000 years old). For older items, inorganic objects (like rocks and pottery), they will often use other types of dating — such as thermoluminescence and potassium-argon dating.

Why were so many of these ancient sites buried or otherwise concealed?

Various reasons led different sites to disappear. Pompeii was buried in volcanic ash by natural disasters. Desert sands covered Egyptian tombs. The jungle rose to hide Machu Picchu and Central American temples. Coastal sites were flooded due to the rising sea levels. Sometimes people intentionally buried sites; others were simply abandoned and left to the slow creep of erasure.

Who gets to be an archaeologist and discover things?

Yes! Jobs in archaeology usually require a college degree (usually in the field of archaeology, anthropology or history) but discoveries are sometimes made by amateur archaeologists and just ordinary people. Many universities have field schools which allow students and enthusiastic amateurs to learn about excavation. Some countries also have reporting programs for finds, to make sure discoveries receive the scientific study they deserve.

What do you do when someone discovers a historical artifact?

It depends where you live. In nearly every nation items such as this are property of the country and there are laws that require you to turn them over when discovered, reporting them to the local authorities or appropriate museum. Professional archaeologists then record the location and context in which a discovery was made, often more valuable in itself than the object. Legal reporting guarantees artifacts are part of the historical record, instead of languishing in collectors’ basements.

What ensures that archaeologists dig in the right place?

They are a hybrid of old and new methods: collecting historical records and maps, employing technology like ground-penetrating radar or satellite imagery, following hunches left by previous discoveries — sometimes even just striking lucky. Local knowledge can also be helpful — people who live in an area might have heard of ruins or other oddball features that call for a look-see.

Are ancient sites in danger?

Unfortunately, yes. Archaeological sites are under threat from climate change, tourism, urban development, looting and conflict. Coastal sites are threatened by rising sea levels, and structures are damaged by extreme weather. This makes the need for cautious excavation, recording and conservation direr than ever.

The Future of Historical Discovery

The story of human history is yet to be completed. There are, it should be remembered, huge portions of our planet which remain archaeologically unexamined. The oceans conceal an unknown number of sunken ships, and perhaps lost civilizations. Dense forests hide untold forgotten cities. Desert sands bulge and reveal fresh secrets year by year.

Technology continues to improve, providing researchers with new eyes to see the past. Patterns in archaeological data are now analyzed by artificial intelligence. Drones provide high-resolution visual data of distant places. DNA tests tell of ancient migrations and family bonds. Virtual reality now makes it possible to reconstruct, and visit for ourselves, ancient places as we flash forward in time.

And then, perhaps most exciting of all, we’re learning to ask better questions. Modern archaeology is not simply a treasure hunt — it tries to untangle how people lived, what they believed, why they did what they did and how societies changed over time. Each discovery fills in more pieces of the great jigsaw puzzle of human history.

Conclusion

From Egyptian tombs with their gold to armies of clay that guarded an emperor, from painted caves to computerized devices, these ten discoveries remind us how vast and rich history truly is. It shows that our ancestors were smart, able and clever human beings who created civilizations, considered the mysteries of life and left us clues to find them.

Every new discovery altered the way we knew the past and served to remind us that history isn’t merely dates and names in schoolbooks, but rather it is the story of flesh-and-blood individuals who lived, loved, suffered and dreamed. These discoveries are linking us through thousands of years, and they reveal that human curiosity, creativity and community have always been our greatest assets.

The next big revelation could come tomorrow. Somewhere, someplace now an object lays in the ground just twiddling its thumbs, eager to surprise us and rewrite what we thought we understood. The quest for knowledge about our past never seems to end, and each new discovery provides some insights into ourselves and into where we have been. History is not behind us — it’s all around us, ready to be discovered.