Ivory: Did you mean...?

The lyre was a stringed musical instrument played by the ancient Greeks. It was probably the most important and well-known instrument in the Greek world. The lyre was closely related to the other stringed instruments: the chelys which was...

Mutapa (aka Matapa, Mwenemutapa, and Monomotapa) was a southern African kingdom located in the north of modern Zimbabwe along the Zambezi River which flourished between the mid-15th and mid-17th century CE. Although sometimes described as...

The Uluburun shipwreck is a Bronze Age vessel discovered lying off the coast of Kas, Turkey. The ship, probably originally from Phoenicia/Canaan, dates to between 1330 and 1300 BCE and was carrying a full cargo of trade goods, perhaps from...

Phidias (also Pheidias) was, according to his contemporaries, the most renowned of all Greek sculptors. His greatest masterpieces were completed between c. 465 and 425 BCE. Unfortunately, except through copies, no example of his work has...

The woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, is an extinct herbivore related to elephants who trudged across the steppe-tundras of Eurasia and North America from around 300,000 years ago until their numbers seriously dropped from around 11,000...

Genoelselderen ivory, Rhéno-Mosane region, island influence, end of the 8th century CE. Ivory and blue glass. Saint-Martin church in Genoelselderen (near Tongeren, Belgium). Musée d’Art et d’Histoire (Musée du Cinquantenaire, Brussels, Belgium...

From 985 until sometime in the 1400s, Greenland was the farthest, most isolated outpost of medieval Scandinavian society. For nearly 500 years, the Norse Greenlanders built churches, kept livestock, and wore the same clothes as their contemporaries...

The Etruscan civilization flourished in central Italy between the 8th and 3rd century BCE, and their prosperity was largely based on their exploitation of local mineral resources, both through manufactured goods and trade. The Etruscans exchanged...

The Portuguese Empire was established from the 15th century and eventually stretched from the Americas to Japan. Very often a string of coastal trading centres with defensive fortifications, there were larger territorial colonies like Brazil...

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...