Europe

Just what are the similarities between ancient Greece and the Roman Empire? You can find out in this section with a podcast that tackles just that, or you can listen to or read the large variety of resources that explore everything from poetry, drama, religious beliefs and the men and women that populated and shaped the Ancient World. Read more

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  • History Abridged: Salt mines in Eastern Europe

    Article

    History Abridged: This feature seeks to take a person, event or period and abridge, or focus on, an important event or detail that can get lost in the big picture. See all History Abridged articles Towards the end of the Bronze Age, the climate across Europe began to warm. This...

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  • History Abridged: The City of Alexandria

    Article

    History Abridged: This feature seeks to take a person, event or period and abridge, or focus on, an important event or detail that can get lost in the big picture. Think Horrible Histories for grownups (without the songs and music). See all History Abridged articles One of the oldest cities...

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  • Film: Attic Inscriptions

    Article

    Public Museums, National Trust Properties and private homes across the UK contain thousands of antiquities deriving from the ancient Greek world. Many of these were obtained by those who ventured upon the Grand Tour, a cultural expedition to Europe undertaken by wealthy young men in the eighteenth and ninteteenth centuries. In...

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  • History Abridged: the Acropolis

    Article

    History Abridged: This feature seeks to take a person, event or period and abridge, or focus on, an important event or detail that can get lost in the big picture. Think Horrible Histories for grownups (without the songs and music). See all History Abridged articles The Acropolis of Athens is...

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  • Anything but enlightened: child slavery in the Roman world

    Article

    Through evidence and models, Ulrike Roth explores the role of child slavery in ancient Rome. Ancient Rome has been a source of inspiration throughout the ages. Some of the most remarkable thinkers in human history have drawn on one or other of Roman society’s great achievements. The profound reflection on,...

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  • The amazing adventures of Pytheas the Greek

    Article

    Alf Wilkinson explores the achievements of Pytheas, the first person, as far as we know, to sail completely around the British Isles in around 325 BC. When we think of the Ancient Greeks we tend to think of warfare, drama, myths and legends, perhaps mathematics, medicine and science. What we...

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  • Space and behaviour at the court of Alexander the Great

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    Why do we behave in the way that we do? In this article, Stephen Harrison shows how our behaviour is intrinsically linked to the spaces we inhabit and he argues that Alexander the Great adopted spatial features from Persian architecture which altered the nature of his relationship with his subjects....

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  • Out and About in Paestum

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    Trevor James introduces the extraordinary archaeological remains from Greek and Roman occupation to be found at Paestum. Paestum is the more recent name of a location originally known as Poseidonia, named in honour of Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea. Poseidonia was a Greek settlement or colony on the west...

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  • The emergence of the first civilisations

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    Paul Bracey – The emergence of civilisations provided fundamental changes in the capacity for human development. This said, they exhibited similarities, differences, frailties, negative and positive attributes and should be related to a broadly based appreciation of the past. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the assumption was that...

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  • Ideas on the Shape, Size and Movements of the Earth - Pamphlet

    Article

    This classic pamphlet takes you through some of the key ideas on the shape, size and movements of the Earth as they changed over time from classical cosmology to the work of Galileo and Isaac Newton.

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  • 'Veni, Vidi, Vici!'

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    A personal reflection on Julius Caesar and the conquest of Britain Julius Caesar always brings to mind the famous dictum of Winston Churchill, ‘History will be kind to me, for I shall write it!' In his writings Julius Caesar provides a vivid and detailed account of his invasions of Britain in...

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  • The Government of the Roman Empire

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    The Government of the Roman Empire, as everyone knows, was autocratic, and, like all autocracies, it was ‘tempered by assassination' or by military revolution. The emperor ruled through an imperial service, at once civil and military, in which several grades, corresponding to the social classes of the empire, were always...

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  • How can there be a true history?

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    "How can there be a true history, when we see no man living is able to write truly the history of the last week?" (Thomas Shadwell) Indeed! Once when I had to give a talk in Spain, I found this quotation by looking up ‘history' in the Oxford English Dictionary....

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  • The Undergrowth of History

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    We can do all kinds of things with the past - examine it analytically, or question whether it ever existed, or churn it up inside ourselves until it turns into personal experience. We can dream it as we lounge amidst a heap of ruins, or petrify it into a museum;...

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  • Diagrams in History

    Article

    One of the gifts of the social sciences to history is the use of expository diagrams; but attention is rarely given to the history of diagrams. Maps - schematized representations of locations in spatial relation to one another - can be dated back to Babylonia in the late third millennium...

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