A reconstruction of what Troy VI might have looked like. For thousands of years, people read Homer's Iliad and learned the story of the Trojan War. But nobody knew if it had really happened, or if there really even was a city of Troy. In the 1800s, a German man named Heinrich Schliemann decided to look for [...]
Philistines on the Egyptian temple of Medinet Habu At the end of the Late Bronze Age, around 1200 BC, there were bad times all over the Mediterranean and West Asia. The Egyptian New Kingdom collapsed, and so did the Hittite Empire. We don't exactly know why. It may have been a change in the climate, which caused a drought and [...]
Earliest known spoked wheels, from a grave in western Siberia When about 2000 BC the Central Asians invented better wheels with spokes, so you could fight from your chariot, a new wave of Indo-Europeans moved from Central Asia west to Greece, and Italy, or south into Egypt and Iran, and from Iran about 1500 BC to India. Some of [...]
Map of Minoan Crete Sometime in the Neolithic period - the Late Stone Age - people came to live on the island of Crete in the Mediterranean Sea. Nobody knows for sure where these people came from. It might be West Asia, or it might be Greece, or it might even be Egypt. Up [...]
Mycenaeans: Two women and a child (Mycenae, ca. 1500 BC) Mycenaeans By around 1600 BC, the Greeks had gotten completely mixed with the earlier Lerna people, and began to move on to bigger things. First, they started to get to know the other people living around the Mediterranean Sea, especially the Phoenicians (foy-NEE-shans), [...]
Did climate change cause a Bronze Age crisis? Tomb stela of Nemti-ui, from the First Intermediate Period. The stele's only painted, not carved, because people couldn't afford carving after the climate change collapse. But even as people created the world's first cities and governments, the world continued to get warmer. This may have [...]
Fresco painting from Thera, Greece (about 1600 BC) Why are they called frescos? Fresco is the Italian word for "fresh", and that's because painters do fresco painting on fresh, wet plaster walls. What is plaster? Egyptian painting All our ancient Egypt articles Why paint on wet plaster? That way the colors really sink in [...]
