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.

Historians debate Copenhagen links to Nazis

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen and other Danish educational institutions had extensive scientific cooperation with Germany after Hitler's takeover in 1933, shows recent historical analysis.

At a two day conference entitled 'Danish Science, Universities and the Challenge from Nazism 1933-1945', the participants discussed the details.

Ancient societies were more complex

Here you have the Babylonians, here you have the Egyptians, here you have the Phoenicians, and here you have early Islam. And this is what they were about. Possibly the normal way to look back at Near Eastern ancient history.

But now a conference organised by the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Canon and Identity Formation intends to show how these different civilisations interacted with each other.

Researcher to unearth origins of agriculture

12,800 years ago a global climactic cooling event occurred. Low temperatures marked the beginning of 1,300 very cold years. University of Copenhagen associate professor, Tobias Richter, argues this may have been one of the reasons for the emergence of agriculture.

Last month Richter and fellow researchers from Jordan, UK, and US announced the discovery of 20,000 year old hut structures at the archaeological site of Kharaneh IV in eastern Jordan. Findings suggest that the area was once intensively occupied, changing our understanding of humanity's development in the region.

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.