Miriam frequently refers to the street philosophers. For example, in The Deadliest Fever, she mentions encountering them in the agora:...

The sphinxes were everywhere in Alexandria. A sphinx is a mythical creature with the head of a human, falcon, cat, or sheep, the body of...

The ancient Egyptians were famous for their perfumes. Cleopatra herself wore Neroli oil, an essential oil produced from the blossom of...

With a lot of luck and a dry climate like that of Egypt, the Papyrus Ebers remained stable for thousands of years. The medical knowledge,...

Ancient Egyptians made efficient use of all the parts of the papyrus plant, which they considered to be a “gift of the Nile.” For...

Maybe because I’m a writer too, I wince when I read a scathing review. I know the work it takes to put words together. But it also takes...

Greek medicine was based on Hippocrates’s theory of the four humors, that diseases occurred when a humor became imbalanced in response to...

In last week’s blog, we saw that the Greeks approached the practice of medicine scientifically. The Romans, however, banned dissection...

Miriam explains in The Deadliest Lie that her favorite school subject was anatomy: My tutor Hector would tell us about Herophilos of...

The Romans used frescoes to expand their interiors, which were often small and claustrophobic. The history of Roman painting is...