In a broad coastal plain south of the Bay of Naples stand three of the best-preserved Greek temples anywhere in the world, and they are not in Greece at all.

Founded by Milesian settlers on the Kerch Strait, Panticapaeum became the capital of the Bosporan Kingdom, a hub of grain trade where Greek and Scythian worlds fused.

Paquime in Chihuahua, Mexico was a multi-story adobe trading city that bred macaws and engineered running water, linking the Southwest and Mesoamerica from 1200 to 1450 CE.

Before the great terraced splendor of the later Persian capital, there was a quieter, more intimate royal center out on a high plain in what is now southern Iran. Pasargadae

High in the Altai Mountains, ice preserved the tattooed bodies, oldest knotted carpet, and whole horses of Iron Age steppe nomads in astonishing detail.

Some cities spread out; Pergamon climbed. Rising in tier after dramatic tier up the flank of a steep hill in western Anatolia, the ancient capital stacked its temples, palaces, and

There are ruins that whisper and ruins that still, after thousands of years, seem to speak with the full voice of empire. Persepolis belongs firmly to the second kind. Rising

Founded by Aegean settlers on the Black Sea, Phanagoria grew into a cosmopolitan Greek city where Hellenic culture met the Scythian and Sarmatian steppe.

On an August day in the year 79, or possibly a little later in the autumn, the mountain that had loomed peacefully over the Bay of Naples for as long

In the Louisiana lowlands, hunter-gatherers with no farming raised six giant concentric ridges and a huge bird-shaped mound over 3,000 years ago. Meet Poverty Point, a monument that rewrites the story of early civilisation.