Catalog
10 routes found
Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, goes looking for the secret of immortality. This route follows the epic from its city to the Cedar Forest and the flood hero's home, then to the Nineveh library where the tablets were found. The poem's places are legend and the tablets' places are archaeology; each stop says which, and which pins are only candidates. The Iraqi sites are not visitor destinations.
Legend and archaeology meet at six places, from Agamemnon's citadel to Odysseus's island. Each stop is told from Homer's text, with what archaeologists have found kept apart and honestly labelled. The route follows the epic from the fleet at Aulis to the plain of the Scamander, then the Odyssey's road home via Pylos and Ithaca. Many identifications here are traditional or disputed, and the pins show it.
China's first emperor unified the warring states in 221 BC and spent his last decade building: a capital, canals, walls, palaces and a vast tomb. Some of what is told about him is documented history; some is legend. This route visits seven places tied to him, from Xianyang to the Terracotta Army. Stops marked as legend or speculative (the elixir quest on Zhifu Island, the lost course of the Qin wall) are kept apart from sites that archaeology has confirmed.
The Kojiki, compiled in 711-712, is the oldest surviving book in Japan. It tells how the gods quarrelled over the land, how Amaterasu hid in a cave, how Izumo yielded to her line and how her grandson came down to earth. This route follows that story to seven places, from Izumo to Takachiho, Kirishima and Ise. The myth is what the text tells; the shrine foundings and excavations are documented history, and each stop keeps the two apart. Several sites are traditional identifications that rival places also claim.
The Old English poem Beowulf is set in Denmark and Sweden, and a surprising number of its kings, battles and halls turn up in Scandinavian sources and in the ground. Follow the hero from his Geatish homeland to Hrothgar's hall, then to the raid in Frisia, the royal mounds at Uppsala, and the English ship burial and library shelf where the poem survived. Most identifications here are traditional rather than proven, and the pins say so.
In AD 79 a mountain above the Bay of Naples blew apart. Pliny the Younger watched from Misenum across the water, lost his uncle, the admiral Pliny the Elder, to the eruption, and years later described it for the historian Tacitus in two letters: the only eyewitness account that survives. The route follows the eruption in the order of its events, from the mountain's first column to Pompeii, Herculaneum, the beach at Stabiae and back to Misenum. Pliny's letters never mention Pompeii or Herculaneum, so those stops come from archaeology. The traditional date is 24 August, but newer evidence points to the autumn.
Two branches of one royal family, the five Pandava brothers and their hundred Kaurava cousins, quarrel over the throne of the Kuru kingdom. The Pandavas survive a murder plot, win the princess Draupadi, build a splendid capital, lose everything in a rigged game of dice and spend thirteen years in exile before the families meet in an eighteen-day war at Kurukshetra. The Sanskrit epic, one of the longest poems ever composed, also holds the Bhagavad Gita. Northern India is dotted with places that tradition links to the story, several of them with real Iron Age remains. This route follows the Pandavas through those traditional sites. They are identifications of faith and local memory; archaeology has found ancient towns, but not the epic's events.
On the eve of his coronation, Prince Rama of Ayodhya is sent into the forest for fourteen years, so that his stepmother's son can rule. His wife Sita and brother Lakshmana go with him. In the forest Sita is carried off by Ravana, the demon king of Lanka, and Rama, helped by Hanuman and an army of vanaras, monkey-like forest people, crosses the sea to win her back. The Sanskrit epic attributed to Valmiki runs to some 24,000 verses and is still retold, staged and worshipped across South and Southeast Asia. For centuries pilgrims have tied its episodes to real places, from Ayodhya to the hills of Sri Lanka. This route follows those traditional identifications, which are matters of faith and local memory rather than archaeology. Most of the stops are living temples.
1937, between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. A giant breaks into Marshall College, steals a mummified cat and knocks out Indiana Jones. The trail leads Indy to a "Great Circle" of sacred sites spaced evenly around the globe, and into a race against the Nazi archaeologist Emmerich Voss to unlock its power. Todd Howard conceived the story of MachineGames' 2024 game, and its director pictured it as a "lost Indiana Jones adventure from the 1980s". The circle and its secret are pure adventure fiction, but its stops are real: the Vatican, Giza, wartime Shanghai, the ruined Thai capital of Sukhothai and the ziggurat of Ur. The designers rebuilt them from books and photographs as they would have looked in the 1930s. This route follows the main story.
In April 1947 the Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl and five companions pushed off from Peru on a raft of nine balsa logs, built in the style of old Spanish drawings of South American rafts. They meant to prove that ancient people could have drifted from South America to Polynesia. After 101 days and almost 7,000 kilometres on the open Pacific, they crashed onto a coral reef in the Tuamotus — and all six walked ashore. The voyage became a bestselling book and an Oscar-winning documentary. Heyerdahl's theory, though, has not survived: archaeology, language and genetics show that Polynesians came from the west, from Island Southeast Asia, as master navigators. The route follows the raft from Callao to Tahiti.