Today a ‘beautiful but broken shell’, the Parthenon has housed three very different cults – those of Athena, Allah and the Blessed Virgin – since it was first constructed in the fifth century BC. It was a Christian soldier, in the siege of 1687, who did most to destroy the sanctuary.
Owing to the researches of the late Michael Ventris, Greek scripts of some six or seven centuries before the Age of Homer can be read. Here, L.R. Palmer here examines the basis of Ventris's achievement in classical scholarship.
Among the ruins of ancient Pylos— which, together with all the other major strongholds of Mycenaean power, was destroyed at the end of the Hellenic Bronze Age—a library of clay tablets has come to light, depicting a threatened society “in the throes of total moblization.” By L.R. Palmer.
L.R. Palmer describes what we can learn of social stratification in ancient Greece from its epics.
C.M. Matthews introduces Cymbeline, the most successful king of the dominant tribe in Southern England during the period between the two Roman invasions.
Despite its isolation from the mainstream of human development, Basil Davidson writes, African society before the coming of the Europeans was neither savage nor stagnant.
Michael Grant offers the tale of Rome's most infamous emperor from both his fans and detractors.
Anthony Rhodes introduces Diocletian, the first sovereign to voluntarily resign power, and how, at the opening of the fourth century, he spent his last years in a huge fortified seaside palace of his own construction.
No memorials of the past are more fantastic than the series of great statues—some of them as tall as a four-storey building—that greet the visitor to this lonely and storm-swept Pacific island. By C.A. Burland.
Between the years 1300 and 600 B.C. the virile kingdom of Ararat rose to be a large empire, which long held the Assyrians at bay.
