In every parcel
Story cards
Thank you for your order. Every plate we draw comes from a true story. Find yours below: what we know, what is still debated, and where we checked it.
Plate 01 · The Letter TReading the layersGeologists read layers of rock from the bottom up.
Plate 02 · The StacksThe library that fadedThe most famous library of the ancient world was founded in Alexandria around 295 BC, under Egypt’s Greek kings, the Ptolemies.
Plate 03 · RiverHippos in LondonHippos once lived much farther north.
Plate 04 · Bone TreeMore than one kind of humanFor most of our history the human family had several living branches at once.
Plate 05 · Desert RuinsA city of caravansPalmyra was already an established caravan stop when it came under Roman control in the first century AD, and trade made it rich.
Plate 06 · CourtyardRain in the middle of the houseIn a Roman house, the front hall, the atrium, had a square opening in its roof called the compluvium.
Plate 07 · MammothThe last mammothsThe last known mammoths lived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean, cut off from Siberia as the seas rose at the end of the Ice Age.
Plate 08 · FragmentStatues in colourGreek and Roman marble statues were often painted, although most look white today.
Plate 09 · The PassElephants in the AlpsIn 218 BC the Carthaginian general Hannibal marched an army from Spain over the Alps to fight Rome, and he brought war elephants.
Plate 10 · Sphere & SeaThe Moon is leavingOur own Moon pulls on the whole Earth and draws the oceans into two bulges, one on the side facing it and one on the far side.
Plate 11 · Above, BelowWhales had legsThe earliest whales walked.
Plate 12 · HeadwatersCities under the canopyIn 2016 an aircraft flew a lidar survey over 2,144 square kilometres of northern Guatemala, measuring the ground with laser pulses through gaps in the forest.
Plate 13 · ThawThe land under the North SeaAt the end of the last Ice Age, Britain was joined to mainland Europe by a wide, low land now called Doggerland.
Plate 14 · Sun TempleThe temple that movedAt Abu Simbel in southern Egypt, four seated statues of Ramesses II, each about 20 metres tall, guard the Great Temple he built in the 1200s BC.
Plate 15 · Deep ForestBefore flowersFor much of the age of dinosaurs, forests had no flowers.
Plate 16 · InscriptionWriting, more than onceWriting was invented more than once.
Plate 17 · WaterlineA city on a forestVenice, the best-known city built over water, spreads across 118 islands in a lagoon, and its buildings rest on huge numbers of wooden piles driven into the soft mud and clay.
Plate 18 · TorchlightPainting by firelightIn the Chauvet cave in southern France, sealed by a rockfall around 20,000 years ago and found in 1994, more than a thousand drawings survive, the oldest dated to over 30,000 years ago, among them a mammoth outlined in red.
Plate 19 · SunkenThe resort that sankIn Roman times Baia, on the Bay of Naples, was the area’s most famous place to live.
Plate 20 · Narrow StreetWater by gravityIn the dry country of Iran, qanats have carried water to towns and farms for centuries, some for millennia.