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Out of the immediate military reach of the great empires of Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria and Persia lay the Aegean coast (now western Turkey), the Aegean islands and the valleys of the hilly Greek peninsula beyond. The communities here developed their own small economies and benefited from the cultural and technological advances of the big empires [...]

The Romantic era in the history of architecture, which fundamentally changed the way Western culture perceived its art and architecture, was born 200 years ago alongside the first industrial age. Late 18th-century revolutionary France and America took the noble republics of the Greeks and Romans as their architectural models. But the hard rationalism, clarity and [...]

About 500 BC the Persian empire was at its height, dominating the lands of the once powerful Babylonian empire (now Iraq and Syria) and Egypt. It then began acquiring the Ionian Greek kingdoms on what is now the Turkish coast of the Aegean Sea. The states of the Greek peninsula, Dorian and Ionian alike, became [...]