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Ancient Persian Governors
The Achaemenid Persian Empire functioned as well as it did because of the efficient bureaucracy established by its founder Cyrus the Great (r. c. 550-530 BCE) which was administered through the satrapy system. A Persian governor of a province...
Article
Pizarro & the Fall of the Inca 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 empire, combined with a civil...
Image
Clay head from Old Babylonian period
Clay head from Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq. Old Babylonian period, 2003-1959 BCE. The Sulaymaniyah Museum, Iraq.
Article
Gibbon's Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire
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...
Interview
Rubin Museum's Faith and Empire: Tibetan Buddhist Art
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...
Definition
Portuguese Empire
The Portuguese Empire was established from the 15th century and eventually stretched from the Americas to Japan. Very often a string of coastal trading centres with defensive fortifications, there were larger territorial colonies like Brazil...
Article
Battles & Conquests Of The Ottoman Empire (1299-1683)
Spanning across three continents and holding dominance over the Black and Mediterranean Seas, the Ottoman Sultanate (1299-1922) was a global military superpower between the 15th and 17th centuries. From the point of its inception in 1299...
Article
Continuity and Change after the Fall of the Roman Empire
The cataclysmic end of the Roman Empire in the West has tended to mask the underlying features of continuity. The map of Europe in the year 500 would have been unrecognizable to anyone living a hundred years earlier. Gone was the solid boundary...
Definition
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia (from the Greek, meaning 'between two rivers') was an ancient region located in the eastern Mediterranean bounded in the northeast by the Zagros Mountains and in the southeast by the Arabian Plateau, corresponding to modern-day...
Definition
Mauryan Empire
The Mauryan Empire (322 BCE - 185 BCE) supplanted the earlier Magadha Kingdom to assume power over large tracts of eastern and northern India. At its height, the empire stretched over parts of modern Iran and almost the entire Indian subcontinent...