Genius: Did you mean...?

The game of chess has a particularly long and fascinating history of more than 1500 years. Over the centuries, there have also been hundreds of different chess variants, all of which incorporate the fundamental distinguishing feature of standard...

The idea that Cleopatra VII (69-30 BCE), the famous last queen of ancient Egypt, owed her powerful position to her beauty persists. “The nose of Cleopatra: if it had been shorter, the whole face of the earth would have changed,” the French...

The Arch of Titus is a Roman Triumphal Arch which was erected by Domitian in c. 81 CE at the foot of the Palatine hill on the Via Sacra in the Forum Romanum, Rome. It commemorates the victories of his father Vespasian and brother Titus in...

On the evening of 30 May 1593, the sounds of a heated argument could be heard emanating from a boarding house in Deptford, a district of London on the south bank of the River Thames. Two of the boarders were quarreling over which of them...

Visitors to Naples and its surrounding area could be overwhelmed by the number of archaeological wonders to see. Buried for centuries beneath tons of volcanic ash and debris, the archaeological sites scattered along the coast of Naples are...

Herod the Great was the king of Judea from 37-4 BCE. As a client king of Rome, Herod's moniker as "Great" was due more to his grand building program throughout the eastern Mediterranean world. Herod's building program generally ran from 35...

The Battle of Kiev (Kyiv) in July-September 1941 was a major Axis victory in Operation Barbarossa, Adolf Hitler's attack on the USSR during the Second World War (1939-45). Hitler wanted the resources of Ukraine since these would allow the...

The hei tiki is a small personal adornment, fashioned by hand from tough pounamu (New Zealand greenstone or nephrite jade), and is worn around the neck. Hei means something looped around the neck, and tiki is a generic word used throughout...

The thermometer was invented in the mid-17th century during the Scientific Revolution when scientists began to search for an accurate instrument to measure a wide range of temperatures using a scale that could be compared with other readings...

Enheduanna (circa 2300 BCE) is the world's first author and was the daughter (either literally or figuratively) of the great empire-builder Sargon of Akkad (reign 2334-2279 BCE). Her name translates from the Akkadian as "high priestess of...