Tides of History

Justinian is, without a doubt, one of the most impactful historical figures of the past 2,000 years. Professor Peter Sarris, a longtime favorite historian of mine, has written an oustanding new accoun...

The Scythians transformed the Eurasian steppe. They built giant burial mounds for their powerful kings, raided and plundered their sedentary neighbors, and laid down the template for every nomadic emp...

For millennia, the Eurasian steppe has been the highway connecting the distant ends of Europe and Asia. But at the beginning of the Iron Age, something important changed. A new people, the Scythians, ...

The Persian Wars came to an end in the spring of 479 BC, when the land forces of the allied Greeks met the Persian army in an epic clash at Plataea. But the legacy of the Persian Wars would last for d...

In excavating massive Iron Age burial mounds in southern Siberia, Dr. Gino Caspari is doing some of the most innovative archaeology in the world, and he's doing it in one of the most remote places on ...

The Persian invasion of Greece aimed to do one thing above all else: punish Athens for its transgressions against the Great King. After defeating Leonidas, the vast army descended on Attica and burned...

In 480 BC, the Persian Great King Xerxes descended on mainland Greece with one of the largest armies and navies the world had ever seen. The Persians swept through the approaches to Greece, winning al...

When we think about the wars between the Persians and the Greeks, our perspective is quite explicitly that of the Greeks. But how did the Persians view these conflicts, and what were they after? Profe...

While Cyrus the Great built the Persian Empire from the ground up, his successors expanded it until the new state stretched from the Indus Valley of Pakistan to the Upper Nile, Kazakhstan to the Aegea...

The kingdoms of Iron Age Anatolia survive only as whispers in the archaeological and historical record; others exist through enigmatic references and legends in the writings of foreigners; and still o...