A Viking ship. Viking trade took the Vikings all over the world. Who were the Vikings? The Vikings were Indo-European people from Scandinavia (modern Denmark, Norway and Sweden). Around the 400s AD the Vikings started to [...]
The Empress Zoe (from the church of Hagia Irene) Zoe and Romanus III Although he lived a long time and ruled nearly fifty years, Basil II never had any sons. When he [...]
Alexios I Comneni, the Byzantine emperor (1081 AD) The Battle of Manzikert The Battle of Manzikert in 1071 was the end of Basil's Armenian Dynasty. The Byzantines had lost Armenia to Alp Arslan [...]
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 [...]
A later portrait of Xenophon (now in the Prado museum in Madrid) Xenophon, like Thucydides, was an Athenian from a rich family who lived during the Peloponnesian War, in the [...]
Map of Minoan Crete Where did the Minoans come from? Sometime in the Neolithic period - the Late Stone Age - people came to live on the island of Crete [...]
Archaic Greece: Stone statues of Kleobis and Biton Oligarchy and temples By around 1000 BC people in Greece were starting to rebuild their civilization after the Dark Age. Greek Dark [...]
Ancient Greek climate: The island of Rhodes Good fishing Fishing was very important to early Stone Age people, and fishing is probably what brought the first people to [...]
The economy of ancient Greece: A Greek man doing carpentry (Athens, 400s BC) The Greek word "economy" The Greeks did not have the same idea of an economy that we [...]
Classical Greek economy: Sailors rowing trading ships (Athens ca. 550 BC) Greek mercenary soldiers The trends of the Archaic period in Greece continued into the Classical period, about 500-400 BC, [...]
