Prehistory: Did you mean...?

The island of Gla, an enigmatic Mycenaean citadel in the north-eastern corner of the Copais basin lies 70 miles north of Athens, in the region of Boeotia. Lake Copais was the largest lake in Greece until the late-19th century CE when it was...

Iran, or Persia as it was formerly known, is a country with a long and rich history stretching back thousands of years and where many civilisations thrived. With 24 historical sites registered on the UNESCO World Heritage List and each with...

The 8th November is celebrated as Archangels Day in Greece, but on that November day in 1977 CE something remarkable happened: an excavation team led by Professor Manolis Andronikos were roped down into the eerie gloom of an unlooted Macedonian-styled...

For whom have I labored? For whom have I journeyed? For whom have I suffered? I have gained absolutely nothing for myself, I have only profited the snake, the ground lion! The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI This is how the Epic of Gilgamesh...

Our CEO Jan van der Crabben writes about the organization's history for its 10th anniversary in 2019 (when it was still called Ancient History Encyclopedia). Ancient History Encyclopedia just turned ten! On 25 August 2009, we officially...

Metsamor, which is located 32 km (20 mi) west of Yerevan, Armenia is one of the most interesting archaeological sites in the Caucasus. While first settled and founded as a Bronze Age city, people continuously inhabited Metsamor through Urartian...

Today we sit down with Gordon Doherty to discuss his new book Empires of Bronze: Son of Ishtar. Based in the dark and cold north (i.e. Scotland), Gordon has written extensively on ancient Greece and Rome. His new novel, however, takes us...

In 1896 Flinders Petrie discovered what is for many the most important achievement of his long and celebrated career as an archeologist. It is a large granite stela, over ten feet high, dating to 1208 BCE. This stone bears an account of how...

Ancient History Encyclopedia has over 100 articles on UNESCO World Heritage sites, and in this collection, we look at just a few of them. The selection of sites, some well-known and others much less so, represents cultures from around the...

The voyage of Aeneas, the Trojan prince and hero of The Aeneid, belongs to Rome’s foundational myth-making rather than historical record. Composed by Virgil between 29–19 BCE, during the reign of Augustus (reign 27 BCE–14 CE), the epic reimagines...