Spice Trade: Did you mean...?

The Mongol Empire was the largest land empire in world history, at about 22,000,000 square kilometers (850,000 square miles). The term Pax Mongolica (Mongol Peace) refers to the way this massive...

The rulers of China's Ming dynasty (1368-1644) acquired an insatiable desire for silver in the 16th century, largely to pay for huge prestige projects like building the Forbidden City in Beijing and repairing the...

The Kingdom of Benin, located in the southern forests of West Africa (modern Nigeria) and formed by the Edo people, flourished from the 13th to 19th century CE. The capital, also called Benin, was the hub of a trade network exclusively...

Caesarea Maritima was a city built over 2,000 years ago (c. 22-10 BCE) on the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean. With Roman engineering and largesse, Herod the Great (r. 37-4 BCE) accomplished this feat by constructing a whole...

Timbuktu (Timbuctoo) is a city in Mali, West Africa which was an important trade centre of the Mali Empire which flourished between the 13th and 15th centuries. The city, founded c. 1100, gained wealth from...

The Swahili Coast on the shores of East Africa was a region where Africans and Arabs mixed to create a unique identity from the 8th century called Swahili Culture. Swahili is the name of their language and means 'people of the coast.'...

The Ghana Empire flourished in West Africa from at least the 6th to 13th century. Not connected geographically to the modern state of Ghana, the Ghana Empire was located in the western Sudan savannah region (modern southern Mauritania...

African Slave Trade, map by KuroNekoNiyah, 2021. This map provides an overview of the slave trade out of Africa, c. 1500-1900, showing both transatlantic and ancillary global flows. It is based on Map I from Atlas...

Alexander the Great died in Babylon on the 13th of June, 323 BCE. His Macedonian-Greek empire broke apart, but Alexander’s heritage was felt throughout the ancient Mediterranean world for centuries. Three Hellenic...