Articles

The English historian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) wrote and published his seminal work History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire between 1776 and 1788. The dominant theme of Gibbon's six-volume work is that the fall of the Roman Empire...

On 10 May 1796, in the later stages of the French Revolution (1789-1799), a group of leftwing agitators were arrested in Paris, charged with plotting to overthrow the French Directory. After a series of trials, two of them were guillotined...

Ashurbanipal's collection of Sumerian and Babylonian proverbs formed part of the famous Library of Ashurbanipal (7th century BCE) established at Nineveh for the express purpose of preserving the knowledge of the past for future generations...

The Ludlul-Bel-Nemeqi (c. 1700 BCE) is a Sumerian and later Babylonian poem on the theme of unjust suffering, which is thought to have influenced the biblical Book of Job. Also known as The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer, the title translates...

The Poor Man of Nippur (c. 701 BCE) is a Babylonian poem on the themes of the obligations of hospitality and revenge for an undeserved injury. A poor man of the city of Nippur feels mistreated when he visits the mayor and then goes to great...

In 88 BCE, Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138-78 BCE) marched on Rome and entered the city's sacred inner boundary, the pomerium, bearing arms. Breaking this taboo, he sought to gain political power and control of the army of the East that had been...

The Retreat from Kabul in 1842 was one of the most notorious disasters in the history of the British Empire. An East India Company army had invaded Afghanistan but was obliged to withdraw. This army of 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 camp followers...

The Battle of Wattignies was a significant battle in the War of the First Coalition, part of the wider French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802). It was fought on 15-16 October 1793 between a ragtag army of the First French Republic and a professional...

The Battle of Marj Ayyun (10 June 1179, also given as the Battle on the Litani) was a military engagement between Baldwin IV, King of Jerusalem (r. 1174-1185) and Saladin, Sultan of Egypt and Syria (r. 1174-1193). Saladin decisively won the...

The Battle of Chillianwala on 13 January 1849 was a bloody and indecisive clash between the British East India Company (EIC) and the Sikh Empire during the Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848-9). The EIC commander, General Gough, employed the dated...