According to a new study by an international team of researchers from the Caribbean, Europe and North America, the Caribbean was settled by several successive population dispersals that originated on the American mainland.

The database research community has made tremendous strides in developing powerful database engines that allow for efficient analytical query processing.

An enormous number of monumental buildings, such as burial tombs, appeared in Mycenaean Greece after 1600 BC. Why did this urge to build come to an abrupt end 400 years later? Archaeologist Ann Brysbaert investigates the possible causes thanks to her ERC Consolidator Grant.

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Drug-related homicide (DRH) has the potential to act as a valuable indicator of wider drug-related crime. Yet DRH remains a knowledge gap within this broader field of study.

The Leiden University Centre for International Relations (LUCIR) is a multi-disciplinary platform promoting research and education on international relations at Leiden University.

There are still things we can learn from the Ancient Greeks. How they managed to make sure that innovations were accepted, for example. A group of classics scholars, led by Leiden, will be carrying out research on this question funded by the largest ever NWO subsidy.

The people who lived in Saqqara, City of the Dead in Egypt, died thousands of years ago, but they are not all that different from us. This is what a study by the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, The Netherlands concludes. If you wanted to prove that you had good taste in ancient Egypt then…

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To what extent can Nietzsche's Amor Fati be seen as a Stoic concept?

Nichiran kankei-shi o yomitoku [Revisiting the History of Dutch-Japanese Relations] is a new, two-volume Japanese publication with a chapter written by Wulan Remmelink. Both volumes offer a new look on the historical relations between Japan and The Netherlands during the Edo period by examining various…

Roderick Geerts, a PhD candidate of the Faculty of Archaeology in Leiden, takes us on a short journey through the rich history of the Red Sea port of Berenike in Egypt.

Palaeography of an ancient nomadic writing culture

Over the last decades, the systematic investigation of urban settlements in Central-Tyrrhenian Italy led to the discovery of a growing number of contexts revealing both direct and indirect evidence of artisanal workshops. Such research commitment has yielded a vast amount of new data that greatly contribute…

Rafał Matuszewski and Kim Beerden, both university lecturers in Ancient History, received a grant from The A.G. Leventis Foundation.

In Renaissance Florence, humanists wrote Latin poems fashioning their city as the new Rome, and members of the Medici family as Roman rulers. How can we explain this practice?

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University lecturer Tazuko van Berkel has obtained a Vidi grant of 800,000 euros. This will enable her to research the image of man that emerges from economic texts from ancient Greece.

Are you thinking about studying Global Order in Historical Perspective? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

Our mission is to advance the understanding of mental health of individuals with a history of stress and/or trauma through rigorous interdisciplinary research, integrating insights from clinical psychology, neurobiology, and social sciences. We are committed to translating our findings into innovative…

The precise psychobiological mechanisms leading to chronic physiological stress responses have not been sufficiently explained, although stress is a major risk factor for disease and early death. A problem for conventional stress theory is that most of these responses seem to occur in situations without…

Do you live in Egypt and have you always wondered about all the pharaonic heritage surrounding you? This spring NVIC organizes a beginner’s level, introductory course in Egyptology. In 6 richly illustrated lessons, the history of ancient Egypt will be brought to life, both chronologically as well as…

The chair group of Ancient and Medieval History at the Radboud University organizes a series of lectures that are held between February and June 2024. The exact dates and titles can be found in the programme below.

If you had something important to write down in ancient times, you would usually write in Greek in the eastern Mediterranean. University lecturer Joanne Stolk has been awarded an ERC grant to explore the kinds of spelling mistakes that were made in these scripts. And, more importantly, what improvements…

Scientific research at the molecular level on a collection of medieval skeletons from Norton Priory in Cheshire, United Kingdom, could help rewrite history after revealing they were affected by an unusual ancient form of the bone disorder, Paget’s disease. Osteoarchaeologist Carla Burrell, attached…

This month marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. NINO, the Language Museum, Things that Talk and the National Museum of Antiquities are seizing the opportunity to organise the first Week of Ancient Writing.

Knowledge and culture subproject 3:

This project uses archaeological, literary and epigraphic evidence to investigate urban development in Roman-period North Africa, compiling this in a GIS-linked database in order to analyse the development of urban settlement spatially over time.

In the world of Ancient Greece the interpretation of supernatural signs was a versatile tool to facilitate decision-making. This is the central hypothesis of the PhD dissertation of historian Kim Beerden. Defence on 14 February.

For decades it was thought that the family system of the ancient Egyptians was very similar to our own. However, PhD candidate Steffie van Gompel explains that the reality is somewhat different. ‘In Egyptian families, it was often the eldest son versus the rest of the children.’

The Institute for Philosophy at Leiden University is host to the NWO programme,

The Persian Empire (539-330 BCE) was the first world empire in history. At its height, it united a territory stretching from present-day India to Libya - and it would take 2,000 years before significantly larger empires emerged in early modern Eurasia. This territorial sweep is both a source of fascination…

New sampling and analytical strategies give archaeologists a better understanding of the nutrition and survival of ancient populations. Publication in PLOS One.

On the 12th of May, Rita Barrera Virhuez-Eloranta successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Rita Barrera Virhuez-Eloranta on this achievement.

Henk Versnel's work on ancient religion has been seminal. For his 80th birthday, a group of scholars assembled to celebrate and analyze his oeuvre.

The main purpose of DNAmarkerpoint is to better understand the ecology, evolution and biodiversity through the study of ancient- and modern DNA.

This book offers readers an alternative history of the origins of the discipline of International Relations.

In ancient times, the desert in the Udhruh region in Jordan was transformed into a green oasis. An intricate network of underground water channels was part of an ancient system of water management, storing water and preventing loss through evaporation. Archaeologist Mark Driessen found a new way to…

About 15 km to the south of the ancient city of Petra, archaeologists from the University of Leiden have discovered an impressive network of ancient water conservation measures and irrigated field systems.