Iron Age: Did you mean...?

During the 600s CE, supplies of oriental garnets failed and gold and silver grew scarcer. As a result, Frankish jewelers turned to a decorative technique of inlaying designs and silver wire. These often imitated patterns used earlier in garnet...

Alabaster bas-relief depicting Assyrian soldiers using iron crowbars. Neo-Assyrian Period, 865-860 BCE. Detail of Panel 4 (bottom), Room B, the North-Palace Palace, Nimrud, modern-day Iraq. (The British Museum, London)

A detail of an inlaid iron sword. From Eta Funayama Tumulus, Nagomi-machi, Tamana-gun, Kumamoto, Japan. Kofun Period, 5th-6th century CE. National Treasure. Tokyo National Museum.

The rock drawings of Valcamonica are prehistoric petroglyphs carved in the glacier-polished, grey-purple Permian sandstone of the Camonica valley that extends for 90 km in the Italian provinces of Brescia and Bergamo in Lombardy. The name...

An iron corslet from Borno in what is now Fika, Nigeria. The corslet was acquired by the British Museum in 1911, and is currently a part of the museum's collection.

Although life expectancy was lower in ancient Greece and Rome, many people survived into old age. Those who reached old age tended to accumulate wealth and political power. However, the societies of the ancient Mediterranean were also often...

The Vedic Age (c. 1500-500 BCE) marks a formative period in the history of the northern Indian subcontinent, bridging the decline of the Indus Valley Civilization (c. 1300 BCE) and the emergence of early states in the Gangetic plain. During...

The Vikings did not use fishing reels or poles. Instead, they tied hooks to a fishing line made from sheep, cow, or walrus intestines, then pulled the fish up by hand. On a small rowing boat out on the open ocean, this was a very dangerous...

The Bronze Age Aegean in the eastern Mediterranean encompassed several powerful entities: the Minoans on Crete; the Mycenaeans on mainland Greece, and the Cypriots on Cyprus. These cultures are often examined separately, and thus the ample...