Civilization in the Andes Mountains emerged in almost complete isolation from other parts of the world, as did religion there. Archaeologist Kevin Lane delves into the nature of Inca religious practice and traces the emergence of organized religion in the highland Andes.
Anatolia’s colorful history has left a windfall of riches—ancient ruins, ornate Byzantine churches, supremely elegant mosques, and splendid Ottoman palaces. In an illustrated series, Serif Yenen, a Turkish-born tour guide and author, highlights the heritage and splendor of ancient Turkey through an examination of some of its cultural gems.
In Plato’s time the South of Italy was known as “Greater Greece”—the beautiful land settled in the centuries after 800 B.C.E. by colonists from the Greek mainland. Author Ross King examines how these settlers brought trade and prosperity as well as their religion, customs, alphabet, and language—in addition to the political, philosophical, and artistic foundations that would influence the world of the ancient Romans and, much later, that of the Italian Renaissance.
When Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, the oldest known fossils were trilobites preserved in rocks deposited during the Cambrian Period. Many decades and countless discoveries later, fossils from six continents now extend the animal record backward into the Ediacaran Period, some 50 million years before the first trilobites. Andrew H. Knoll of Harvard University traces the fossil record of Earth’s earliest known animals, asking how these remains illuminate the early evolution of our own kingdom.
The famous formulation that all Gaul was divided into three parts came from the self-serving pen of Caesar himself, whose conquest of Gaul served as the springboard for a quest for power that ended fatally on the Ides of March in 44 B.C.E., five years after he had famously crossed the Rubicon River en route to Rome from Gaul. Historian Jennifer Paxton tells the complex and fascinating story of how Rome gradually acquired commercial and military interests in southern Gaul that provided the pretext for Roman intervention in the complicated politics of the region.
Once it was "discovered" by explorer and academic Hiram Bingham in the first decade of the of 20th century, Machu Picchu became attached to seemingly endless speculation about its origins, purpose, and meaning. Cultural historian George Scheper traces the travels of Bingham to see the archaeological ruins as he first beheld them, and then, guided by modern scholarship, he revisits the site as it is today.
Archaeologists and historians have struggled to answer questions about the Iliad, Homer's magnificent account of the Trojan War. Is there any historical truth in a face that launched a thousand ships or was there simply a 10-year struggle for political hegemony in the Aegean? Classicist Eric Cline examines the latest archaeological and textual discoveries that lead to the conclusion that a Trojan War, or several such wars, did indeed take place during the Late Bronze Age.
