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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...

The monumental statue of Zeus at Olympia in Greece was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Created in the 430s BCE under the supervision of the master Greek sculptor Phidias, the huge ivory and gold statue was bigger even than...

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...

The Egyptian hieroglyphic script was one of the writing systems used by ancient Egyptians to represent their language. Because of their pictorial elegance, Herodotus and other important Greeks believed that Egyptian hieroglyphs were something...

The Pharaoh in ancient Egypt was the political and religious leader of the people and held the titles 'Lord of the Two Lands' and 'High Priest of Every Temple'. The word 'pharaoh' is the Greek form of the Egyptian pero or per-a-a, which was...

The Louisiana Purchase was a land deal made in 1803, in which the United States purchased 828,000 square miles (2,144,510 km²) of land west of the Mississippi River from France for $15 million, or an average of three cents per acre. The purchase...

Horus is the name of a sky god in ancient Egyptian mythology which designates primarily two deities: Horus the Elder (or Horus the Great), the last born of the first five original gods, and Horus the Younger, the son of Osiris and Isis...

Xanadu (aka Shangdu, Shang-tu, and Kaiping) located in Inner Mongolia, northern China, was first the capital (1263-73) and then the summer capital (1274-1364) of the Mongol Empire. It came to prominence during the reign of Kublai Khan (r...

Tiamat is the Mesopotamian goddess associated with primordial chaos and the salt sea, best known from the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish. In all versions of the myth, following the original, Tiamat always symbolizes the forces of chaos, which...