Seals: Did you mean...?

Alexander Selkirk (or Selcraig, 1676-1721) was a Scotsman famously marooned for four years and four months on a desert island in the Pacific Ocean until his rescue by a passing British ship in February 1709. His story inspired the title character...

Heraldry, which is the use of inherited coats of arms and other symbols to show personal identity and family lineage, began on the mid-12th century CE battlefield as an easy means to identify medieval royalty and princes who were otherwise...

The Predynastic Period in Ancient Egypt is the time before recorded history from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic Age and on to the rise of the First Dynasty and is generally recognized as spanning the era from c. 6000-3150 BCE (though physical...

Script is the written expression of a language. Cuneiform, the first script, was invented in Sumer, Mesopotamia c. 3500 BCE, hieroglyphics sometime prior to the Early Dynastic Period in Egypt (c. 3150-2613 BCE), and Sanskrit in India during...

The government of the Byzantine Empire was headed and dominated by the emperor, but there were many other important officials who assisted in operating the finances, judiciary, military, and bureaucracy of a huge territory. Without elections...

The art of the Minoan civilization of Bronze Age Crete (2000-1500 BCE) displays a love of animal, sea, and plant life, which was used to decorate frescoes and pottery and also inspired forms in jewellery, stone vessels, and sculpture. Minoan...

Rhodes, with an area of 1,400 km², is the largest island in the Greek Dodecanese group located in the south-eastern Aegean. The island was an important protagonist in wider Greek and Mediterranean affairs throughout the Bronze Age, Archaic...

In Greek mythology, Amphitrite is a goddess and the feminine personification of the sea. She is the wife of the Greek sea god, Poseidon, and lives with him in a golden palace beneath the sea. As the daughter of Nereus and Doris, she is one...

Charles I of England (r. 1625-1649) was a Stuart king who, like his father James I of England (r. 1603-1625), viewed himself as a monarch with absolute power and a divine right to rule. His lack of compromise with Parliament led to the English...

A medieval Teutonic Knight was a member of the Catholic military Deutscher Orden or Teutonic Order, officially founded in March 1198 CE. The first mission of the Teutonic knights was to help retake Jerusalem from the Arabs in the Third Crusade...