City walls: Did you mean...?

The distinctive Roman theater was last used as a playhouse and a venue for religious festivals and political meetings in Augusta Raurica, which is located in present-day Switzerland. Before that it had been altered several times. From AD...

The site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is identified as the place both of the crucifixion and the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth. Despite the mutilations of the centuries, the Holy Sepulchre remains a fascinating complex of...

This map illustrates the city-states of Classical Greece around 500 BCE, highlighting the rise of the polis system and the growing reach of Hellenic influence along the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts. The period saw Athens and Sparta...

Carthage was a Phoenician city-state on the coast of North Africa (the site of modern-day Tunis) which, prior the conflict with Rome known as the Punic Wars (264-146 BCE), was the largest, most affluent, and powerful political entity in the...

A polis (plural: poleis) was the typical structure of a community in the ancient Greek world. A polis consisted of an urban centre, often fortified and with a sacred centre built on a natural acropolis or harbour, which controlled a surrounding...

The siege of Antioch in 1097-1098 CE occurred during the First Crusade (1095-1102 CE) when the western Crusader knights were on their way to retake Jerusalem. The great metropolis of Antioch in northern Syria was heavily fortified, and it...

The Trojan War was fought between Greeks and the defenders of the city of Troy in Anatolia sometime in the late Bronze Age. The story has grabbed the imagination for millennia but a conflict between Mycenaeans and Hittites may well have occurred...

Forts and sieges held a key position in ancient Indian warfare. Built on considerations of strategic location, topography, and the natural advantages provided by the site, forts would be heavily supplemented with man-made fortifications...

Carthago Nova (modern-day Cartagena) was a city on the southern Iberian Peninsula, Spain, originally known as Mastia. Human habitation of the region predates the Neolithic Period, but the area around the site of Carthago Nova seems to have...

Athens, Greece, with its famous Acropolis, has come to symbolize the whole of the country in the popular imagination, and not without cause. It not only has its iconic ruins and the famous port of Piraeus but, thanks to ancient writers, its...