For three thousand years the great stone lions above the gate of Mycenae have kept watch over an empty hill in the northeastern Peloponnese. They were carved when the citadel

Every great city needs a door to the sea, and for a thousand years the door of Rome was Ostia. At the mouth of the river Tiber, where its yellow

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.

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

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

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

Some cities are remembered for their armies, others for their gods. Sardis is remembered for its gold. Long before it became a Roman provincial town or a stop on the

In the far southeast of Iran, near the border with Afghanistan, lies a vast field of low mounds and scattered pottery baking under the sun of the Sistan desert. This

Four thousand years ago on the Ural steppe, fortified villages produced the earliest known war chariots, advanced metallurgy, and perhaps the roots of the Indo-Iranian world.