Empires: Did you mean...?

Few English-language histories of the country and land of Georgia have been written. Donald Rayfield's Edge of Empires: A History of Georgia attempts to fill this gap. Rayfield is a scholar of Russian and Georgian literature, and while he...

Mesopotamia (from the Greek, meaning "between two rivers") was an ancient region located in the Near East (Middle East) bounded in the northeast by the Zagros Mountains and in the southeast by the Arabian Plateau, corresponding to modern-day...

The Aztec Empire (c. 1345-1521) covered at its greatest extent most of northern Mesoamerica. Aztec warriors were able to dominate their neighbouring states and permit rulers such as Montezuma to impose Aztec ideals and religion across Mexico...

The Byzantine Empire existed from 330 to 1453. It is often called the Eastern Roman Empire or simply Byzantium. The Byzantine capital was founded at Constantinople by Constantine I (r. 306-337). The Byzantine Empire varied in size over the...

The Scientific Revolution (1500-1700), which occurred first in Europe before spreading worldwide, witnessed a new approach to knowledge gathering – the scientific method – which utilised new technologies like the telescope to observe, measure...

Caliphate (“Khilafat” in Arabic) was a semi-religious political system of governance in Islam, in which the territories of the Islamic empire in the Middle East and North Africa and the people within were ruled by a supreme leader called...

Genghis Khan (aka Chinggis Khan) was the founder of the Mongol Empire which he ruled from 1206 until his death in 1227. Born Temujin, he acquired the title of Genghis Khan, likely meaning 'universal ruler’, after unifying the Mongol tribes...

The Treaty of Versailles, signed in June 1919, was an agreement between the victors of the First World War (1914-18) which redivided parts of Europe and imposed reparations, armament limitations, and total blame for the war on Germany, one...

Elam was a region in the Near East corresponding to the modern-day provinces of Ilam and Khuzestan in southern Iran (though it also included part of modern-day southern Iraq) whose civilization spanned thousands of years from circa 3200 to...

Ferdinand Magellan, or Fernão de Magalhães (c. 1480-1521), was a Portuguese mariner whose expedition was the first to circumnavigate the globe in 1519-22 in the service of Spain. Magellan was killed on the voyage in what is today the Philippines...