Ceramics: Did you mean...?

Elam was a region in the Near East corresponding to the modern-day provinces of Ilam and Khuzestan in southern Iran (though it also included part of modern-day southern Iraq) whose civilization spanned thousands of years from circa 3200 to...

Troy is the name of the Bronze Age city attacked in the Trojan War, a popular story in the mythology of ancient Greece, and the name given to the archaeological site in the north-west of Asia Minor (now Turkey) which has revealed a large...

The Early Dynastic period in Mesopotamia is the modern-day archaeological term for the era in Mesopotamian history – circa 2900 to circa 2350/2334 BCE – during which some of the most significant cultural advances were made, including the...

Ancient Egyptian literature comprises a wide array of narrative and poetic forms including inscriptions on tombs, stele, obelisks, and temples; myths, stories, and legends; religious writings; philosophical works; wisdom literature; autobiographies...

Sappho of Lesbos (l. c. 620-570 BCE) was a lyric poet whose work was so popular in ancient Greece that she was honored in statuary, coinage, and pottery centuries after her death. Little remains of her work, and these fragments suggest she...

Ibn Battuta (l. 1304-1368/69) was a Moroccan explorer from Tangier whose expeditions took him further than any other traveler of his time and resulted in his famous work, The Rihla of Ibn Battuta. Scholar Douglas Bullis notes that “rihla”...

George III of Great Britain (r. 1760-1820) was the third of the Hanoverian monarchs, and he remains the longest-reigning king in British history. His six decades on the throne saw the creation of the United Kingdom, the loss of the 13 American...

The qilin (麒麟, or simply lin 麟) is a Chinese mythical creature, frequently translated as "Chinese unicorn." While this term may suggest a one-horned creature, the qilin is often depicted with two horns. However, like the Western unicorn...

The pan flute or panpipes (syrinx) was a musical wind instrument first used by the ancient Greeks. Most commonly played by shepherds, the earliest use was in the Cycladic islands in the third millennium BCE, and representations of the instrument...

The Vandals were a Germanic tribe who are first mentioned in Roman history in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder (77 CE). The Roman historian Tacitus also mentions them in his Germania (c. 98 CE), though he also refers to them as the...