Author: Jan van der Crabben

AHE on Flipboard, magazine-style

We’ve just put over 600 of our articles and definitions onto Flipboard, an app that allows you to read great web content in a magazine-style format. It’s perfect for browsing our ancient history content on your mobile phone or tablet, but you can also read Flipboard directly in your browser on the web. To make it easier to find your favourite content, we’ve divided our content into several “magazines”, all of which are centered around a specific subject area: Roman History Greek History Mesopotamian History Assyrian History Egyptian History Americas History Asian History North European History African History General History Topics Interviews Maps History Videos History Cartoons About AHE We hope you enjoy browsing AHE in this format! From now on, we’re going to continue adding to these magazines, so you can follow us on Flipboard, too.

NuSphere Sponsorship

The kind folks at NuSphere are now sponsoring us! They have provided our programming team with the latest version of their flagship product PhpED. This is going to help us greatly in programming our website and adding new features, so that our readers can enjoy an ever improving free ancient history website. Thank you very much!

Ancient History Encyclopedia in 2013

The new year is here (at least in many parts of the world). This is, as usual, a good time to look back and examine what we’ve achieved, but also a time to look forward. We would like to share our thoughts on the past and future of Ancient History Encyclopedia with you. Growth The last year has been excellent for Ancient History Encyclopedia. We’ve had our best year ever since we launched in 2009. A whopping 2.6 million people visited our site, viewing 5.6 million pages. In the last few months of the year, we had almost 500,000 people visiting the site every month! Almost 200,000 history enthusiasts follow us on Facebook and tens of thousands more on Twitter and Google Plus. Those are absolutely stunning numbers! Let’s put that into perspective…  Encyclopedia Britannica sold 120,000 copies in its best year (that was in 1990). Most history magazines have far fewer monthly readers than we do: Archaeology Magazine has a print circulation of 235,000 copies and 225,000 website visitors, All About History has 151,000 …

Tsohost is sponsoring us!

Today we are happy to announce that we are being sponsored by Tsohost, the company that has been hosting Ancient History Encyclopedia for several years now. This is great news as it not only saves us money, but above all it means that we can improve our service to you, with faster and better hosting. We initially chose Tsohost because they had been recommended to us, and we were not disappointed! Of course there are cheaper hosting providers around, but Tsohost really convinced us with their service. They have advised us on what hosting solution is right for us, helped us move our site (which was not that easy because it is a custom-built content management system), and they have actively supported us ever since. Every problem was resolved in a few hours, and even the founder himself sometimes answers our support tickets. We are extremely happy to have arrived at this cooperation. There are many free hosting solutions around… but instead of being anonymous and without any support, we much prefer being with our …

UserVoice is sponsoring us!

We’re happy to announce that the kind people at UserVoice are sponsoring us. We’ve been using their services for quite some time now; it’s the little red feedback tab on the bottom right. They describe themselves in these terms: “UserVoice is the San Francisco-based startup that empowers you to help and understand your users so you can keep them happy with great support and be even smarter about building better products.” Well, we can honestly say that UserVoice has helped us better understand what our readers want. As they’ve now given us free access to all their services, we can not only improve our feedback forums, but we can now also add contact forms and a knowledge base to the site. Thank you very much for this support, UserVoice! 🙂

Ancient History Maps Now Online

After much preparation and a lot of work (which is far from being finished), we are pleased to include an interactive map section on Ancient History Encyclopedia. You can now geographically explore the ancient world and gain a much deeper understanding of not only geography and location, but also interconnections between civilizations and empires. The first map is a political map of ancient times that lets you set the date you want to view, and you will see the cities and state borders at that time (all searchable, of course). The terrain shows the original natural terrain in ancient times, not the modern landscape. It’s a custom-built map, and it’s not complete: At the moment you can only see borders until around 270 BCE, even though cities are already placed until a much later date. The second map is a Map of the Roman Empire (and the Classical World), created by the Pelagios Project. It doesn’t allow you to change the date or see state borders, but it offers a far more detailed view of …

Maya 3D Interview

We just had the pleasure of interviewing Mathias Kohlschmidt and Martin Gruhn, the founders of Maya3D. Together with their team of programmers, 3D artists, and historians they have recreated several ancient Maya cities in 3D and turned this into a series of interactive iOS TimeTours apps. These apps are meant to serve as both an educational instrument and an on-site travel guide at the same time. We believe that initiatives like this show us a glimpse of how the future of history education might look like.

Winning at the ancient Games

With the Olympic Games 2012 coming to London, the British Museum in London has created a new trail through the museum titled “Winning at the ancient Games”. The trail takes visitors to twelve objects in the museum that reveal more about the Olympic Games in ancient times. If you are in London, have a look — it’s free!

Uncovering Athens’ Ancient Harbour: The Zea Harbour Project Interview

The Zea Harbour Project (ZHP) is a combined land and underwater archaeological investigation of the ancient harbours of Zea and Mounichia in the Piraeus (Athens’ harbour city) in Greece. Launched in 2002 under the auspices of the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities, the 26th Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities (until 2009) and the Danish Institute at Athens, ZHP’s mission is to survey, excavate, and publish the archaeological remains of the ancient naval bases of the Piraeus. The Carlsberg Foundation has funded the project since 2004. In this interview, James Blake Wiener of the Ancient History Encyclopedia speaks with Dr. Bjørn Lovén, Associate Fellow in Maritime Archaeology at the University of Southern Denmark, and director of the ZHP.

Doggerland Recreated in 3D

Doggerland, the sunken land bridge between Britain and the European continent, has been recreated in 3D by a team of scientists. They used the computer game engine of Far Cry to create a stone age village, showing how the rising sea level might have forced the village’s inhabitants to move. SPIEGEL Online has published a slideshow.