Gold in antiquity: Did you mean...?

In November 1532 CE, Francisco Pizarro led a group of about 160 conquistadors into the Inca city of Cajamarca. The illiterate and illegitimate son of an Extremaduran nobleman and an impoverished woman, Pizarro had spent his entire life on...

The Seven Cities of Cibola are the mythical lands of gold that the Spanish of the 16th century believed existed somewhere in the southwest of North America, comparable to the better-known mythical city of El Dorado. No sites matching the...

Gold is a treasure, and he who possesses it does all he wishes to in this world, and succeeds in helping souls into paradise. Christopher Columbus. On June 22, 2005, the Sulaymaniyah Museum of Iraqi Kurdistan purchased a pair of gold...

A map of Europe displaying important cities that shaped its history, from antiquity to the present. Cities on the map represent key centers throughout history. Each city represents a distinct period from Athens, Rome, and Constantinople (now...

Money Matters: The Development of Money through the Ancient World. A four-part series that traces the development of economic systems in the ancient world and explore how money as a financial instrument has evolved over the millennia...

Scythian art is best known for its 'animal art.' Flourishing between the 7th and 3rd centuries BCE on the steppe of Central Asia, with echoes of Celtic influence, the Scythians were known for their works in gold. Moreover, with the recent...

El Dorado ('Gilded Man' or 'Golden One') referred to the legendary kings of the Muisca (Chibcha) people who populated the northern Andes of modern-day Colombia from 600 to 1600. The name derives from the coronation ritual when the new king...

The coinage of the Byzantine Empire continued that of its more ancient predecessors and functioned as a convenient method of payment for goods and services, especially to soldiers and officials, and as a means for people to pay their taxes...

The Oxus Treasure is a collection of 180 artifacts of precious metal, dated to the Achaemenid Empire (c. 550-330 BCE), which were discovered on the north bank of the Oxus River near the town of Takht-i Sangin in Tajikstan between 1876-1880...

Medicine in the ancient world was often combined with what we would consider magic, especially in Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. In Mesopotamia, the goddess Gula who is also known as Ninkarrak and Ninisinna presided over health and healing...