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Ancient China has an incredibly rich historiographical tradition that is nearly as vast and complex as that of the Greeks. At the basis of this tradition lay Sima Qian’s ‘Records of the Grand Historian’, a monumental work on China’s history that spans the period between the reign of the mythical Yellow Emperor and that of the Han emperor Wu, Sima Qian’s contemporary. Sima Qian has been called the Chinese Herodotus, which at first glance seems to be a textbook example of the Eurocentric tendency to compare great eastern people to their western counterparts, but there are indeed some significant similarities between the two. Nevertheless, Sima Qian’s magnum opus – the Records of the Grand Historian, has a lot of unique Chinese characteristics as well.

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Akkadian has been one of the most influential languages in history. For
thousands of years it was the lingua franca of the Near East and the vast majority of cuneiform sources was written in this language. Knowledge of the Akkadian language and the cuneiform script in which it was written enables you to explore the Ancient Near East yourself. But how do you learn this difficult language and this even more complex script without going to university? Luckily, there is a way to learn Akkadian and the cuneiform script in no more than three months.

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The swift rise of the Persian Empire is one of the most remarkable developments of Antiquity. Within mere decades this new superpower subdued all the lands between the Aegean Sea and the steppes of Central Asia, including world powers like Lydia and Babylon. Most of these conquests were carried out by one man: Cyrus the Great. How did he bring such a vast area under his rule in such a short time?

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The Histories of Herodotus are the best known historiographical work from Antiquity. Other Greek and Roman historians have written longer and more accurate histories, but none of them has become as popular. The Histories were copied over and over again for nearly 2500 years and have survived almost intact. Why do the Histories of Herodotus fascinate us so much?

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