Category: SERIES: The Ancient World (original series)

“So it was that the Persians, who had once been the slaves of the Medes, became their masters.“ – Herodotus Nebuchadnezzar II turned Babylon into the most magnificent city of the ancient world, but the Chaldean line dissipated in his wake.  Nabonidus’ fervent devotion to […]

“Ahmose became a lover of the Hellenes; and besides other proofs of friendship which he gave to several among them, he also granted the city of Naucratis for those of them who came to Egypt to dwell in; and to those who did not desire […]

“I freed those here who suffered unseemly enslavement and feared the tempers of their masters.  I did this by harnessing force and justice together with power, and I carried through my promises.  I wrote statues alike for those of high and of low social status, […]

“So they took the king and brought him up to the king of Babylon at Riblah in the land of Hamath, and he pronounced judgment on him.  Then the king of Babylon killed the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes. And he killed all the […]

“But when earth had covered this generation also, Zeus the son of Cronos made yet another, the fourth, upon the fruitful earth, which was nobler and more righteous, a god-like race of hero-men who are called demi-gods, the race before our own, throughout the boundless […]

“Nineveh is laid waste: who will bemoan her?  Whence shall I seek comforters for thee?” – Nahum 3:7 Ashurbanipal spent the end of his reign establishing a library of Mesopotamian knowledge and culture.  Twenty years after his death, internal discord and powerful enemies combined to […]

In the mid-seventh century BC, Nubia and Assyria struggled for control over Egypt before the kingdom regained independence under the pharaoh Psamtik I.  King Gyges of Lydia drove the Cimmerians from western Anatolia and sent Greek mercenaries to reinforce the pharaoh’s armies.  Ashurbanipal spent decades […]

“The city and its houses, from its foundations to its walls, I destroyed, I devastated, I burned with fire.  The wall and outer wall, temple-tower of brick and earth, temples and gods, and many as there were, I razed and dumped into the Arahtu-Canal.  Through […]

In the west, Phoenician mastery of the Mediterranean was challenged by widespread Greek colonization.  Rome’s first kings established the boundaries and institutions of the early state.  In the Near East, Sennacherib was confronted with the return of a Chaldean usurper to the Babylonian throne. Series […]