Maya Culture: Did you mean...?

Kish was one of the most significant and politically prestigious city-states in ancient Mesopotamia. According to the Sumerian King List, it was the first city to be given divine kingship after...

The Day of the Dead, known in Spanish as Día de los Muertos, is a holiday that celebrates life and honors the dead through traditions, food, decorations, and activities intended to sustain the connections between the living and...

To climatologists, the period of seven to twelve centuries ago was known as a "Climate Anomaly" or a "Warm Period" (800-1300 CE). To archaeologists, it was a time of great change, a period when cultural patterns...

Early medieval Irish book art is both beautiful and fascinating. It reflects a flourishing monastic culture which played a key role in the cultural development of Europe from the 6th to 9th centuries. Nowhere...

Ancient East Asia was dominated by the three states known today as China, Japan, and Korea. The complex chain of successive kingdoms created a rich web of events that archaeologists have...

A vision of the afterlife is articulated by every culture, ancient or modern, in an effort to answer the question of what happens after death. Ancient Persia had the same interest in this as any culture of...

Ancient Mesopotamian literature developed circa 2600 BCE after scribes, who had formerly been record-keepers, began composing original works in the region of Sumer. The Sumerians invented writing...

Lao-Tzu (l. c. 500 BCE, also known as Laozi or Lao-Tze) was a Chinese philosopher credited with founding the philosophical system of Taoism. He is best known as the author of the Laozi (later retitled the Tao-Te-Ching translated as “The...

The Amorites were a Semitic people who seem to have emerged from western Mesopotamia (modern-day Syria) at some point prior to the 3rd millennium BCE. In Sumerian they were known as the Martu or the Tidnum (in the Ur III Period), in...

Sardis (near modern-day Sart, Turkey) was the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Lydia founded (according to Herodotus) by the Heracleidae, the Heraclid Dynasty descended from the hero Heracles (Hercules). The city was famous in antiquity...