We tend to romanticise the Christmas season, that time of year when we gather with friends and family, feast and be merry. But for most of its history Christmas has been a time of sordid behaviour.

According to ancient Roman tradition, Tullus Hostilius lived in the 7th century BCE and was the third king of Rome, reigning around 673-642 BCE. His predecessor was said to have been King Nu…

Scholars and others associate Austen Henry Layard with the site of Nineveh. But a fuller appreciation of the man, and his accomplishments, must reckon with his work as a diplomat, politician, and publ...

Both the religious and the secular celebration of Christmas was forbidden by the English Puritan republic, but by no means everywhere with success.

Albertus Magnus whose scientific contribution in times considered the prehistory of science earned him the title of patron saint of natural scientists.

Agriculture arose independently at several locations across the world, beginning about 12,000 years ago. The first crops and livestock were domesticated in six rather diffuse areas including the Near....

After the upheavals of 1688, England’s shifting social order needed new ways to define itself. A taste for fine claret became one such marker of wealth and power, as Charles Ludington explains.

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The Kingdom of Mitanni, known to the people of the land, and the Assyrians, as Hanigalbat and to the Egyptians as Naharin and Metani, once stretched from present-day northern Iraq, down through Syria....