This week: bad luck Dan Brown, Rome’s most perplexing code is found on a wooden tablet from Easter Island. How close have we come to deciphering the lost script of Rapa Nui? Also this week: the Spanish Empire grapples with indigenous rights, the tall but true tales of a Tudor explorer, the complex tapestry of Iraqi Jewish identity, and a Victorian sporting substances sensation.
Hidden away in a nondescript building on the outskirts of Rome there is a wooden tablet from Easter Island, more remarkable and mysterious than any of its famous statues. Reputedly found by two missionaries in 1870, it is a fragment of a wooden oar, less than a metre in length, covered in strange hieroglyphs...
Ready, Set, Show! When a Victorian celebrity sportsman was found to be taking performance-enhancing drugs it caused a sensation, not a scandal.
The Valladolid Debate Was the subjugation of indigenous peoples a just means to expedite Christianity? On 15 August 1550, a humanist scholar and a Dominican friar debated.
‘Three Worlds’ by Avi Shlaim review Some 110,000 Jews left Iraq in 1950 and 1951 – a Jewish community that could trace its origins back to the Babylonians.
