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The Palaeolithic ('Old Stone Age') makes up the earliest chunk of the Stone Age – the large swathe of time during which hominins used stone to make tools – and ranges from the first known tool use roughly 2,6 million years ago to...

Timur (1336-1405), also known as Tamerlane, Temür, or Timur Leng, was the founder of the Timurid Empire (1370-1507), which had its heartlands in modern-day Uzbekistan and capital at Samarkand. A Muslim Turkic...

Chichen Itza, located at the northern tip of the Yucatán Peninsula of modern Mexico, was a Maya city which was later significantly influenced by the Toltec civilization. Flourishing between c. 750 and 1200 CE, the site is rich in...

Johannes Hevelius (1611-1687) was a Polish astronomer based in Danzig (Gdańsk). He worked from his own privately funded observatory, creating maps of the Moon's surface, discovering the first variable star, and spotting several...

Horus is the name of a sky god in ancient Egyptian mythology which designates primarily two deities: Horus the Elder (or Horus the Great), the last born of the first five original gods, and Horus the Younger, the son of Osiris and Isis...

The astrolabe is an astronomical instrument used from around the 6th century to measure time and position by determining the altitude of heavenly bodies like the Sun and certain stars. Measurements were taken in reference to the viewer's...

From around 800 BCE, ancient Greek city-states, most of which were maritime powers, began to look beyond Greece for land and resources. As a consequence, they founded colonies across the Mediterranean. Trade was usually the...

Edmond Halley (1656-1742) was an English astronomer, mathematician, and cartographer. Halley's Comet is named after him since he accurately predicted its return in 1758. One of the early globetrotting scientists, Halley led several...

The lyre was a stringed musical instrument played by the ancient Greeks. It was probably the most important and well-known instrument in the Greek world. The lyre was closely related to the other stringed instruments: the chelys which...

The Stamp Act of 1765 was the first direct tax imposed on the 13 American colonies by the Parliament of Great Britain. It required the colonists to pay a tax on all printed materials including newspapers, legal documents, magazines...