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The camel caravans which crossed the great dunes of the Sahara desert began in antiquity but reached their golden period from the 9th century CE onwards. In their heyday caravans consisted of thousands of camels...

The most important cash crop in Colonial America was tobacco, first cultivated by the English at their Jamestown Colony of Virginia in 1610 CE by the merchant John Rolfe (l. 1585-1622 CE). Tobacco grew in the wild...

Scythian women garnered leadership roles and a raised level of status in their day, which is perhaps without parallel until recent times. While many female figures rose to pivotal roles in history, their rise was not a reflection...

The term “Athenian Calendar” (also called the “Attic Calendar”) has become somewhat of a misnomer, since Ancient Athenians never really used just one method to reckon the passage of time. Athenians, especially from the 3rd...

The Index of Prohibited Books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum) was a list of written works condemned as heretical or injurious to the Christian faith by the Catholic Church at the Council of...

Piracy has involved many nationalities over the centuries, but one of the prominent groups in the medieval and early modern periods was the French pirates, who terrorised the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean...

The search for the source of the Nile River was one of the last great geographical mysteries of 19th-century European exploration. Men like Livingstone, Burton, Speke, and Stanley...

The names of John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood are forever linked to the Maya and Mayan studies as the two great explorers who documented the ruins from Copan...

The Doge's Palace, or Palazzo Ducale, in Venice, Italy, was the seat of power of one of the world's most powerful city-states, as the Venetian Republic dominated the Mediterranean for centuries. The bright façade of the...

In Norse mythology, the Sun and the Moon appear as personified siblings pulling the heavenly bodies and chased by wolves, or as plain objects. Written sources, such as the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda, have surprisingly...