On the walls of one of the Assyrian palaces, Assyrian soldiers attack a town. Some are swimming, using balloons made of goatskins to hold themselves up. Palace of Ashurnasirpal II, Nimrud, [...]
Iron Age timeline: Zhou Dynasty swimmers (Sichuan bronze vessel, ca. 750 BC) How did the Iron Age begin? All across Asia, the early Iron Age started out as a time of many [...]
Judah and Israel: Assyrian prisoners of war from the siege of Lachish. Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh, 704-681 BC. (now in the British Museum) Israel splits into two kingdoms Under Solomon, Israel [...]
A cider press with big wooden screws What is a screw? People always count screws as a separate kind of simple machine. But really screws are just one kind of inclined plane. [...]
Who was Aristotle? An ancient Egyptian papyrus with a scrap of Aristotle's "Politics" Aristotle's family Aristotle's father was Nicomachus, a doctor who lived near Macedon, in the north of Greece. [...]
Bee-keeping reaches West Asia: a wax writing tablet from Uluburun shipwreck off the coast of modern Turkey (1300 BC) Bee-keeping reaches the Eastern Mediterranean By 2400 BC, people were keeping [...]
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 [...]
Persistence hunting People have been hunting for a long, long time; the history of hunting is older than people. Even monkeys hunt meat with sticks. So men and women have been hunting since [...]
Molded bricks form an archer at ancient Susa, in Iran If you're a teacher, parent, or day camp counselor thinking of spending a week or so on ancient West Asia [...]
Siege of Nineveh When the Assyrian kings of what is now Iraq and Syria (ancient Mesopotamia) built their great palaces in the 700s and 600s BC, artists carved long stories [...]
