The low-relief carvings of the kings of Assyria, imagined in their original colourings. (700-645 BCE) This was one of the most fun parts of creating the video accompaniment to Episode 13 of @Fall_of_Civ_Pod. Thank you to Jeramy Smith of @ProgenStudio for providing 20 of these brilliant colourings.

One thing that has made Episode 5 of Fall of Civilizations TV so exciting to work on is the digital recreations of the ancient Cambodian city of Angkor, done by Thomas Chandler and his team at Sensilab, Monash University. Virtual Angkor is a groundbreaking collaboration between Archaeologists, Historians and virtual reality specialists designed to bring the Cambodian metropolis of Angkor back to life in all its glory.

One of the strangest stories of the discovery of an ancient ruin is that of the Victorian explorer and circus performer William Leonard Hunt.

He claimed to have discovered a lost, ruined city in Southern Africa's Kalahari Desert. But no one else has ever been able to find it. Born in New York to strict disciplinarian parents, Hunt moved to Canada in the year 1843, at the age of 5.

One day, he snuck away from home and saw a troupe of traveling performers passing through his town. This began a lifelong infatuation with the circus.

I'm really excited to reveal the cover for my upcoming second novel, All Our Broken Idols.

This is a story about art and loss, set in the 7th century BC during the final days of the Assyrian Empire, and in the Fall of Mosul in 2014.

Coming 28th May 2020, from @BloomsburyBooks. The book has been five years in the writing, and has included multiple trips to Iraq as part of my PhD on the cultural significance of ruins.

I've spent weeks exploring the ancient ruined sites there like Babylon, Ur and Uruk. It has been a huge labour of love.

Taking a walk up to the ruins of Whitby Abbey in Yorkshire. Whitby Abbey was a 7th-century Christian monasterythat later became a Benedictine abbey.

The abbey church was situated overlooking the North Sea on Whitby's East Cliff.

Some of the world's most melancholy ruins are the concrete remains of the Maginot Line.

This border wall of concrete fortifications, traps and weapon installations was built by France in the 1930s to deter invasion by Germany, and today it forms a tragic monument to those days. After the horror of the First World War, it was clear to many in Europe that the world had reached a new phase of armed conflict.

Much of the countryside of Eastern France was now a ruined and pockmarked wasteland.

(📷aerial view of Fort Vaux in ruins, 1916. Verdun.)

Incredible use of light in the Ashurbanipal exhibition at the British Museum, bringing the ancient Assyrian carvings to life. And another ancient carving brought to life with light projection.

Some of the most remarkable lost artefacts from the ancient world were the titanic wrecks of the Nemi ships.

In their 1st century heyday they held gardens, palaces & baths in a floating wonderland. But barely a decade after their recovery, they were lost forever. For centuries, the fishermen who sailed in the placid waters of Lake Nemi, 30km south of Rome, knew a secret.

It was said that the rotting timbers of a gigantic ancient wreck lurked below the water's quiet surface.

(📷 Kleuske; Google)

A thread-of-threads on the ruined places I've visited and the folklore that surrounds them. My visit to the abandoned East Somerton Church on the Anglian coast, where the strange story of a witch and her wooden leg still haunts this ivy-covered ruin.

https://twitter.com/PaulMMCooper/status/990592780320821254

Heading out into the Norfolk countryside today to find the ruin of a church that was supposedly struck by lightning, and looking into the myth of the demon dog of the broads. The All Saints Church in Billockby was a fine flint-built church first built in the middle ages, but with most of the surviving stone dating back to the 15th century.

One of the world's most haunting ruined places is the ghost town of Kolmanskop, in the desert of Southern Namibia.

Once a thriving mining town, it now sits in an enormous "restricted zone" where people are still forbidden to enter, and is slowly being reclaimed by the sands. One evening in 1908, a humble railway worker named Zacherias Lewala was working on the rails in the Southern Namib desert, shovelling them clear of the sand dunes that constantly roll over the land.

While working, he saw some strange-looking stones shining in the evening light.

Many thanks to @LibraryArabLit for sending me this beautiful copy of "War Songs", a new collection of poetry by the 6th-century poet Antarah ibn Shaddad. ʿAntar was a knight and adventurer, and wrote poetry about his battles and loves, as well as meditations on a world falling into ruin.

Throughout history, people have tried to imagine the past by looking at ruins.

One of the most failed attempts to do so was the 1854 Assyrian Court exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace. Widely mocked & reviled by the public, it was finally destroyed in the most fitting manner. The Crystal Palace was a revolutionary building. It used the new technologies of sheet glass & cast iron to create a 92,000 m² greenhouse, an enormous exhibition space in London's Hyde Park.

When the exhibition closed, it was rebuilt in 1854 in South London’s Sydenham Hill.

One of the world’s most chilling ruins is the Ploutonion at Hierapolis, “the Gates to Hell”.

Here crowds watched priests lead animal sacrifices down into a cave, where they died mysteriously as if dragged down to the underworld. And no one knew how they did it until recently. Hierapolis was a city built on a plateau over the modern Turkish site of Pamukkale, meaning “cotton cliffs”.

This unique landscape was formed as calcium deposits bubbled from thermal springs & formed cliffs of white limestone.

I've been visiting my grandparents over the weekend, and managed to find some of my great-grandfather's photos from when he was stationed in Basra and Mosul during the First World War.

I thought I'd share some of the most interesting ones. My great-grandfather was an animal expert. He used to take care of the horses and bullocks still used to lug weaponry and supplies around.

He was stationed at the Somme but was transferred away to an Indian bullock regiment before the summer offensive, probably saving his life.

I went in search of the ruined 13th century church of St Edmund's in Southwood, Norfolk. It's almost impossible to see from the road if you don't know what you're looking for.

The landscape of the Yare Valley is one of secretive lanes divided by high hedges and wooded coppices.

One of the world’s most incredible ruins is also one of its most mysterious: The ancient Gorgan Wall.

For nearly 1,000 years, this was the longest & mightiest border wall ever built. It was twice as long as Hadrian's Wall, & its construction is an unsolved mystery to this day. Golestan Province in Northern Iran is a unique landscape.

Between the temperate forests of the Alborz Mountains & the shores of the Caspian Sea, a fertile plain stretches for over 200km, forming a narrow corridor between Persia & the wide desert steppes of Central Asia.

The Altai region of Central Asia seems at first to be a remote & peaceful place. But it also sits on the world's busiest flight path for space missions.

Here used-up rockets regularly crash to earth, & local people are left to salvage what they can of the wreckage. The Altai mountain range sits right in the centre of Asia.

This is a rugged landscape that forms a junction between the snow forests of Sibera, the Kazakhstani steppes & the desert plateau of Mongolia.

One of the world's most remarkable ruined places is the sunken city of Thonis-Heracleion.

Once a thriving hub of the ancient world, the city was devastated by a series of environmental disasters, & now lies 6.5km off the coast in the blue waters of the Egyptian sea. The story of its discovery began in 1933, when an RAF pilot flying off the coast of Alexandria reported a strange sight in the water.

He claimed to have seen massive ruined structures below the waves: buildings, squares & streets, a whole city lost beneath the ocean.

I set out into the Norfolk countryside in search of one of the most beautiful & least-visited ruins in England.

I wanted to find the church of St Mary's. Local folklore claims this as the resting place of the Somerton Witch, whose ghost is supposed to haunt its abandoned nave. It was a grey & rainy day. I set out early in the morning, & took a couple of buses out to the coast, into the parish of Martham.

From there, I still had a walk of an hour along country lanes, through the low undulating land of Norfolk.

(this is my "getting-rained-on" face)

One of the most chilling abandoned places in the world is France's Red Zone, or "Zone Rouge".

Over 100 years ago, the First World War so devastated the landscape here that people are still forbidden to enter, & the zone has become a ghostly & overgrown place. As the First World War drew to a close in 1918, Europe had to face the consequences of the most apocalyptic conflict ever seen.

18 million people were dead, while towns & cities lay in ruins. Disease & hunger ravaged the population.