Civilizations
The first cities, kingdoms and cultures, and how they lived, traded and fell.
Featured in Civilizations
Start with these, then follow the links inside each article wherever they lead.
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia is a historical region of West Asia situated within the Tigris-Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. It corresponds roughly to the territory of modern Iraq.
Sumer
Sumer is the earliest known civilization, located in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia (now south-central Iraq), emerging during the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Ages between the 5th and 4th millennium BC. Like nearby Elam, it is one of the cradles of civilization, along with Egypt, the Indus Valley, the Erligang culture of the Yellow River valley, Caral-Supe, and Mesoamerica. Living along the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Sumerian farmers grew an abundance of grain and other crops, a surplus of which enabled them to form urban settlements.
Indus Valley Civilisation
The Indus Valley Civilisation, also known as the Indus Civilisation, was a Bronze Age civilisation in the northwestern regions of South Asia, lasting from 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE, and in its mature form from 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE. Together with ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China, it was one of the four centres of the ancient world; it was geographically larger than ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia combined. It spanned much of Pakistan, northwestern India, and northeast Afghanistan.
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece was an ancient civilization existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th-9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity (c. 600 AD), comprising a loose collection of culturally and linguistically related city-states and regions, primarily centered in the northeastern area of the Mediterranean Sea. Prior to the Roman period, most of this area was officially unified only once, from 338 to 323 BC under the Kingdom of Macedon.
Maya civilization
The Maya civilization was a Mesoamerican civilization that existed from antiquity to the early modern period. Known by its ancient temples and glyphs (script), the civilization is also noted for its art, architecture, mathematics, calendar, and astronomical system.
Olmecs
The Olmecs or Olmec were an early major Mesoamerican civilization, flourishing in the modern-day Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco from roughly 1200 to 400 BC during Mesoamerica's formative period. They are known as one of the cradles of civilization.
Kingdom of Kush
The Kingdom of Kush, also known as the Kushite Empire, or simply Kush, was an ancient kingdom in Nubia, centered along the Nile Valley in what is now northern Sudan and southern Egypt. The region of Nubia was an early cradle of civilization, producing several complex societies that engaged in trade and industry.
Ancient Carthage
Ancient Carthage was an ancient civilization based in North Africa. It grew from a small settlement in present-day Tunisia into the Carthaginian Empire, a major power that dominated the western half of the Mediterranean Sea.
Minoan civilization
The Minoan civilization was a Bronze Age culture centered on the island of Crete. Known for its monumental architecture and Minoan art, it is often regarded as the first civilization in Europe.
Mycenaean Greece
Mycenaean Greece, also called Mycenaean civilization, was the last phase of the Bronze Age in ancient Greece, spanning the period from approximately 1750 to 1050 BC. It represents the first advanced and distinctively Greek civilization in mainland Greece with its palatial states, urban organization, works of art, and writing system. The Mycenaeans were mainland Greek peoples who were likely stimulated by their contact with insular Minoan Crete and other Mediterranean cultures to develop a more sophisticated sociopolitical culture of their own.
Achaemenid Empire
The Achaemenid Empire was an ancient Iranian empire founded by Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid dynasty in 550 BC. At peak, its territorial extent was roughly 5.5 million square kilometres (2.1 million square miles), making it the largest empire of its time.
Maurya Empire
The Maurya Empire was a geographically extensive Iron Age historical power in South Asia with its power base in Magadha. Founded by Chandragupta Maurya around c.
Gupta Empire
The Gupta Empire was an Indian empire during the classical period of the Indian subcontinent which existed from the mid 3rd century to mid 6th century CE. At its peak, the dynasty ruled over an empire that spanned much of the northern Indian subcontinent. This period has been considered as the Golden Age of India by some historians, although this characterisation has been disputed by others.
Khmer Empire
The Khmer Empire was an empire in mainland Southeast Asia, centred on hydraulic cities in what is now northern Cambodia. Known as Kambuja by its inhabitants, it grew out of the former civilisation of Chenla and lasted from 802 to 1431 AD. Historians call this period of Cambodian history the Angkor period, after the empire's most well-known capital, Angkor.
Great Zimbabwe
Great Zimbabwe was a city in the south-eastern hills of the modern country of Zimbabwe, near Masvingo. It was settled from around 1000 AD, and served as the capital of the Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe from the 13th century.
Kingdom of Aksum
The Kingdom of Aksum, or the Aksumite Empire, was a kingdom in the Horn of Africa and South Arabia from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages, based in what is now Eritrea and Northern Ethiopia, and spanning present-day Djibouti, Sudan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Emerging from the earlier Dʿmt civilization, the kingdom was founded in the 1st century.
Hittites
The Hittites were an Anatolian Indo-European people who formed one of the first major civilizations of the Bronze Age in West Asia. Possibly originating from beyond the Black Sea, they settled in north-central Anatolia in the early 2nd millennium BC. There they formed a series of polities, including the kingdom of Kussara (before 1750 BC), the Kanesh or Neša (c. 1750-1650 BC), and an empire centered on their capital, Hattusa (around 1650 BC).
Phoenicia
The Phoenicians were an ancient Semitic-speaking people who inhabited city-states in Canaan along the Levantine coast of the eastern Mediterranean, primarily in present-day Lebanon. Their maritime civilization expanded and contracted over time, with its cultural core stretching from Arwad to Mount Carmel.
Etruscan civilization
The Etruscans created a civilization in Etruria, in ancient Italy, with a common language and culture, and formed a federation of city-states. After adjacent lands had been conquered, its territory covered, at its greatest extent, roughly what is now Tuscany, western Umbria and northern Lazio, as well as what are now the Po Valley, Emilia-Romagna, south-eastern Lombardy, southern Veneto and western Campania.
Teotihuacan
Teotihuacan is an ancient Mesoamerican city located in a sub-valley of the Valley of Mexico, which is located in the State of Mexico, 40 kilometers (25 mi) northeast of modern-day Mexico City. Teotihuacan is known today as the site of many of the most architecturally significant Mesoamerican pyramids built in the pre-Columbian Americas, namely the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon.
Nabataean Kingdom
The Nabataean Kingdom, also named Nabatea () was a political state of the Nabataeans during classical antiquity. The Nabataean Kingdom stretched south along the Tihamah into the Hejaz, up as far north as Damascus, which it controlled for a short period (85-71 BC).
Cahokia
The Cahokia Mounds (11 MS 2) is the site of a Native American city (which existed c. 1050-1350 AD) directly across the Mississippi River from present-day St.
Silk Road
The Silk Road was a network of Asian trade routes active from the second century BCE until the mid-15th century. Spanning over 6,400 km on land, it played a central role in facilitating economic, cultural, political, and religious interactions between the Eastern and Western worlds.
Shang dynasty
The Shang dynasty, also known as the Yin dynasty (殷代; Yīn dài), was a Chinese royal dynasty that ruled in the Yellow River valley during the 2nd millennium BC, traditionally succeeding the Xia dynasty and followed by the Western Zhou dynasty. The classic account of the Shang comes from texts such as the Book of Documents, Bamboo Annals and Shiji.
Babylon
Babylon was an ancient city located on the lower Euphrates river in southern Mesopotamia, within modern-day Hillah, Iraq, about 85 kilometres (53 miles) south of modern-day Baghdad. Babylon functioned as the main cultural and political centre of the Akkadian-speaking region of Babylonia.
Assyria
Assyria was a major ancient Mesopotamian civilization that existed from the 21st to the 7th century BCE which conquered and administered most of West Asia from the Assyrian heartland in Upper Mesopotamia. Assyria is called the first true military superpower in human history, and pioneered major inventions and advances in the first libraries and large-scale preservation and accumulation of knowledge, as well as in statecraft, centralised government, bureaucracy, warfare, military organisation, propaganda, art, and architecture.
Zhou dynasty
The Zhou dynasty was a royal dynasty of China that existed for 790 years from c. 1046 BC until 256 BC, the longest span of any dynasty in Chinese history. During the Western Zhou period (c. 1046, 771 BC), the royal house, surnamed Ji, had military control over territories centered on the Wei River valley and North China Plain.
Parthian Empire
The Parthian Empire, also known as the Arsacid Empire (), was a major Iranian political and cultural power centered in ancient Iran from 247 BC to 224 AD. Its latter name comes from its founder, Arsaces I, who led the Parni tribe in conquering the region of Parthia in Iran's northeast, then a satrapy (province) under Andragoras, who was rebelling against the Seleucid Empire. Mithridates I (r. c. 171, 132 BC) greatly expanded the empire by seizing Media and Mesopotamia from the Seleucids.
Sasanian Empire
The Sasanian Empire, officially Eranshahr (Middle Persian: 𐭠𐭩𐭥𐭠𐭭𐭱𐭲𐭥𐭩, romanized: Ērānšahr, lit. 'Empire of the Iranians'), was an Iranian empire that was founded and ruled by the House of Sasan from 224 to 651 AD (the era of late antiquity). Lasting for over four centuries, the length of the Sasanian dynasty's reign over ancient Iran was second only to that of the Arsacid dynasty of Parthia which immediately preceded it.
Kingdom of Benin
The Kingdom of Benin or Empire of Benin, also known as Great Benin, is a traditional kingdom in southern Nigeria. It has no historical relation to the modern republic of Benin, which was known as Dahomey from the 17th century until 1975.
Songhai Empire
The Songhai Empire was a state located in the western part of the Sahel during the 15th and 16th centuries. At its peak, it was one of the largest African empires in history.
Caral-Supe civilization
Caral-Supe was a complex pre-Columbian era society that included as many as thirty major population centers in what is now the Caral region of north-central coastal Peru. The civilization flourished between the 4th and 2nd millennia BCE, with the formation of the first city generally dated to around 3500 BCE, at Huaricanga, in the Fortaleza area.
Ancestral Puebloans
The Ancestral Puebloans, also known as Ancestral Pueblo peoples or the Basketmaker-Pueblo culture, were an ancient Native American culture of Pueblo peoples spanning the present-day Four Corners region of the United States, comprising southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Colorado. They are believed to have developed, at least in part, from the Oshara tradition, which developed from the Picosa culture.
Srivijaya
Srivijaya, also spelled Sri Vijaya or Sriwijaya, was a Malay thalassocratic empire based on the island of Sumatra that influenced much of Southeast Asia. Srivijaya was an important centre for the expansion of Buddhism from the 7th to 11th century.
Angkor Wat
Angkor Wat is a Vaishnava Hindu and Theravada Buddhist temple complex in Siem Reap, Cambodia, and the largest religious complex in the world. Located on a site measuring 162.6 hectares (1.6 km2; 401.8 acres) within the ancient capital of Angkor, it was constructed between 1113 and 1150 CE during the reign of the Khmer king Suryavarman II as a Hindu temple dedicated to Vishnu.
Göbekli Tepe
Göbekli Tepe is a Neolithic archaeological site in Upper Mesopotamia (al-Jazira) in modern-day Turkey. The settlement was inhabited from around 9500 BCE to at least 8000 BCE, during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic.