Central Asia: Did you mean...?

Lycia is a mountainous region in south-west Anatolia (also known as Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey). The earliest references to Lycia can be traced through Hittite texts to sometime before 1200 BCE, where it is known as the Lukka Lands. The...

The Medes or Medians were a group of Indo-Iranian-speaking people from central Asia who migrated westwards and entered northern Iran around the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. They settled in the highlands of Zagros (Zagreus in Greek) and...

Croesus (r. 560-546 BCE) was the King of Lydia, a region in western Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and was so wealthy that the expression "as rich as Croesus" originates in reference to him. Best known for his wealth, he is also famous for...

As the 15th century ended, Europeans were still mostly in the dark about the Eastern world. Early travelers like Marco Polo had given the West tidbits of information, but these accounts were too highly colored and fragmentary to provide a...

Romani is an Indo-European language, belonging to the Indic subbranch which includes Sanskrit and Hindi. Because of the Romani diaspora throughout Europe and West Asia, it developed in close contact with European and Iranian languages. It...

The La Tène culture (c. 450 - c. 50 BCE) is named after the site of that name on the northern shores of Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland. It replaced the earlier Hallstatt culture (c. 1200 - c. 450 BCE) as the dominant culture of central Europe...

Located at the crossroads of many ancient civilizations, Turkey is a haven for archaeology lovers. Over the centuries, a succession of empires and kingdoms – Hittite, Lydian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine and, finally, Ottoman – ruled...

Justinian II “the Slit-nosed” ruled as emperor of the Byzantine Empire in two spells: from 685 to 695 CE and then again from 705 to 711 CE. It was after his first reign and prior to his exile that his nose was cut off by the usurper Leontios...

O Creator of the material world, at what distance from the holy man (should the place for the dead body be)?" Ahura Mazda replied: "Three paces from the holy man". (Vend. 8. 6-7) In September 2009 CE, one of my relatives suggested that we...

Nagasaki, on the northwest coast of Japan’s Kyushu Island, was an important Portuguese trading base from c. 1571 to 1639, and the most eastern outpost of the Portuguese empire. The Portuguese presence transformed Nagasaki from a small fishing...