Robert Cioffi

Wadi el-Jarf​ lies two hundred kilometres south-east of Cairo on a pristine stretch of the Red Sea coast. It dates from the time of the pharaoh Sneferu, the father of Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza, who used it as a staging post for expeditions to the Sinai Peninsula in search of turquoise and copper ore. For the past 4500 years, it has lain dormant. To the untrained eye, the...

If you want​ to get to know someone, especially if you’re an ancient historian, you should go through their rubbish. At the end of the 19th century, two Oxford academics, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, set off for the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus in search of Greek texts written on papyrus. Over six seasons, assisted by scores of local workmen, they excavated thousands of...

The year 2000​ has come and gone; we survived the Maya apocalypse of 2012. Portents of our demise now come most often in the form of UN climate reports, the Doomsday Clock or the pronouncements of epidemiologists. These predictions reveal not only the fragility of our existence, but also our capacity to bring about potentially catastrophic changes to life on earth. Yet humanity’s...

Demetrius​ the Besieger, son of Antigonus the One-Eyed and one of the generals who fought to succeed Alexander the Great in the late fourth century and early third century bce, had a career of mixed success, but constant intrigue. He won victories on land and sea, terrified cities into submission, married five times, was widowed twice, never divorced and died in captivity at the age of 54...

Certain places​ capture the imagination; others fade into the background, forgotten and overlooked. Phoenicia is one of the rare places that does both. In 1963, Sabatino Moscati, the founder of modern Phoenician studies, asked the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome: ‘Who were the Phoenicians?’ By 1988, he believed that he had begun to find the answer. With great fanfare, he...