Mapping the shifts in ancient Greek territories

Watch Mediterranean power shift over millennia with this animated map

The ancient Mediterranean holds a vast amount of history; from Egypt to Rome, the coasts of this sea are home to some of the most advanced ancient civilizations. This video displays on a map the many different civilizations that rose and fell around the fertile region, from the year 2500 BCE to 0 BCE.

Maritime trade in the Mediterranean accelerated during the late Bronze Age

This map illustrates the vibrant trade networks of the eastern Mediterranean during the Late Bronze Age (circa 1500–1200 BCE), highlighting an era of growing interconnectivity among major powers including Egypt, the Hittite Empire, Mesopotamia, and others.

Ancient Greece originated roughly 4,000 years ago around the Aegean Sea

From architectural feats to the Western alphabet, ancient Greece has helped shape modern life. Over centuries, the eastern Mediterranean culture grew as far as India, Egypt, and Spain. Its cultural influence has long since spread beyond any physical boundaries.

Interactive human migration map

Using archeological, genetic, and climate data, scientists have pieced together an outline of the human odyssey—the journey that took our species from Africa to all corners of the globe. Experience this 200,000-year migration using an interactive human migration map.

See how migrating tribes reshaped Europe after the fall of Rome

During the early Middle Ages (c. 300–700 CE), groups such as the Franks, Vandals, Visigoths, and Suebi migrated into former Roman territories. Their movements transformed European politics and culture while preserving many Roman traditions.

Medieval Europe was a patchwork of hundreds of competing states

In the Middle Ages, Europe was divided into hundreds of kingdoms, duchies, and territories, bearing little resemblance to modern borders. This map captures the political landscape in 1444, as the Ottoman Empire was in the midst of its rise.

A map of the Byzantine Empire

This map, hosted on the World History Encyclopedia, shows the Byzantine Empire in four eras. The area shaded dark purple is the original Eastern Roman Empire. The light purple areas represent the conquests of Justinian. The dark purple line surrounds the middle Byzantine Empire. The hatched area, finally, indicates the small “Latin Empire” established after the Fourth Crusade.

How did Polynesian wayfinders navigate the Pacific Ocean?

Ancient Polynesian navigators used the sun, moon, stars, clouds, currents, and more to sail the seas. People of Southeast Asia began their voyages to the region now known as Polynesia in roughly 1500 BCE. They would settle a vast area of 15 million square miles, including hundreds of islands, moving from islands due to overpopulation or war. Such voyages dwindled in 1300 CE as societies became more rooted.

An illustrated guide to the ancient Greek version of the Olympics

Go back to the original time and place of the athletic contest with this illustrated guide to the Games. For 1,200 years, the ancient Greeks would gather every four years for the Games in Elis, months after heralds had spread the word of the event to the region's many peninsulas, with its greatest athletes competing for honor.

Homer's warrior tales were loosely based on the Mycenaean civilization

The great eighth-century BCE poet Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey" portray a great warrior culture based in large palaces around the Aegean Sea in the Mediterranean. Historians and archaeologists have long believed Homer's stories were based on the Mycenaean civilization, which flourished several centuries before his time.

Mapping the Middle East showing Sunni and Shia populations by country

France24's interactive visualization shows where each branch of Islam predominates across the region, from Iran's Shia majority to Saudi Arabia's Sunni dominance. The map helps make Middle Eastern politics (and conflicts) more legible.

Stanford built a Google Maps for the Roman Empire, revealing how much it cost to travel in the ancient world

The Dokos shipwreck, the oldest discovered to date, is more than 4,000 years old

Many of the oldest shipwrecks yet discovered sank during the late Bronze Age as Mediterranean trade networks began to flourish. This video explores the nine oldest wreckage sites, topped by the wreck off the Greek island of Dokos.

The underground cities of the Byzantine Empire

This TED-Ed video explores the mysterious cave cities of Cappadocia. Although their oldest sections may go back to the Bronze Age, most of these subterranean complexes were excavated during the Byzantine period, when the locals went underground to take shelter from Arab raiders. Monasteries were also cut into pinnacles of the local tufa, and decorated with frescoes that have often survived to the present.

A day in the life of an ancient Athenian during the Peloponnesian War

In 427 BCE, Athens was at war with Sparta and losing badly, and now its inhabitants had to decide the fate of another city that had revolted against Athenian rule. Follow along with the fictional Archias, Dexileia, and their three children as they live through the tumult of a city in conflict in this five-minute animation.

How the ancients calculated Earth's size correctly

Watch this seven-minute video to hear Carl Sagan explain how ancient Greek polymath Eratosthenes correctly calculated the size of the Earth in the third century BCE. At some point, Eratosthenes noticed a discrepancy in the length of shadows cast in different cities during the summer solstice. This observation grew into a simple experiment that enabled Eratosthenes, the head librarian at the Library of Alexandria, to calculate the Earth's size precisely.

The Silk Road was an ancient series of trade routes between East Asia and Europe

Founded by the Han Chinese in 130 BCE, the Silk Road was a series of trade routes connecting eastern China with the Mediterranean and the rest of Europe. The Persians created a predecessor series of routes, but the Chinese solidified the Silk Road, where travelers traded commerce, ideas, and more.

How Byzantine scholars supercharged Renaissance Italy

A brief survey of how Byzantine scholars changed the course of the Renaissance by introducing Classical Greek literature to Italy. These scholars and their students were responsible for translating, interpreting, and printing many of the most fundamental texts in the Western tradition. Without their efforts, the Italian Renaissance and Western thought would have been immeasurably poorer.

European powers carved up nearly all of Africa in just 4 decades

This video explains the "Scramble for Africa," when seven European nations seized over 90% of the continent between 1870 and 1910. Only Liberia and Ethiopia remained sovereign as imperial competition redrew Africa’s borders and reshaped its future.

Mapping the route options between the Pacific and Atlantic

This map shows some of the alternative trade route options that are available to shipping companies, from overland routes that rely on railways to transport goods coast-to-coast, to Arctic Ocean passages.

Explore the system of ancient Roman roads with this interactive

The Itiner-e map includes unpaved secondary roads that connected farms and towns to the empire's primary routes. Explore routes, view three-dimensional elevation, and compare the old roads to contemporary ones with this sprawling interactive project.

European colonization contributed to coffee's spread

European colonization created channels for large-scale coffee exports with workforces based in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Trade routes throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world carried the drink to new shores and changed the agricultural and economic landscapes of the countries in the Bean Belt.

View maps of seafloor topography, earthquakes, and volcanic activity

Earthquakes and volcanoes are most common at plate boundaries, where moving plates interact. Mapping the locations of these events creates outlines for the different tectonic plates on Earth, whose movements can be tracked via GPS satellites.

Israel’s swift victory in the Six-Day War redrew the map of the Middle East

Learn more about the June 1967 conflict which shifted territorial lines across Israel and its neighbors—Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq—reshaping the Middle East’s political landscape with long-lasting geopolitical ramifications.

For most of human history, property rights were in the elite’s hands

Humans learned to domesticate dogs long before they formed the concept of private property. But by the era of the ancient Greeks and Romans, property law and ownership became more sophisticated.

Environmental determinism links human traits and societal progress to geography

Also known as climatic determinism, the theory states that the latitudes where people are located influence their emotional and intellectual capabilities. Originating in Ancient Greece, these ideas were used throughout history to justify racial hierarchies.

See photos of Meteora, a mountainous site in central Greece, home to 14th-century monasteries perched atop soaring outcroppings.

Explore an interactive map built from more than 100,000 survey responses on where people find joy in their lives

Volcanic activity may have triggered the Black Death by spewing gases that led to crop failures in Europe, thus forcing the import of grain ships with plague-infested fleas.

Explore the history, structure, and species of Australia's Great Barrier Reef with this interactive journey narrated by Sir David Attenborough.

Track the location of the Voyager probes, currently between 13 and 15 billion miles away from Earth.

Explore the known asteroids, comets, and spacecraft involved in asteroid studies within our solar system with 'Eyes on Asteroids,' a 3D visualization from NASA.

The American cockroach is actually from Africa, an apparent hitchhiker aboard ships carrying enslaved people, with evidence suggesting the bug may have arrived in the New World as early as the 1600s.

The Russia-Ukraine conflict is the largest ground war in Europe since World War II in casualties, forces mobilized, and displacement of civilians.

The term 'algorithm' originated from the Latinized name of al-Khwārizmī, a 9th-century mathematician whose works introduced Arabic numerals and the decimal-based numeral system to Europe and whose treatise 'Al-Jabr' gave algebra its name.

For centuries, it was common to sleep in two shifts: a few hours at the beginning of the night, and a longer period beginning around midnight

Take a 3D tour of the Hajj, Islam's annual pilgrimage to Mecca, undertaken by over 1.5 million Muslims.

Alzheimer's can lead to brain shrinkage, with an average of around 2% of volume reduction per year

Scientists can determine Earth's past climate conditions by analyzing air trapped in microscopic bubbles within ice cores—columns of compressed snow layers that build up over hundreds of thousands of years.

Gerrymandering works through two techniques: cracking opposing voters across districts to dilute their power, and packing them into a few to waste their votes in lopsided majorities.

Hurricanes, which rely on air consistently spinning in the same direction, cannot cross the equator because air curves in opposite directions north and south of it.

Massive blooms of microscopic plankton called dinoflagellates produce the neon blue light seen in glowing tides.

Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps is independent of Iran's regular army and is one of the most powerful and influential military-political organizations in the Middle East.

'Shogun,' a 1980s TV series, helped popularize sushi in the US by stimulating an American interest in Japanese culture.

Play the role of a student in a game where you try to navigate college and remain debt-free, selecting different income levels, high school experience, race, ethnicity, and more.

Electrical grids worldwide must double their power delivery capacity by 2050 to meet surging demand from AI and electric vehicles.

The hormonal disorder PCOS was renamed PMOS in 2026, a move designed to improve care and research by shifting the focus to the hormonal causes of this condition that affects 1 in 8 women.

Hear 50 years of iconic hip-hop samples, the genre's foundational looped tracks

Meet the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence—most of whom didn't put pen to paper until August 2, 1776—and see their original signatures.

Hotels in Cannes, the glamorous city on the French Riviera, hire hawks to ward off seagulls during the city's famous film festival.