Collections

• The Code of Hammurabi — The First Written Law

  If a builder builds a house and it collapses and kills the...

• The Colosseum — Arena of the Eternal City

  It held 80,000 people. It had elevators powered by ropes and counterweights...

• The Dragon — Symbol of Imperial Power

  The Chinese dragon is nothing like the European dragon. It does not...

• The Dreamtime — Living Law of the Land

  The Dreamtime is not a time in the past. It is a...

• The Druids — Keepers of Sacred Knowledge

  They memorized twenty years of sacred knowledge before being permitted to write...

• The Fenghuang — Chinese Phoenix

  The Chinese phoenix is not the European phoenix — it does not...

• The Fifth Sun — Aztec Calendar Stone

  We live in the Fifth Sun. The first four suns were destroyed...

• The Firebird — Slavic Phoenix

  It comes at night to steal golden apples from the tsar's garden....

• The Flood Myth — Before Noah, There Was Utnapishtim

  The Sumerian flood story is at least a thousand years older than...

• The Golden Horde — Mongols of the West

  When Batu Khan's armies swept westward in 1241, they destroyed Poland and...

• The Grand Bazaar — Heart of the Empire

  Sixty-one covered streets. Four thousand shops. Half a million visitors on a...

• The Great Wall — Guardian of Civilization

  It took two thousand years to build and cost more lives than...

• The Haka — War Dance of the Ancestors

  Ka mate, ka mate! Ka ora, ka ora! I die, I die!...

• The Immortals — Elite Warriors of Persia

  They were always ten thousand. When one fell, another immediately took his...

• The Jade Emperor — Ruler of Heaven

  Above all the gods, spirits, and immortals of the Chinese celestial bureaucracy...

• The Janissaries — Elite Warriors of the Sultan

  They were taken as children from Christian families through the devshirme system,...

• The Kandake — Warrior Queens of Kush

  When Augustus Caesar dispatched Roman legions to pacify the frontier of Roman...

• The Katana — Soul of the Samurai

  It took a master swordsmith three months to make a single katana....

• The Legions — Rome's Unstoppable Army

  The Roman legion was the most effective military machine the ancient world...

• The Mahabharata — The Great War

  It is the longest poem in human history — ten times the...

• The Maya Calendar — Tracking the Cosmos

  The Maya did not have one calendar. They had three, running simultaneously...

• The Mongol Horse — Warriors of the Steppe

  The Mongol warrior and his horse were a single organism. From the...

• The Morrígan — Goddess of War and Fate

  She appeared on the battlefield as a crow, circling above the dying....

• The Odyssey — The Long Journey Home

  Ten years to win the war. Ten more years to get home....

• The Oracle at Delphi — Navel of the World

  Kings and generals crossed seas to sit before the Pythia — the...

• The Purple Trade — Color of Kings

  The Phoenicians discovered that the murex sea snail, found along the Lebanese...

• The Quipu — Language of Knots

  The Inca governed an empire of ten million people without writing —...

• The Rainbow Serpent — Creator of the World

  She moved across the featureless land at the beginning of time, and...

• The Royal Road — Persian Highway of Empire

  Two thousand five hundred kilometers from Susa to Sardis, with rest stations...

• The Silk Road — Bridge Between Worlds

  The Pax Mongolica — the Mongol Peace — made it possible, for...