There is something quietly humbling about standing before an ancient artifact and realizing, with all of our satellites, supercomputers, and electron microscopes, we still have no clue how it was made ...

We can split atoms, map the human genome, and launch cars into space. Still, there are objects built hundreds or even thousands of years ago that we struggle to fully understand, let alone recreate.

Often, when we think about antiquity and ancient military technologies, we fall into the usual view of ancient warfare. You might picture phalanxes of Greek spearmen crashing into one another. The ...