All posts filed under: Behind the Scenes

Advancing the “Humanidades Digitales”

To mark Ancient History Encyclopedia’s latest international partnership with Humanidades Digitales CAICYT in Buenos Aires, Argentina, James Blake Wiener of Ancient History Encyclopedia (AHE) speaks to Dr. Gimena del Rio Riande, a researcher at the Seminario de Edicion y Crítica Textual (SECRIT-IIBICRIT) of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), about the state of the digital humanities in Argentina, in addition the potential implications and promise of digital research in the Hispanosphere and wider world alike. JW: Dr. Gimena del Rio Riande, thank you for speaking with me and welcome to AHE. What is the state of the “digital humanities” in Argentina and Latin America? What specific challenges are encountered in the region, and what can researchers abroad do to assist? GDRR: Every time someone asks me this question, the first thing I do is to say that the “digital humanities” or “DH” is not the same as the humanidades digitales or “HD” in Spanish. While the digital humanities is nowadays an expanding scientific field with a clear tradition in relation to the humanities, computing, computational linguistics, …

Laurels .eu Web Award 2016

AHE won the .eu Web Award

With immense pleasure and excitement, I can announce that Ancient History Encyclopedia has won the .eu Web Award 2016 in the Laurels (education) category! This is great confirmation that providing accurate and easy-to-read history information for free is appreciated not only by teachers, students, and history enthusiasts around the world but also by major institutions within the European Union.

What Inspires Us?

Here at Ancient History Encyclopedia, we have been discussing what inspires us and decided our readers might be interested in the conversation as well. With that in mind, have a read of what inspires some of AHE’s  key figures to do what they do! Jan van der Crabben CEO and Founder Changing the world; no less! I believe that we can make a real difference to society by helping students get interested in history, so that they learn more about it on their own. Too often schools fail to create an interest in our past, but it’s our past through which we understand our present. If you know your history, it’s hard to be xenophobic, racist, or nationalist…understanding how we’re all connected and share our history is an important step in creating a better world.

Searching for the Remaining Dead Sea Scrolls

At the beginning of May an exciting initiative began by the IAA (Israeli Antiquities Authority) to excavate the caves in the Judean Desert in search of the remaining Dead Sea Scrolls. The catalyst for this was partially due to the area being a prime spot over the last few years for looters and antiquities thieves who have been selling their findings on the black market. Thats why the IAA along with the several other organisations have come together to begin a national plan to find the remaining Dead Sea Scrolls, before the looters do. The Dead Sea Scrolls (for those who do not know) were a collection of over 900 manuscripts from the Second Temple Period found in caves in Qumran, northwest of the Dead Sea. During this period, families and rebels were hiding from the Roman Empire in caves, hence why the scrolls were found hidden in caves. This excavation was south of that location in a place known as The Cave of Skulls in the Judean Desert.

AHE Launches History et cetera Video Series

A new series of entertaining and educational videos created by Ancient History Encyclopedia, in co-production with Past Preservers, will expand and enhance the availability of online resources pertaining to the study of the ancient world. Ancient History Encyclopedia (AHE), a nonprofit, digital humanities website focused on global ancient history, announced today that they are launching a series of videos under the title History et cetera with Past Preservers. This new series will bring fresh and engaging video content to Ancient History Encyclopedia, offering the “YouTube generation” expert knowledge on a variety of topics related to history, archaeology, and much more. This video series is designed to appeal to students, educators, and history enthusiasts alike.

Osama Receives Honours

Sulaymaniyah Museum Honours AHE’s Osama Muhammed

It is with great pleasure that I report the honour bestowed upon Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin, one of the key contributors to Ancient History et cetera: In conjunction with International Museum Day on 18 May 2016, the Sulaymaniyah Museum honoured Osama’s contribution to the development of the museum, through the publication of several articles detailing the museum, its artefacts, and its discoveries here on AHetc. We’re incredibly proud of Osama’s achievement, and grateful for his unique and highly interesting contributions to this site, giving us a glimpse of the treasures of Iraq, which are otherwise inaccessible to most of us.

My Top 10 Favourite Posts from AHetc Contributors

Hi everyone, I am Jade Koekoe, blog editor of AHetc. As an end of year treat I thought I would share with everyone my 10 favourite blog posts of 2015. 10 Hidden Ancient Treasures in Caria I love learning from people who have visited a place before me, this is why Carole Raddato‘s 10 Hidden Ancient Treasure in Caria, is top on my list. Carole provides a brief history of each place on her list and details the site’s significance today. This article is a truly wonderful guide for people wanting to travel to Caria in future. Carole has also written a similar post for AHE about Provence, France.

Happy Holidays & 2015 Summary

Dear Readers! Once again, it’s that time of year. Most of our readers are ready for the festivities of Christmas, gathering with their families, and enjoying a festive moment. Most of our team will do the same, and we wish you all Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year! 2015 in Review It’s time to look at what we’ve achieved in 2015… Quite a lot, in fact! It’s been a very good year for Ancient History Encyclopedia. Let’s have a look at some numbers, with comparisons to last year: Reach We’re now the #1 ancient history website and the #4 general history website in the world Surpassed 1,000,000 monthly unique readers, currently 1.7 million Served a grand total of 12,184,308 unique readers on Ancient History Encyclopedia, helping them learn about ancient history (+82%) Served a grand total of 65,442 unique readers on Ancient History et cetera, sharing our love of history (+216%) Grew our newsletter to 5,100 subscribers (+200%) Our content has been widely and repeatedly cited by publications such as: – National Geographic – BBC – New York Times – Time – CNN – …

Our Little-Known but Amazing Tools for History Buffs

With several thousand pages, Ancient History Encyclopedia is huge! There are a few features on our site that most people don’t know about, but which are absolutely amazing! So come give our amazing tools for history buffs a try: We’ve got a searchable timeline of ancient history. Just enter a date range and a few keywords and you’ll see a list of timeline entries. You can even search by event category, such as warfare or philosophy. By searching the world timeline, relationships between events appear that you never knew were there.

New Record: 1 Million Monthly Readers

It’s an immense pleasure to tell you that we’ve just surpassed a major milestone this month: We now have over 1,000,000 monthly unique visitors on Ancient History Encyclopedia! A million! Every month. Wow… mind blowing. This is by far the biggest success we have ever celebrated here at the AHE team in our six-year history. This makes us without a doubt the world’s #1 ancient history website: We were already ranked the world’s 11th history website overall on July’s data where we only had 675,000 unique visitors, with no website specific to ancient history in front of us. Now there’s no possible doubt that we’re the #1 for ancient history! When I launched AHE over six years ago, I had no idea we would ever reach such heights. It was just a little side project… Now it’s a non-profit organisation with 14 amazing team members (all very dedicated volunteers), countless contributors from all over the globe, members & donors who support us financially, and partnerships with many other reputable organisations. We’ve become kind of a big deal now, and we get more …