Read & Explore: Greece, Rome, Byzantium and the West

Ancient Greece from Knossos to Chaeronea (338 BCE): city-states, colonies, Athens and Sparta, the wars with Persia and Greek thought, on a map.

The Byzantine Empire from Constantinople's founding in 330 to its fall in 1453: Justinian, Hagia Sophia, Persia and Islam, icons, Crusaders and Ottomans.

Europe from 1450 to 1991: print and Reformation, Atlantic empires and slavery, revolutions, industry, colonial rule, two world wars and the Cold War.

The Hellenistic world from Alexander's death in 323 BCE to Cleopatra in 30 BCE: the Successor kingdoms, Alexandria's scholars and Rome's arrival.

Medieval Europe from the Franks to the Black Death: Charlemagne, Vikings, universities, translations from Arabic, the Crusades and Magna Carta, on a map.

Ancient Rome from the Republic (509 BCE) to 476 CE: conquest, slavery and citizenship, Augustus and the emperors, wars with Parthia and Sasanian Iran.

How Alexander conquered the Persian Empire (334–330 BCE): Issus, Gaugamela, the burning of Persepolis and the fate of Darius III, beyond the legend.

Athenian democracy (508–322 BCE): Cleisthenes' reforms, the Assembly, lot and juries, who was excluded, its critics, and its uneven legacy today.

The Battle of Carrhae, 53 BCE: how the Parthian general Surena destroyed Crassus' Roman army, why it happened and what the sources really tell us.

The Battle of Thermopylae (480 BCE) from both sides: Xerxes' strategy, Herodotus' unreliable numbers and what the film 300 gets wrong.

The fall of the Western Roman Empire: Goths and Huns, the sack of Rome in 410, Odoacer in 476, why it fell and why the eastern empire survived.

The Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions: Newton to Kant, America, France and Haiti, rights and slavery, women's rights, and the debates that followed.

The European Renaissance: why it began in Italian cities, humanism and the classics, Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, print, and what the label leaves out.

Achaemenid Empire vs Roman Empire compared: size, population, government, roads, religion, longevity and legacy, with honest ranges for the numbers.

Persia vs Rome: how Parthian and Sasanian Iran fought Rome and Byzantium for 700 years, from Carrhae in 53 BCE to Heraclius and the war of 602–628.

Rome and Han China compared: size, government, armies, frontiers, the Silk Road with Parthia in between, contact attempts, and why their fates diverged.

What was the world like in 550 BCE? Babylon, Lydia, Greece, Egypt, China and India at the moment Cyrus the Great founded the Persian Empire.

Follow the Ionian Revolt and the campaigns of Darius and Xerxes while separating battlefield history from the Greek literary images that later cast Persia as Europe's opposite.

From Alexander's conquest to Parthian expansion, follow political rupture alongside the survival and adaptation of Achaemenid, Iranian, Babylonian, and Greek institutions.

Greek city-states shared sanctuaries, an alphabet and poetry. Athens built self-government for its adult male citizens, turned an alliance against Persia into an empire, and after its defeat by Sparta put Socrates on trial.

Alexander's campaign seen from both sides. Macedonian propaganda presented it as revenge for Xerxes' invasion; for Iran it meant the end of the Achaemenid dynasty, whose satrapies, roads and capitals Alexander took over. Iranian events are linked rather than retold.

An aristocratic republic conquers the Mediterranean, becomes a monarchy in all but name, meets its limits on the Iranian frontier and loses its western half to new rulers.

The eastern Roman empire from Constantine to Mehmed II: a new capital, a domed church, the last war with Sasanian Iran, a long dispute over icons, a mission to Kyiv and the crusader sack of 1204.

A monastic rule, a revived western empire, translators in Toledo, early universities and Gothic cathedrals, and how Arabic and Greek learning reached them, up to the Black Death and Florence's dome.

Printing and Renaissance workshops, the Spanish conquest in the Americas and the Indigenous peoples who fought it, allied with it and recorded it, Luther's challenge and Catholic reform, the Valladolid debate and the peace that ended the Thirty Years' War.

From Copernicus and Newton to the Encyclopédie and three Atlantic revolutions, with the question Haiti forced on the age: did the rights of man include enslaved people? The tour ends with the Congress of Vienna.

Steam and cotton, revolutions and emancipation, the Suez Canal and the conquest of Africa, and industrial power as it was felt in Canton and Tehran.