East Asia: Did you mean...?

On June 10, 323 BCE Alexander the Great died in Babylon. Although historians have debated the exact cause most agree that the empire he built was left without adequate leadership for there was no clear successor or heir. The military commanders...

The Boston Tea Party was an act of political protest carried out by American colonists on 16 December 1773, in Boston, Massachusetts. Disguised as Mohawk Native Americans, the colonists dumped 342 crates of tea into Boston Harbor to protest...

The network popularly known as the Silk Road refers not to a single route but to a shifting constellation of overland and maritime pathways that connected East and West across more than a millennium. Long before the term was coined in the...

The age-old concept of the “divine right of kings” allowed that a country's ruler received his or her power or authority from God. However, few, if any, were delusional enough to actually believe themselves to be a god. An exception to this...

Disregarding the extremely inhospitable spots even the most stubborn of us have enough common sense to avoid, humans have managed to cover an extraordinary amount of territory on this earth. Go back 200,000 years, however, and Homo sapiens...

The Parthians ruled from 247 BCE to 224 CE creating a vast empire that stretched from the Mediterranean in the west to India and China in the east. East of the Caspian Sea there emerged from the steppe of Central Asia a nomadic Scythian tribe...

Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1587-1629), an officer of the Dutch East India Company and twice the company's Governor-General in the Dutch East Indies, oil on wood portrait after Jacob Waben, 1629. Westfries Museum, Hoorn, The Netherlands.

View of the east side of the ziggurat of Chogha Zanbil with the southeastern stairway which provided access to the first terrace. Chogha Zanbil is a magnificent, 3300-year-old ancient Elamite complex located 30 kilometres south-east of the...

17th-century Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) navigators were the first Europeans to set foot on Australian soil. Although there is a strong theory that the Portuguese explorer, Cristóvão de Mendonça (1475-1532...

Weavers, Scribes, and Kings: A New History of the Ancient Near East by Amanda H. Podany is a unique history of the ancient Near East that compellingly presents the life stories of kings, priestesses, merchants, bricklayers, and others. Rather...