Bronze Age Greece is seen as a golden age. This is Homer’s Greece, the Greece of the Iliad and the Trojan War, of city states and island kingdoms, of great heroes and gods and monsters. But it may surprise some to find that we actually know very little of this time. Once all the epic
The high Bronze Age saw the first emergence of complex cultures. Successive innovations in agriculture had produced a food surplus, perhaps the first meaningful one in history, and these foodstuffs could support the first cities. These complex urban centers appeared in four different places, developing alongside each other essentially at the same time along what
The idea of being visited by aliens is an appealing one, and it is not hard to see why. It would allow those who believe to feel that they are part of something much bigger, that there is a wider universe out there waiting, one which renders trivial all our domestic problems, from a planet
There are many forgotten gods in the world. Though the great pantheons of history endure along the crumbling ruins of the empires that spawned them, there are many lesser deities who run the risk of being forgotten entirely. Many pantheons as rich and varied as those of Egypt, Greece or Rome have already been half
Of all the city states of ancient Greece it is Sparta who stands out as the home of the most formidable fighting force. Athens may have been more powerful and more prosperous, but it was Sparta who bred the best warriors. Soldiery, and physical toughness were an intrinsic part of Spartan life. Famous legends of
Some would argue that human history begins in detail with the Iron Age. Although records survive in some particular locations from the earlier Bronze Age and there is much archaeology to pick over, we can only start to map the general course of our past once we have access to surviving histories, mythologies, and oral