Astronomy: Did you mean...?

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)

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 Verbiest (1623-88...

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, corresponding to modern-day...

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 of God" (or "Gate of the...

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 term is difficult to define...

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, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and northern Egypt...

The Mali Empire (1240-1645) of West Africa was founded by Sundiata Keita (r. 1230-1255) following his victory over the kingdom of Sosso (c. 1180-1235). Sundiata's centralised government, diplomacy and well-trained army permitted a massive...

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 the...

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 of Ashur...

Ancient Maya government was formed on the basis that rulers were thought to have been god-like, which to some might suggest one unified state. However, the consensus amongst anthropologists supports that each major Maya city remained its...