Standard of Ur: Did you mean...?

The government of ancient Egypt was a theocratic monarchy as the king ruled by a mandate from the gods, initially was seen as an intermediary between human beings and the divine, and was supposed to represent the gods' will through the laws...

Confucianism is a philosophy developed in 6th-century BCE China, which is considered by some a secular-humanist belief system, by some a religion, and by others a social code. The broad range of subjects touched on by Confucianism lends itself...

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was an Italian mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and natural philosopher. He created a superior telescope with which he made new observations of the night sky, notably that the surface of the Moon has mountains...

The art of the Inca civilization of Peru (c. 1425-1532 CE) produced some of the finest works ever crafted in the ancient Americas. Inca art is best seen in highly polished metalwork, ceramics, and, above all, textiles, which was considered...

German East Africa (Deutsch-Ostafrika) was a colony of Imperial Germany from 1885 until 1918. The territory, much larger than Germany itself, covered what is today Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, and part of Mozambique. As in many other European...

Crucifixion as a punishment was practiced by several ancient cultures, but most notably adopted by the Roman Republic and later Roman Empire. Crucifixion was a method of hanging or suspending someone on the combination of vertical and horizontal...

Phoenicia was an ancient civilization composed of independent city-states located along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea stretching through what is now Syria, Lebanon and northern Israel. The Phoenicians were a great maritime people, known...

Sophocles of Kolōnos (c. 496 - c. 406 BCE) was one of the most famous and celebrated writers of tragedy plays in ancient Greece and his surviving works, written throughout the 5th century BCE, include such classics as Oedipus Rex, Antigone...

Sargon of Akkad (reign 2334-2279 BCE) was the king of the Akkadian Empire of Mesopotamia, the first multinational empire in history, who united the disparate kingdoms of the region under a central authority. He is equally famous today as...

Ancient Mesopotamian art and architectural works are among the oldest in the world, dating back over 7,000 years. The works first appear in northern Mesopotamia prior to the Ubaid period (circa 6500-4000 BCE) and then developed in the south...