Sed festival: Did you mean...?

Although the ancient Egyptians are often depicted as death-obsessed and dour, they actually had a great appreciation for life and their culture reflected their belief in existence as an eternal journey imbued...

Of all the pharaohs who ruled ancient Egypt, there is one in particular that stands out from the rest. Over the course of his 17-year reign (1353-1336 BCE), Akhenaten spearheaded a cultural, religious, and artistic revolution...

The Enuma Elish (also known as The Seven Tablets of Creation) is the Babylonian creation myth whose title is derived from the opening lines of the piece, "When on High". The myth tells the story...

The popular view of life in ancient Egypt is often that it was a death-obsessed culture in which powerful pharaohs forced the people to labor at constructing pyramids and temples and, at an unspecified time, enslaved...

The society of ancient Egypt was strictly divided into a hierarchy with the king at the top and then his vizier, the members of his court, priests and scribes, regional governors (eventually called 'nomarchs'), the...

Rome began as a small city on the banks of the Tiber River in Italy. The Latin tribes (also known as the Latini or Latians) inhabited the region c. 1000 BCE but the founding of the city is dated to 753 BCE. The family was...

The fall of Maximilien Robespierre, or the Coup of 9 Thermidor, was a series of events that resulted in the arrests and executions of Robespierre and his allies on 27-28 July 1794. It signaled the end of the Reign...

The Bronze Age frescoes from Akrotiri on the Aegean island of Thera (modern-day Santorini) provide some of the most famous images from the ancient Greek world. Sometime between 1650 and 1550 BCE Thera suffered a devastating earthquake...

During the period of early Judaism (6th century BCE - 70 CE), Judean religion began to develop ideas which diverged significantly from 10th-to-7th-centuries BCE Israelite and Judean religion. In particular, this period marks a significant...

A Roman boy's rite of passage, a ceremony or ritual marking a transitional period in life from childhood to adulthood, was the assuming of the toga virilis, the adult toga. The ceremony usually took place sometime between...