Ancient

C.A. Burland describes the highly developed, sprawling and ancient Incan civilisation in the years preceding its conquest by the Spanish seaborne empire.

A great historian of an age he disliked, Harold Mattingly shows how Tacitus has given posterity an incomparable picture of the early Roman Empire.

The Aeneid, Virgil’s epic Latin poem, offers as profound an insight into the current Libyan crisis as any 24-hour news channel, argues Robert Zaretsky.

As the TV series Ancient Worlds reaches its conclusion, its writer and presenter Richard Miles looks at the challenges of making a historical documentary.

J.H. Plumb comments on how the famous historian of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon, sought a detached and truthful past, free from preconception or the idea of inherent purpose.

At the height of the Roman Empire, hundreds of merchant ships left Egypt every year to voyage through the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean, exchanging the produce of the Mediterranean for exotic eastern commodities. Raoul McLaughlin traces their pioneering journeys. 

Richard Cavendish describes the attack, on August 24th 410, that signalled the beginning of the end of the Western Roman empire 

The economic crisis in Greece has drawn attention to the question of where best to display treasures such as the Elgin Marbles. Jonathan Downs offers some solutions to a historical tug of war.