If you've ever read a letter from antiquity, you may recognize the strange pull it can have. The writer is long gone, the world around them has vanished, and still, the voice can feel close enough to ...

Researchers recover 42 lost pages from a 6th-century Greek codex, giving insights into the Letters of St. Paul and early ...

Simon and Marie de Brienne were the 17th century's most active postmaster and postmistress, delivering personal and political letters alike across Europe. But the Briennes also had a secret. In ...

A long-overlooked writing system from 5000 years ago is still largely undeciphered, but could mark the moment humans first ...

Archaeologists have found a collection of ancient letters written on papyrus seemingly featuring correspondence between Roman military commanders in an "extremely rare" discovery. The documents were ...

When we read about the Greco-Roman world, we often hear the stories of famous and wealthy men and women. But the letters of ordinary people, preserved on papyri in Egypt, show us what they were ...

Archaeologists excavating a 1,800-year-old pet cemetery in Berenike uncovered the writings of soldiers and other artifacts, photos show. Photo from M. Osypińska via Institute of Archaeology of the ...

New York Times subscribers* enjoy full access to TimesMachine—view over 150 years of New York Times journalism, as it originally appeared. *Does not include Games-only or Cooking-only subscribers.

Even as technology made communication quicker, these Coptic leaders ministered through snail mail. In his rural New Jersey home, Wafik Habib carefully laid out his letter collection before us, now ...

An international team of researchers led by the University of Glasgow has achieved a remarkable breakthrough in biblical scholarship, successfully recovering 42 lost pages from Codex H, one of the ...