Queen mother of the west: Did you mean...?

Margaret of Valois' eyewitness account of St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre is among the most famous and the only written record of the event left by a member of the royal family of France at the time. Her account appears in her memoirs as Letter...

Ruins of the West Church found at the village of Umm el-Jimal in the north of Jordan, which was occupied between the 1st century CE (by the Kingdom of Nabatea) and the 9th century CE (during the Abbasid period). Inscriptions made by Tanukhid...

The Kingdom of Benin, located in the southern forests of West Africa (modern Nigeria) and formed by the Edo people, flourished from the 13th to 19th century CE. The capital, also called Benin, was the hub of a trade network exclusively controlled...

Chlothar II was a Merovingian king of the Franks, who reigned from 584 to 629. He inherited the throne of Neustria as an infant, upon the assassination of his father, Chilperic I (r. 561-584). Following a long and bitter power struggle with...

The lives of women in ancient Mesopotamia were regulated by a patriarchal hierarchy, but within this social structure, there were many who distinguished themselves and some who were able to assume positions traditionally held by men. Women...

Like most Gothic cathedrals, the west façade of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris is tri-portaled, meaning it has three entranceways. Above each door is an elaborately carved tympanum depicting a story through sculpture, an accessible...

This stone fragment from ancient Egypt depicts Imentet. She was the ancient Egyptian goddess of the West and thus the protector of the necropolises west of the Nile. Married to Aqen, she is mentioned with some frequency in the Book of the...

3500 years after its construction, the temple of the fortress of Semna West was dismantled in 1964 to be rebuilt in the gardens of the new Khartoum museum. Semna West, Sudan (1964)

Mary Prince (l. c. 1788 to c. 1833) was the first enslaved Black woman to publish an autobiography/slave narrative. Prince was illiterate but dictated her life story to the writer Susanna Strickland (l. 1803-1885), published in 1831 as The...

The Tragedy of Richard III, often referred to as simply Richard III, is a history play by William Shakespeare (1564-1616), probably written around 1592-94. It is the fourth and final installment of the 'first tetralogy' of Shakespeare's history...