Spear: Did you mean...?

In ancient China warfare was a means for one region to gain ascendancy over another, for the state to expand and protect its frontiers, and for usurpers to replace an existing dynasty of rulers. With armies consisting of...

Apophis (also known as Apep) is the Great Serpent, enemy of the sun god Ra, in ancient Egyptian religion. The sun was Ra's great barge which sailed through the sky from dawn to dusk and then descended into the underworld. As it sailed...

The ancient Olympic Games were a sporting event held every four years at the sacred site of Olympia, in the western Peloponnese, in honour of Zeus, the supreme god of the Greek religion. The games, held from 776 BCE to 393...

Ancient Japan has made unique contributions to world culture which include the Shinto religion and its architecture, distinctive art objects such as haniwa figurines, the oldest pottery vessels in the world, the largest wooden buildings...

Roman warfare was remarkably successful over many centuries and across many territories. This was due to several important factors. Italy was a peninsula not easily attacked, there was a huge pool of fighting men to draw upon, a...

The Toltec civilization flourished in ancient central Mexico between the 10th and mid-12th centuries. Continuing the Mesoamerican heritage left to them by earlier cultures, the Toltecs built an impressive capital at Tollan...

The Medes or Medians were a group of Indo-Iranian-speaking people from central Asia who migrated westwards and entered northern Iran around the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. They settled in the highlands of Zagros (Zagreus in Greek...

Jousts were, from the 13th to 16th century CE, a popular part of the European medieval tournament where knights showed off their martial skills by riding against one another with wooden lances in a designated area known as the...

Bartholomew Roberts, aka 'Black Bart' Roberts (c. 1682-1722), was a Welsh pirate and one of the most successful villains of the Golden Age of Piracy. Roberts plundered over 400 ships on both sides of the Atlantic during his...

Viking warfare, along with its key component of raiding, is inextricably connected with the expansion of Scandinavian influence along the North Atlantic and into the Mediterranean in the Viking Age (c. 790-1100 CE), where the Vikings'...