Greek hoplites and democracy - a Corinthian helmet from the 600s BC Hoplites needed armor When the Greek city-states turned to this new hoplite way of fighting, it meant that each man [...]
Phoenician ship In 480 BC, the Persian king Xerxes was attacking Greece. Things looked very bad for the Greeks, when the Greek navy, under the command of the Athenian general Themistocles, wrecked the Persian fleet [...]
Archilochus: a bronze statuette of a Spartan man in armor, from about 500 BC When did Archilochus live? Archilochus was a poet who wrote in the 600s BC. He was [...]
Etruscan image of a Scythian woman riding a horse, ca. 600 BCE When did cavalry get started? Cavalry are soldiers riding horses. The earliest cavalry soldiers were in about 800 [...]
Roman helmet, from the kids at Laurelhurst School, Portland, Oregon Although the Romans did many other things besides fight battles, certainly one of their greatest achievements was the world's first [...]
A suit of medieval plate armor In the Middle Ages men and women who fought in battles generally wore chain mail, which was both lighter and cheaper (because it was [...]
Modern-day re-enactors having a tournament Tournaments were a common form of entertainment in the Middle Ages. A group of knights came together at the castle of some powerful duke or [...]
Spartan Shield, made by 6th graders at Laurelhurst School, Portland Greek hoplite soldiers carried shields like this one. The cut out areas made the shield lighter to carry. To make a [...]
Around 300 BC, during the Warring States period, a Chinese general called Sun Tzu wrote a book about the best ways to win wars, called The Art of War. Sun Tzu's main [...]
Scythian woman fighting Greeks (Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, ca. 350 BC) Central Asian soldiers were famous for fighting on horseback. Because Central Asian people spent a lot of time on horseback, [...]
