Pirates in the Golden Age of Piracy (1690-1730) both dished out and received a wide range of imaginative punishments. Victims of piracy endured torture, floggings, and ceremonies of humiliation, but.....

Serapis is a Graeco-Egyptian god of the Ptolemaic Period (323-30 BCE) of Egypt developed by the monarch Ptolemy I Soter (r. 305-282 BCE) as part of his vision to unite his Egyptian and Greek subjects....

Orisha (also given as Orisa and Orishas) are supernatural entities usually referred to as deities in the Yoruba religion of West Africa, though they are actually emanations or avatars of the supreme.....

Madam Wang was a Chinese noblewoman who could trace her ancestry back to the ancient kingdom of Yan. Helped by her noble blood, Madam Wang and her sister were both accepted into the imperial…

Speakers Corner and Tyburn hill and gallows where many highwaymen and criminals were hanged

Pliny the Younger’s (61-112 CE) letter (Epistulae X.96) to Roman Emperor Trajan (r. 98-117 CE) is one of our earliest sources on Christianity from an outsider’s point of view. It highlights the Christ...

With 7600 perimeter miles (12,231 km), the Scythians roamed and ruled over an astonishing 1.5 million mi² (2.4 million km² of territory between the 7th and 3rd centuries BCE. Although building an ...

Mary Read, sometimes spelt Reade (b. c. 1690), was an infamous pirate during the Golden Age of Piracy (1690-1720) active in the Bahamas until her capture by the Jamaican authorities in 1720. As a crew...