including headings The first Greek civilization, Trade and conquest, Doric and Ionic, The power of the Peloponnese, Greek colonies overseas, ...
The Greeks acquire a vague attachment to a great many different gods during their gradual movement, as a group of Indo-European tribes, into the region of modern Greece. The result is an extremely complex account of how...
The position of Greece, as a central region of the Byzantine empire, remains reasonably secure until the 11th century. At that time, and in the following century, there are troublesome attacks on the Greek coastline from...
Both the leading states of Greece - Sparta and Athens - depend entirely upon forced labour, though the system in Sparta is more properly described as serfdom rather than slavery. The distinction is that the helots of Spa...
No place or period has been so influential in the history of architecture as Greece in the 7th to 5th centuries BC. Here there emerge the various elements of the classical style which will recur at many periods of later...
The purpose of the journey of Zhang Qian is political (sent by the emperor Wudi to find allies in the west against the marauding Xiongnu), but his discoveries give him the status of an explorer. In 138 BC he set...
The most dramatic example of direct democracy in 5th-century Athens is the system of ostracism, used from about 487 to 417. Anyone ostracized must go into exile for ten years but no harm is done to his family, his proper...
How many people hold power in a society, and how they exercise it, are eternal themes of political debate. At one extreme a single person rules. Such a system is usually called a monarchy (Greek for 'rule by one...
For three years groups of Zealots hold out against Roman domination in a few rocky fortresses in Palestine. The last to fall, Masada, is the most dramatic site of all. Standing high and sheer on the western...
The craftsmen of Phoenicia maintain their pre-eminence in glass technology when they discover, in the 1st century BC, how to produce glass vessels in large quantities. Instead of the laborious processes of building up mo...
The astrolabe (meaning 'star taker') is arguably the world's oldest scientific instrument. It is often credited as an invention to Hipparchus, a leading Greek astronomer of the 2nd century BC. The astrolabe meas...
An important adaptation of the wheel in technology is the pulley - a wheel round which a rope is run to exert force on an object at the other end. Such a machine is first mentioned in a Greek text of the 4th century BC,...
The principle of distillation is probably in use long before it is applied to the production of alcohol. Greek sailors of the 4th century BC know how to derive fresh water from the sea, by boiling salt water and suspendi...
A Chinese text, the Nei Ching or 'Book of Medicine', describes the practice of acupuncture. The document is written in about the 1st century BC, by which time acupuncture is already a long-established tradition....
Builders in Greek cities on the coast of Turkey (and in particular Pergamum) evolve cement in about 200 BC as a structural material, in place of weaker mortars such as gypsum plaster (used in Egypt) or bitumen (in Mesopo...
