Social structure: Did you mean...?

Although life expectancy was lower in ancient Greece and Rome, many people survived into old age. Those who reached old age tended to accumulate wealth and political power. However, the societies of the ancient Mediterranean were also often...

The Knight’s Revolt (1522-1523) was a military action led by the German imperial knight Franz von Sickingen (l. 1481-1523) and encouraged by the knight and writer Ulrich von Hutten (l. 1488-1523) launched to restore the status of the imperial...

The cataclysmic end of the Roman Empire in the West has tended to mask the underlying features of continuity. The map of Europe in the year 500 would have been unrecognizable to anyone living a hundred years earlier. Gone was the solid boundary...

The Three Estates of pre-revolutionary France were the hierarchical social divisions that structured society under the Ancien Régime (French for "Old Regime," a term coined after the French Revolution to describe the pre-revolutionary system...

Korea, located on a large peninsula on the eastern coast of the Asian mainland, has been inhabited since Neolithic times. The first recognisable political state was Gojoseon in the second half of the first millennium BCE. From the 1st century...

The German Peasants' War (1524-1525) was a conflict between the lower class of the Germanic region of the Holy Roman Empire and the nobility over the feudal system of serfdom, religious freedom, and economic disparity. It was later characterized...

The Arthashastra is an Indian treatise on politics, economics, military strategy, the function of the state, and social organization attributed to the philosopher and Prime Minister Kautilya (also known as Chanakya, Vishnugupta, l. c. 350-275...

Early medieval Icelandic government, or Viking Iceland, has been termed an incipient form of democracy or democratic parliamentarism, however, the system was actually nothing like its European counterparts, be they medieval or contemporary...

This infographic illustrates the Varna caste system in ancient India. First mentioned in the Rig Veda's Purusha Sukta c. 1200–1000 BCE, it shows society divided into four groups that emerged from the sacrifice of Purusha, a transcendent and...

Hunter-gatherer societies are – true to their astoundingly descriptive name – cultures in which human beings obtain their food by hunting, fishing, scavenging, and gathering wild plants and other edibles. Although there are still groups of...