All news on the topic: Ancient World

The Maya, Aztecs and many other ancient civilisations had their own ballgame courts more than 1,000 years ago - where they used balls they made from natural rubber

A team has discovered a long lost branch of the Nile which would once have been used to transport workers and materials to build the pyramids, but which have been dried up for centuries

The 22-year-old German, who has not been publicly named, is set to be hit with a huge fine after he was accused of scaling the 16th century monument, causing an estimated £4,272 worth of damage

At 2,000 years old, the Antikythera mechanism is a hand-powered orrery — a mechanical model of the Solar System — and is the earliest known example of an analogue computer

Julian Baker, 52, filmed himself excavating the buried monument at Eglwysilan Mountain in Caerphilly, South Wales, and has been ordered to pay £4,000 to restore the relic

The bone, which is believed to be a hip bone, is known as an ilium and was excavated from a cave in the vast Grotte du Renne caves several decades ago but only now being analysed

An international team of academics from Brazil, Australia and Italy used genetic information from a woman's skull named Zlaty kun (golden horse in Czech), which they unearthed at a site near Prague more than 70 years ago

A British town hides a mysterious and secret cave right beneath its bustling streets - it was only discovered by accident and to this day nobody knows how it got there

A stone surrounded by cheap railings to keep away vandals on an Edinburgh housing estate is actually an ancient monument older than the pyramids of Egypt, built around 4,000 years ago

New research has shed light on an extremely unfortunate resident of Herculaneum

The Al Jassasiya rock carvings in Qatar are full of ancient symbols including pearling ships, but experts are still not sure what exactly they mean or how old they are

The patches of bare ground, which form circles between two and 12 metres wide and are found across Australia's deserts, were originally recorded in Africa in the 1970s, but it took scientists until now to discover where they came from

The sword, known as a dakō sword, was believed to have been used during the Kofun period in Japan to help ward off evil spirits for the most elite in the afterlife

Scientists used facial reconstruction technology to reconstruct the man's face who is believed to have lived over 30,000 years before the earliest Pharaoh

The Brazen Bull, a hollowed out bronze bovine sculpture, was created in Ancient Greece in the 6th Century BC by a man called Perilaus, who gifted it to a cruel tyrant called Phalaris

The Sphinx-like statue, which is said to be in the likeness of Roman Emperor Claudius, was made near the Dendera Temple complex in Qena, Egypt, an area conquered by the empire after the taking of Carthage in 146BC

The Great Pyramid of Giza - which is the only remaining structure of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World - was built around 1,570 BC and the hidden corridor hasn't been seen in 4,500 years

The discovery of the Mayan settlements has led archaeologists to believe that Mesoamerican people lived in more densely populated and organised societies than previously thought