Duke Ellington: Did you mean...?

Franklin Pierce (1804-1869) was an American lawyer and politician who served as the fourteenth president of the United States. An unremarkable politician prior to his election, his presidency was marred by...

Gezer is an ancient city and archaeological site located in central Israel where the central mountains meet the northern Shephelah, about 10 km southeast of the city of Ramleh. According to the Hebrew Bible, Gezer was one of the great...

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...

The Hurrians (aka Hurri or Khurri) were a Bronze Age people who flourished across the Near East from the 4th millennium BCE to the 1st millennium BCE. Hurrian is also the name of the language these people spoke and, indeed, is the one...

Zarathustra (also given as Zoroaster, Zartosht, Zarathustra Spitama, l. c. 1500-1000 BCE) was the Persian priest-turned-prophet who founded the religion of Zoroastrianism (also given as Mazdayasna “devotion to Mazda”), the first monotheistic...

Oceanus (also Okeanos) was the eldest of the Titans and a son of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth) in Greek mythology. He was the god and personification of the freshwater river Oceanus, which was thought to encircle the earth and was...

Ionia was a territory in western Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) populated by the Ionians (Greeks who spoke the Ionian dialect) in c. 1150 BCE. It is best known as the birthplace of Greek philosophy (at Miletus) and the site of the Ionian...

The Templo Mayor or Great Temple (called Hueteocalli by the Aztecs) dominated the central sacred precinct of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan. Topped by twin temples dedicated to the war god Huitzilopochtli and...

The word philosophy comes from the Greek philo (love) and sophia (wisdom) and so is literally defined as “the love of wisdom”. More broadly understood, it is the study of the most basic and profound matters of human existence. Philosophical...

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...