Ancient

S.G.F. Brandon describes how the Roman conquest of Jerusalem marked a crisis in the early development of Christianity, and paved the way for a general acceptance of the Pauline message.

Despite its isolation from the mainstream of human development, Basil Davidson writes, African society before the coming of the Europeans was neither savage nor stagnant.

Michael Grant offers the tale of Rome's most infamous emperor from both his fans and detractors.

Anthony Rhodes introduces Diocletian, the first sovereign to voluntarily resign power, and how, at the opening of the fourth century, he spent his last years in a huge fortified seaside palace of his own construction.

No memorials of the past are more fantastic than the series of great statues—some of them as tall as a four-storey building—that greet the visitor to this lonely and storm-swept Pacific island. By C.A. Burland.

Geoffrey Grigson examines the treatment, by artists and poets, of the "three wise men" of Christian scripture.

Michael Grant analyses Mithras and its importance to the ancients.

Just over a thousand years ago Chinese printers completed the publication of the Confucian Classics—an event as important in the history of civilization as the printing of the Gutenberg Bible. By Adrian L. Julian.

Cyme, near the modern Smyrna, was one of the ports that served the Phrygians during the centuries from 1000-700 B.C., when they dominated Asia Minor. Freya Stark studies the civilization of this ancient people, from whom the Greeks derived one of the three modes of classical music.

David Stockton describes an important stage in the life of Cicero, the Roman philosopher, politican and theorist.