Astronomy: Did you mean...?

The eyepiece of a model of the telescope made by Galileo (1564-1642) c. 1608. Galileo made a telescope capable of x33 magnification and used it to make several important discoveries in astronomy. 970 mm x 60 mm. (Science...

A c. 1877 CE photograph of the remains of instruments at Beijing's Observatory. Astronomy evolved in 16th-17th century CE China as a result of the introduction of scientific ideas by Jesuit missionaries such as Ferdinand...

A fresco fragment depicting Urania, the Muse of Astronomy, from the House of Julia Felix in Pompeii, 62-79 CE. (now in Louvre Museum, Paris)

Mesopotamia (from the Greek, meaning "between two rivers") was an ancient region located in the Near East (Middle East) bounded in the northeast by the Zagros Mountains and in the southeast by the Arabian Plateau...

Babylon is the most famous city from ancient Mesopotamia, whose ruins lie in modern-day Hillah, Iraq, 59 miles (94 km) southwest of Baghdad. The name is derived from bav-il or bav-ilim, which in Akkadian meant "Gate...

Civilization (from the Latin civis=citizen and civitas=city) is a term applied to any society which has developed a writing system, government, production of surplus food, division of labor, and urbanization...

The Fertile Crescent, often called the 'cradle of civilization', is the region in the Middle East that curves like a quarter-moon shape from the Persian Gulf through modern-day southern Iraq, Syria...

Ferdinand Magellan, or Fernão de Magalhães (c. 1480-1521), was a Portuguese mariner whose expedition was the first to circumnavigate the globe in 1519-22 in the service of Spain. Magellan was killed on the voyage in what is...

Assyria was the region located in the ancient Near East which, under the Neo-Assyrian Empire, reached from Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) through Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and down through Egypt. The empire began modestly at the city...

The Han Dynasty (202 BCE - 220 CE) was the second dynasty of Imperial China (the era of centralized, dynastic government, 221 BCE - 1912 CE) which established the paradigm for all succeeding dynasties up through 1912 CE. It succeeded...