Age of Enlightenment: Did you mean...?

In this collection, we look at the lives, works, and ideas of the following 12 key philosophers of the Enlightenment: Thomas Hobbes René Descartes John Locke Montesquieu David Hume Jean-Jacques Rousseau Denis Diderot Adam...

Ibn Sina and Biruni were two of the most outstanding thinkers to have lived between ancient Greece and the European Renaissance. These two giants of a lost era of enlightenment were born in Central Asia about the year 980. For six hundred...

The Iron Age in the traditional Ancient Near Eastern chronology ranges from somewhere around 1200 BCE to 333 BCE. It begins from the era when it was first thought iron came to be used up to the ascendency of Alexander the Great as the major...

A vibrant portrait of an age when Arabic enlightenment anticipated and inspired the European Renaissance, illuminated by its guiding figures and rivals, Ibn Sina and Biruni. In The Genius of their Age, S. Frederick Starr follows up his...

As the Stone Age covers around 99% of our human technological history, it would seem there is a lot to talk about when looking at the development of tools in this period. Despite our reliance on the sometimes scarce archaeological record...

Although women in the Viking Age (c. 790-1100 CE) lived in a male-dominated society, far from being powerless, they ran farms and households, were responsible for textile production, moved away from Scandinavia to help settle Viking territories...

Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was a French author and philosopher known for his views which influenced the Enlightenment and his general editorship of the multi-volume Encyclopedia, often described as the 'Bible of the Enlightenment'. Diderot...

An illustration by Maia Kobabe showing an Enlightenment scholar. From the novel The Jericho River by David Tollen.

The Golden Age of Piracy (1690-1730) refers to a period when robbery on the high seas and at colonial ports reached an unprecedented level. Although not all historians agree on the precise time frame, it is generally applied to those pirates...

The decline of the Late Bronze Age civilizations of the Mediterranean and Near East has puzzled historians and archaeologists for centuries. While many have ascribed the collapse of several civilizations to the enigmatic Sea Peoples, Professor...