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The Songhai Empire (aka Songhay, c. 1460 - c. 1591) covered what is today southern Mauritania and Mali. It replaced the Mali Empire (1240-1645) as the most important state in West Africa. Originating as a smaller kingdom along...

Geoffrey Chaucer (l. c. 1343-1400 CE) was a medieval English poet, writer, and philosopher best known for his work The Canterbury Tales, a masterpiece of world literature. The Canterbury Tales is a work of poetry featuring a group...

The Despotate of the Morea was a semi-autonomous appanage of the later Byzantine Empire. The Byzantines retook part of the Peloponnese in Southern Greece in 1262 CE, but the Morea was only officially governed by semi-autonomous...

King Philip’s War (also known as Metacom’s War, 1675-1678) was a conflict in New England between a coalition of Native American tribes organized under the command of Metacom (also known as King Philip, l. 1638-1676), chief of...

Tiglath Pileser I (reigned 1115-1076 BCE), an Assyrian king of the period known as the Middle Empire, revitalized the economy and the military that had been suffering, more or less, since the death of the king Tukulti Ninurta...

The Avars were a confederation of heterogeneous (diverse or varied) people consisting of Rouran, Hephthalites, and Turkic-Oghuric races who migrated to the region of the Pontic Grass Steppe (an area corresponding to modern-day Ukraine...

The Zulu Kingdom was one of the most powerful states in Southern and Central Africa during its peak in the mid-19th century. The Zulu expansion and domination of their neighbours is credited to the inspirational...

Tyrian purple (aka Royal purple or Imperial purple) is a dye extracted from the murex shellfish which was first produced by the Phoenician city of Tyre in the Bronze Age. Its difficulty of manufacture...

Vasco da Gama (c. 1469-1524) was a Portuguese navigator who, in 1497-9, sailed around the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa and arrived at Calicut (now Kozhikode) on the south-west coast of India. This was the first direct voyage...

Silver had great value and aesthetic appeal in many ancient cultures where it was used to make jewellery, tableware, figurines, ritual objects and rough-cut pieces known as hacksilver which could be used in trade or to store...