Fossil Decoded

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8,000 soldiers.
None of them alike.

China's First Emperor Qin Shi Huang was buried with an army of clay warriors in 210 BC. Each face is unique. Each soldier was painted in vivid colors.

For 2,200 years they waited underground.
Guarding a dead emperor.
Never needed to fight.

An eye for an eye.'

King Hammurabi carved 282 laws into a stone pillar around 1754 BC. It is the oldest surviving legal code in the world.

Laws for merchants. For marriages. For surgeons.
For anyone who built a house that collapsed and killed its owner.

Justice — 3,700 years before your courtroom.

In 1938, archaeologists found a clay jar in Iraq.
Inside: a copper cylinder, an iron rod.

If you fill it with vinegar, it generates electricity.

Dated to 250 BC — over 2,000 years before Alessandro Volta 'invented' the battery.

What were they powering?
No one knows.

Hidden for 400 years.

Machu Picchu was built in the 15th century by the Inca emperor Pachacuti — and abandoned less than 100 years later when the Spanish arrived.

The Spanish never found it.
The mountain hid it. The jungle swallowed it.
And in 1911, Hiram Bingham stumbled upon the greatest secret in the Americas.

Nobody knows who made her.
Nobody knows what her arms were doing.

The Venus de Milo was carved around 100 BC and discovered on a Greek island in 1820. Her arms were missing then. Still missing now.

The world's most famous incomplete artwork.
Perfect, precisely because she is unfinished.

This is the face of Alexander the Great — painted while people who knew him were still alive.

The Battle of Issus mosaic, found in Pompeii, shows Alexander charging at Persian King Darius III in 333 BC.

Made from 1.5 million tesserae.
No portrait photograph. Just 1.5 million tiny stones. And history.