Gothic cathedral: Nave of Rouen cathedral (1200s AD) Northern France gets rich enough to build cathedrals In the late 1100s and early 1200s AD, the kings of France, Philip and his son Louis, [...]
Early Gothic architecture: Notre Dame of Paris (1160s AD) What came after Romanesque? After the Romanesque period in architecture, around 1100 AD, architects in western Europe gradually started to build Christian churches and palaces in [...]
Conciergerie: the king's castle in Paris (parts of it from the 1300 AD) What is the Conciergerie? The Conciergerie was the castle where the kings and queens of France lived when they [...]
Judgment of Paris -Paris is on the right (A fresco from Pompeii, ca. 79 AD) Who is the most beautiful? Once upon a time, around 1250 BC, toward the end of the [...]
Kidnapping Helen of Troy (from Pompeii) In ancient Greece, xenia meant "the way you treat strangers or foreigners". It comes from a very old Proto-Indo-European (Yamnaya) word that means "stranger" [...]
