Babylonian Captivity: Did you mean...?

Valerian ruled as emperor of the Roman Empire from 253 CE until his capture in 260 CE. In 253 CE an elderly Roman military commander and experienced former senator was proclaimed emperor by his troops - a very common occurrence at the...

James I of Scotland ruled as king from 1406 to 1437. In 1406, the future king was captured by pirates and then imprisoned by Henry IV of England (r. 1399-1413), a confinement that lasted for 18 years. He succeeded his father...

Marie Durand (c. 1715-1776) stands apart in French Protestant history for her courage in the struggle for freedom of conscience. She was imprisoned for 38 years in the Tower of Constance at Aigues-Mortes in the south of France, liberated...

Unlike the rich corpus of ancient Egyptian funerary texts, no such “guidebooks” from Mesopotamia detail the afterlife and the soul's fate after death. Instead, ancient Mesopotamian views of the afterlife...

Mesopotamia is the ancient Greek name (meaning "the land between two rivers," the Tigris and Euphrates) for the region corresponding to modern-day Iraq and parts of Iran...

The Cyrus Cylinder is a document issued by Cyrus the Great, consisting of a cylinder of clay inscribed in Akkadian cuneiform script. The cylinder was created in 539 BCE, surely by order of Cyrus the Great, when he took Babylon...

Scribes in ancient Mesopotamia were highly educated individuals trained in writing and reading on diverse subjects. Initially, their purpose was to record financial transactions through trade, but...

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...

The region of ancient Mesopotamia was home to several key kingdoms and empires that left a lasting impact on the region and influenced future civilizations. One of the earliest empires was the Akkadian Empire...

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...