Barbarian: Did you mean...?

Terracotta statuette of a warrior carrying a Celtic shield. He is depicted with long hair, drooping moustache, trousers and a tunic. 2nd century CE. (Ashmolean Museum, UK)

Painting by Laurits Tuxen showing a Christian Bishop displacing an image of the pagan Slavic deities during the Christianisation process of the Slavic culture. Most the Slavic mythology and lore was lost during this time.

Athens, Greece, with its famous Acropolis, has come to symbolize the whole of the country in the popular imagination, and not without cause. It not only has its iconic ruins and the famous port of Piraeus but, thanks to ancient writers, its...

The Edo period refers to the years from 1603 until 1868 when the Tokugawa family ruled Japan. The era is named after the city of Edo, modern-day Tokyo, where the Tokugawa shogunate had its government. It is also sometimes referred to as the...

Built in the seventh century BCE, the ancient city of Byzantium proved to be a valuable city for both the Greeks and Romans. Because it lay on the European side of the Strait of Bosporus, the Emperor Constantine understood its strategic importance...

In ancient China warfare was a means for one region to gain ascendancy over another, for the state to expand and protect its frontiers, and for usurpers to replace an existing dynasty of rulers. With armies consisting of tens of thousands...

In many societies, ancient and modern, religion has performed a major role in their development, and the Roman Empire was no different. From the beginning Roman religion was polytheistic. From an initial array of gods and spirits, Rome added...

Ur was a city in the region of Sumer, southern Mesopotamia, and its ruins lie in what is modern-day Tell el-Muqayyar, Iraq. According to biblical tradition, the city is named after the man who founded the first settlement there, Ur, though...

Cleopatra VII (l. c. 69-30 BCE, r. 51-30 BCE) was the last ruler of Egypt before it was annexed as a province of Rome. Although arguably the most famous Egyptian queen, Cleopatra was actually Greek and a member of the Ptolemaic Dynasty (323-30...

Confucianism is a philosophy developed in 6th-century BCE China, which is considered by some a secular-humanist belief system, by some a religion, and by others a social code. The broad range of subjects touched on by Confucianism lends itself...