Around 800 CE, the ancient Maya abandoned the magnificent cities they had lived in for centuries. NOVA investigates new scientific evidence for droughts that pushed cities already stressed by overpopulation and warfare beyond their limits.

Written four hundred years before the birth of Christ, this detailed contemporary account of the long life-and-death struggle between Athens an Sparta stands an excellent chance of fulfilling its author's ambitious claim that his writing was designed to last forever. Thucydides himself (c-460-400 B.C.) was an Athenian and achieved the rank of general in the earlier stages of the war. He applied thereafter a passion for accuracy and a contempt for...

"Golden-shielded, silver-sworded, man-loving, male-child slaughtering Amazons." That is how the fifth-century Greek historian Hellanicus described the Amazons, and they have fascinated society ever since. Did they really exist? Until recently, scholars consigned them to the world of myth, but Lyn Webster Wilde journeyed into the homeland of the Amazons, and uncovered astonishing evidence of their historic reality. North of the Black Sea, she found...

Text and photographs present a description of early humans: their origins; their tools and weapons; how they hunted and foraged for food; and the role of family life, money, religion, and magic.

Humorous text and illustrations describe what life was like for Assyrians, including their daily chores, how soldiers were chosen, and the jobs soldiers had to do during conflicts and in times of peace.

"This great poem stands with Virgil's Aeneid as one of the vital and enduring achievements of Latin literature.... Based on the tenets of Epicurean philosophy, On the Nature of Things asserts that matter is composed of an infinite number of small particles; that even the soul, like the body, is made up of these atoms and dissolves painlessly after death; that there is no afterlife and therefore no cause for fear; and that the universe operates without...

The influence of Euripides on the development of the dramatic genre cannot be overstated. Along with Sophocles and Aeschylus he is regarded as one of the three great Greek tragedians from classical antiquity. One of the most important of Euripides' surviving dramas is "Medea", the story of its title character, the wife of Jason of the Argonauts, who seeks revenge upon her unfaithful husband when he abandons her for a another bride. Set in Corinth...

"Prehistory covers the period of some 4 million years before the start of written history, when our earliest ancestors, the Australopithecines, existed in Africa. But this is relatively recent compared to the whole history of the earth of some 4.5 billion years. A key aspect of prehistory is that it provides a sense of scale, throwing recent ways of life into perspective. Humans and their ancestors lived in many different ways and the cultural variety...

Introduces young readers to some of the most fascinating ancient civilizations in the world's history and the legacies they left behind, from the intriguing world of pharaohs in Ancient Egypt, to the arts of Greece and Rome, to the amazing culture of the Mayans.