Curated playlist
States and territories disestablished in the 5th century
- OdoacerOdoacer, a barbarian soldier from the Middle Danube, changed the map of the ancient world on the 4th of September 476, when he forced the Western Roman child emperor Romulus Augustulus to abdicate. That single act has been understood ever…
- Indo-Scythian KingdomThe Indo-Scythian Kingdom began with horsemen. Nomadic peoples of Iranic Scythian origin, they rode out of Central Asia and into the Indian subcontinent across a span that lasted from the middle of the second century BCE to the fourth…
- HunsThe Huns arrived at the Volga River by 370 CE and within decades had shaken the foundations of the Roman world. They were a nomadic people from Central Asia, first recorded living east of the Volga in a region that was then considered part…
- Roman BritainRoman Britain was one of the most distant and contested corners of the Roman Empire, a province that took the better part of four decades to conquer and nearly four centuries to hold. The island sat at the edge of the known world, and for…
- Dalmatia (Roman province)Dalmatia, the Roman province, takes its name from the Dalmatae, an Illyrian tribe who lived along the central eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea. Long before any Roman administrator set foot there, the Greeks called the region Illyria. The…
- HispaniaHispania was the Roman name for the Iberian Peninsula, a stretch of land so far west that Roman writers sometimes called it Hesperia ultima, meaning the farthest western land. Rome first sent armies there in 218 BC, and what followed was…
- Gallia NarbonensisBetween the Pyrenees and the Alps, and wrapping around the Gulf of Lion, lay Gallia Narbonensis. The Roman province covered most of the Rhône river's drainage basin in what is now southern France. The Cévennes hills closed off its northern…
- Ancient RomeAncient Rome began as a cluster of graves and a timber wall. The first burials in the necropolis on the Esquiline Hill appear around 800 BC. A clay and timber wall on the lower Palatine Hill dates to the middle of the 8th century BC. From…
- Western Roman EmpireThe Western Roman Empire did not fall in a single dramatic moment. On the 4th of September 476, a Germanic military leader named Odoacer deposed a teenage emperor named Romulus Augustulus in the city of Ravenna. Barely anyone noticed. No…
- RaetiaRaetia was a province of the Roman Empire carved from the heart of the Alps, and Augustus himself had a preference for its wine above any other in the empire. That single detail tells you something about this mountain territory: it was not…
- Roman EmpireThe Roman Empire was one of the most expansive and enduring political structures the ancient world produced, stretching from Hadrian's Wall in drizzle-soaked northern England to the sun-baked banks of the Euphrates in Syria. At its height…
- Kingdom of Armenia (antiquity)The Kingdom of Armenia endured for nearly eight centuries, from 331 BC to 428 AD, outlasting empires that most schoolchildren learn as the dominant powers of the ancient world. It watched the Seleucids collapse, absorbed pieces of their…
- Africa (Roman province)Africa, the Roman province, was said to feed the entire Roman populace for eight months of the year. Egypt supplied the remaining four months of grain. The land in question ran along the northern edge of the continent that still carries…
- Sicilia (Roman province)Sicilia was the first province ever acquired by the Roman Republic, and the story of how Rome came to own it begins not with a grand strategy but with a band of mercenaries who had seized a city and didn't know where to turn. In 241 BC,…
- Roman ItalyRoman Italy begins with a myth and ends with a deposition. In 476 AD, a young emperor named Romulus Augustulus was removed from power by a Germanic chieftain named Odoacer, closing more than a thousand years of Roman rule over the Italian…