Ancients interpreted through lions and crocodiles

Hieroglyphs representing Egyptian gods on temple walls show an intimate knowledge of wild animals' behaviour and ecology.

This is according to Christian Leitz, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Tübingen, who has just presented his research to a group of scholars at the Carsten Niebuhr Institute, University of Copenhagen. The inscriptions can unlock secrets about Egyptian mythology, cosmology, and how they perceived the world.

Medieval knights were stressed out

Knights in medieval battles were not all that hard under their suits of chainmail and armour.

A study by a University of Copenhagen historian Thomas Heebøll-Holm suggests that they had the same symptoms as modern troops in battle. This includes the scourge of modern troops returning from war, post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD).

Factors that dispose combat troops to post-traumatic stress were there in abundance according to his analysis of the medieval treatise ‘On Chivalry’, a kind of combat manual from around 1350 written by the French knight Geoffroi de Charny.

World’s biggest Maya conference

Spreading knowledge of the Maya language and strengthening research dialogue. The two main goals of a conference on ancient Maya culture at the University of Copenhagen.

New stories from old bones

He was struck down from behind with something blunt and hard, and his skull cracked.

He then lived on for several days, most likely in agony. This is what the lesions on his skull can tell us.

Maybe his injury was a battle wound, maybe it was just some kind of brawl. Maybe his friends helped him, transporting him by cart, maybe for days on end, to finally reach the monastery of Æbelholt in northern Sjælland. We don’t know. But he was buried - no coffin, head towards the west as is the custom - in the monastery’s churchyard.

Freak rain storm drowned skeletons

A cloudburst that dumped two months of rain on the inner city in two hours on 2 July also swamped the Æbelholt skeleton collection at the University’s Medical Museion.

The collection of 600 skeletons from the medieval Æbelholt monastery’s ruins stored in the cellar all turned out to be waterlogged after the 30 centimetre surge of water into the museum’s yard and cellars finally had subsided.

Chinese PhD student: It's not just a fairy tale

There was no particular reason why Chinese PhD student Wenjie Li ended up focussing three years of her life on Danish fairy tale writer Hans Christian Andersen.

Growing up in Yichang City, just downstream from what has since become the massive Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, she read Andersen’s tales in school, just like 20 million other Chinese primary school pupils do every year.

But when her career as a lecturer in Comparative Literature at the China University of Petroleum in Beijing took off, the finer points of interest in theories of translation took off.

Fairy tale is bigger than the Bible

Forget your Bible, forget your Harry Potter. No, not even your worn-out reading copy of The Da Vinci Code is a candidate. A short story by Danish 19th century writer Hans Christian Andersen, the Little Match Girl, is probably the most-read piece of literature in mankind.

Since the Danish fairy tale writer was first put on the syllabus for Chinese middle schools in the 1920s, the weight of the numbers has left the Almighty, J.K. Rowling, and Dan Brown struggling for second place.

You can be a jihadist without being a terrorist

There are many ways to be connected to jihad, and only a few of them mean getting involved in violence or terrorism.

This could have been a short conclusion to the work of Ann-Sophie Hemmingsen, who has researched the subject for her PhD thesis, which she defended last week.

Danish students leave you out of the conversation

'I'm sorry. Could you please speak in English?'

For international students in Denmark, this is a phrase they are sick of repeating.

In many classes taught in English, Danish students suddenly slip into discussions in high-speed, complicated Danish, leaving international students completely in the dark.

Here from China to read ancient tablets

As a child at school he had looked in wonder at the mysterious Chinese Bronze Age etchings on bones and tortoise shells, wondering about the people who had carved them.

»I imagined ancient people holding them, poised to carve them, 4000 years ago,« says Xiaowen Shi, who is from Changchun in a region North-east of Beijing.

The inscriptions had opened up a world to someone with his interpretive skills and imagination. But then life took over. Xiaowen grew up and got a job working as a school teacher. Eight years teaching teenagers and Xiaowen needed a radical change.