The spies of the pharaohs and the double agents of the Caesars: How intelligence services operated in antiquity

Jacinto Antón — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 04:00:00 GMT

It may sound anachronistic to use terms like espionage, counterintelligence, secret services, or double agents in relation to ancient times. But activities, organizations, and personnel that largely fit our current concepts were widely deployed by the civilizations of the ancient world, giving truth to the saying that there is nothing new under the Sun (or, in this case, the shadows).

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The ‘Champion’: Bones of predatory dinosaur found in eastern Spain

Jon Gurutz Arranz Izquierdo — Thu, 18 May 2023 15:58:50 GMT

Over 120 million years ago, in the coastal areas of a tropical archipelago of small islands connected by estuaries and marshes in the present-day province of Castellón, in eastern Spain, there was an unprecedented amount of species diversity. In addition to a rich fauna of fish, amphibians, crocodiles, and turtles there were, as far as science is aware, four different groups of dinosaurs — sauropods, theropods, ornithopods and thyreophorans — reptiles that dominated the ecosystem for millions of years in the Early Cretaceous and whose descendants were spread around the Iberian Peninsula, Africa, and Asia, where they diversified into other subspecies. The discovery of the right maxilla and five vertebrae from a single specimen has led researchers to describe what they are calling “a new spinosaurid genus and species”: Protathlitis cinctorrensis. The paper was published in Science Reports, a unit of the same group that publishes the scientific journal Nature.

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The spies of the pharaohs and the double agents of the Caesars: How intelligence services operated in antiquity

The ‘Champion’: Bones of predatory dinosaur found in eastern Spain