The Huns reached their peak under Attila (c. 406-453), who ruled from 434 until his death. He crossed the Danube River twice and invaded Anatolia in 441 but failed to conquer Constantinople, although he did extract 6,000 pounds of gold in tribute from the city

The history of early christianity taught within the religion often focuses on the sacrifices of martyrs who refused to renounce their faith even when threatened with torture and violent death.

Christianity was especially attractive to people who lacked social standing and wealth

A Roman legion built eight forts and a 6.5 mille wall around the fortress and began a siege that lasted about nine months. In the summer and fall of 72, 10,000 workers carried stones up sheer cliffs to build a 1,400 foot ramp. In April 73, when the Romans stormed the walls via the ramp, they found 960 bodies. The defenders had committed mass suicide, except for two women and five children who had hidden in a cistern, who told the tale. Masada, in the Judean Desert, with the Dead Sea in the distance

Cleopatra VII (69-30 BCE) was one of the final Egyptian pharaohs.

The Wusun reciprocated, sending twenty envoys back to China with Zhang, bearing horses and furs. These elite "heavenly horses" from the Ferghana Valley (Uzbekistan) were probably ancestors of the Akhal-Teke breed, valued for their intelligence, speed, and endurance. The descendants of these horses revolutionized Han's archer cavalry.

The Silk Road was not a single highway, but a series of overland routes that connected China with the Mediterranean, Europe, and Africa.

Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 BCE) was born into an influential patrician family in Rome.

While the Greeks and Phoenicians had been expanding across the Mediterranean, a city on the west-central coast of Italy was steadily growing in prominence. Founded according to legend in 753 BCE by orphan brothers Romulus and Remus who had been raised by wolves, the early city was ruled by seven kings (some legendary and some real).

Zeno saw the universe as a divine entity, with humans sharing its rational spark. His Republic, written as a response to Plato's book of the same name, imagined a stateless community, which shocked Athenian elites

5th-century BCE Athenian coin, featuring Athena and her symbol, the owl.

It is harder and holds a sharper edge than copper alone, which makes bronze useful for both practical tools such as knives, axes, plows, and sickles;

Egyptian Book of the Dead: Anubis weighing a dead man's heart against a feather.

Possibly the oldest is called "The Instructions of Shuruppak". Written in Sumerian about 4,600 years ago, it is structured as the advice of a father named Shuruppak, a mythical sage and ruler, to his son Ziusudra (hero of the Sumerian flood myth)

. (Note: there is a persistent rumor that Sumerian is a mysterious language that has never been deciphered. This is not true, although it is an isolated language and not part of the Semitic language group, like Akkadian.)

One of the interesting mysteries of the Minoans is that none of their surviving art seems to depict a ruler.

The most famous and recognizable remnants of ancient Egypt, of course, are the pyramids

By about 9,000 to 7,000 years ago, agricultural techniques including farming and herding had spread from the places they had developed into surrounding regions.

19th-century American painting of Native American men hunting bison on the Great Plains. Big game hunting in the northeastern woodlands was similarly a male profession.

So if we imagine a culture of people who hunted, fished, gathered, and began cultivating valuable food plants near their camps, we would be thinking of people who supported themselves in a similar way to the woodland Native American tribes of the Northeast.

One explanation scholars have proposed for the building of monuments like Gobekli Tepe) and Karahan Tepe, and later Stonehenge, is that these sites may have been important meeting places for ancient people.

Han Wu (156-87 BCE) was the seventh emperor of the Han dynasty, who ascended the throne at age fourteen and ruled for 54 years.

The earliest known Maya pyramid may be the Temple of the Masks in Uaxactun.

about the Chinese Empire: it continued (under several dynasties) until 1911. Life-size ceramic sculptures depicting the armies of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor, buried with him in 210–209 BCE

The new city (its name literally means New City) was located about fifteen miles from the older settlement at Utica. The Tunisian coast lies directly across the Mediterranean from Sicily, at a narrow spot that all ships traveling from east to west would have to pass. Two large harbors were built; one for the city's powerful navy and the other for commerce. C

The object of the battle had been control of the Mediterranean coast, which Egypt had lost during the problematic reign of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, who had tried to shift the polytheistic Egyptian religious system to a monotheism focused on Aten (or Amun-Ra), the solar deity.

Enkidu confronts Gilgamesh and they fight in the streets of Uruk. The wrestling match ends in a stalemate, since the two are evenly matched.

Cassava trees are native to central Brazil, where they were first domesticated between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago. Although the starch of the cassava tree, called manioc, is only familiar to most North Americans as tapioca or in bubble tea,

The Central Americans created the single-stem, large-eared maize plant we are familiar with, by very gradually improving a native grass called teosinte. Year after year farmers saved seeds from the best plants with the biggest seed heads

domesticated, animals need to be willing to accept a human as the leader of their herd.

. While we can’t say for sure that cousins such as Neanderthals did not share this interest and ability to create and to think symbolically, what we do know is that by 35,000 to 20,000 years ago, people were painting the walls of caves in places like France, Spain, Italy, Indonesia, and Africa. In addition, bone flutes dating from 35,000 to possibly 60,000 years old have been found in France, Germany, and Slovenia.

Nearly all people whose ancestors were not sub-Saharan Africans got about 2% of their genes from Neanderthals.

Pre-sapiens humans such as Homo erectus left Africa about 1.8 million years ago and spread as far as China and Java.