Category: History News

The Thucydides Trap: Vital lessons from ancient Greece for China and the US … or a load of old claptrap?

The Thucydides Trap: Vital lessons from ancient Greece for China and the US … or a load of old claptrap?

by | Jun 9, 2025 | , , | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
The so-called Thucydides Trap has become a staple of foreign policy commentary over the past decade or so, regularly invoked to frame the escalating rivalry between the United States and China.

Coined by political scientist Graham Allison — first in a 2012 Financial Times article and later developed in his 2017 book “Destined for War” — the phrase refers to a line from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote in his “History of the Peloponnesian War,” “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.”

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What stone tools found in southern tip of Africa tell us about the human story

What stone tools found in southern tip of Africa tell us about the human story

by | May 29, 2025 | , , | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
Stone tools. Our ancestors made them, some people still make them, and many species of extinct humans made them too. For more than three million years, fractured pieces of hard rock provided past people with a means to extract their livelihood from the environment. Because stone is plentiful and cheap to acquire, stone tools were made in large numbers. And because it is so durable, it usually outlasts other traces of human activity. With the passing of time, everything from our thoughts and languages to clothes, food waste and even our own bones are inevitably erased. But stone tools have remained.

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Scans reveal new details of how Egyptian pharaoh met a violent death

Scans reveal new details of how Egyptian pharaoh met a violent death

by | May 12, 2025 | | 0

Reading time: 4 minutes
For Seqenenre Taa II, the violent injuries were possibly the result of dying in battle or execution by a king who had invaded the north of the country. One theory also suggested he was killed while sleeping. In the new study, the team applied computed tomography (CT) scanning to the remains to investigate further. CT is a non-invasive imaging method that basically layers multiple X-rays on top of each other in order to create three dimensional images of both the soft and hard tissues. We usually think of it in clinical settings, but it has a long history of use in forensic contexts to safely study remains contained inside wrappings or body bags.

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