Social structure: Did you mean...?

The popular view of life in ancient Egypt is often that it was a death-obsessed culture in which powerful pharaohs forced the people to labor at constructing pyramids and temples and, at an unspecified time, enslaved the Hebrews for this...

The Middle Kingdom (2040-1782 BCE) is considered ancient Egypt's Classical Age during which it produced some of its greatest works of art and literature. Scholars remain divided on which dynasties constitute the Middle Kingdom as some argue...

The threshing floors of the Bible were outdoor stone floors, usually circular in fashion, used by farmers to process the grain of their crops. For the larger community, like watermills of the recent past, they could be gathering places bustling...

For centuries, Lucius Cornelius Sulla has been reviled as a maniacal tyrant who defiled the Roman constitution and instituted bloody purges, but some modern historians assert that he has been judged too harshly. They present him as a republican...

It has always been recognized that women in the ancient world were considered only a little higher in value than the man's cattle or plow and, sometimes, not even accorded that kind of respect. Examples of misogynistic attitudes toward women...

The Jade Museum (Spanish: Museo del Jade y de la Cultura Precolombina) in San José, Costa Rica houses the world's largest collection of ancient jade from the Americas. With nearly 7,000 pieces in its collection, the artifacts at the Museum...

The Greek Dark Age (c. 1200 to c. 800 BCE, overlapping with the Iron Age, c. 1200-550 BCE) is the modern-day term for the period in Greek history following the Bronze Age Collapse when the Mycenaean Civilization fell and the Linear B writing...

The 1851 Great Exhibition was held in the purpose-built Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London, to showcase the latest developments in engineering, science, and the arts, as well as objects of cultural significance from Britain and abroad. Running...

A stupa is a reliquary containing the remains (relics) of an individual associated with great spiritual power and insight, most often (since the 3rd century BCE) with the Buddha (l. c. 563 - c. 483 BCE). The form, a hemisphere topped by a...

Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was an Anglo-Irish statesman and political thinker. His most famous work is Reflections on the Revolution in France a critique of the social and political turmoil in that country in the final decade of the 18th century...