by Aseem Gupta | Jan 30, 2016 | History, Empires & Civilizations
Britain still has a king, but not a ruler in the medieval sense. King Charles III opens Parliament, receives ambassadors, appoints a prime minister, grants Royal Assent to legislation and performs ceremonies saturated with ancient symbolism. Yet he does not decide tax...
by Aseem Gupta | Jan 29, 2016 | History, Empires & Civilizations
The history of the United Kingdom begins long before there was a United Kingdom—and even before Britain was permanently an island. England, Britain, Great Britain, and the United Kingdom are often used as though they were interchangeable. They are not. England is one...
by Aseem Gupta | Jan 28, 2016 | History, Empires & Civilizations
In July 1799, during Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, French soldiers strengthening a fort near the Mediterranean town of Rashid uncovered a broken slab of dark stone. The inscription on it was not a forgotten chronicle of the pyramids or the confession of a pharaoh....
by Aseem Gupta | Jan 27, 2016 | History, Empires & Civilizations
Persia has fallen many times. Its capitals have been captured, its dynasties overthrown, its cities burned, its territories divided and its religions transformed. Assyrians, Macedonians, Arabs, Turks and Mongols all conquered parts of the Iranian world. Russia and...
by Aseem Gupta | Jan 26, 2016 | History, Empires & Civilizations
Herodotus was born around 484 BCE in Halicarnassus, a Greek-speaking city ruled by the Persian Empire. That position placed him between worlds. He belonged to Greek culture, yet he grew up inside the political order that Greece would later remember as its great...
by Aseem Gupta | Jan 25, 2016 | History, Empires & Civilizations
India is at once a modern republic, a geographical region and a civilizational space whose boundaries have never remained fixed for long. The kingdoms and empires of the past rarely governed the exact territory marked on today’s political map. Many of the most...
