Athenian Empire: Did you mean...?

The government of ancient Persia was based on an efficient bureaucracy which combined the centralization of power with the decentralization of administration. The Achaemenid Empire (c. 550-330 BCE) founded by Cyrus the Great (r. c. 550-530...

Athenian women attacking the messenger who brings news that their husbands' died in battle. Illustration by Marek Szyszko.

The Dexileos Stele assesses the way that Athenian political thought penetrated all levels of society, showing the conflict that the aristocratic classes were faced with in trying to find their place within the Athenian Democracy. As a visual...

The Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta and their respective allies came in two stages: from c. 460 to 446 and from 431 to 404 BCE. With battles at home and abroad, the long and complex conflict was damaging to both sides. Sparta...

In 1533 CE the Inca Empire was the largest in the world. It extended across western South America from Quito in the north to Santiago in the south. However, the lack of integration of conquered peoples into that empire, combined with a civil...

The English historian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) wrote and published his seminal work History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire between 1776 and 1788. The dominant theme of Gibbon's six-volume work is that the fall of the Roman Empire...

Faith and Empire: Art and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism, a new exhibition at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, explores the dynamic historical intersection of politics, religion, and art as reflected through Tibetan Buddhism. The exhibition...

In the early days of the Achaemenid Empire (c. 550-330 BCE), the kings came to realise that, if they were to be able to administer the vast mass of land and the multicultural people who inhabited it, they had to create an organizational system...

Bust of Pisistratus, Roman plaster cast of original 5th-century Greek marble statue. While there is dispute about the exact figure depicted by this bust, its likeness has been attributed to Pisistratus (c. 600-527 BCE), the populist tyrant...

An empire is a political construct in which one state dominates over another state, or a series of states. At its heart, an empire is ruled by an emperor, even though many states in history without an emperor at their head are called "empires"...