“Great civilizations are not murdered. Instead, they take their own lives.” The great historian Arnold Toynbee concluded this in his 12-volume magnum opus A Study of History. It was an exploration of ...

The feeling will be familiar to many who have visited the great cities of history: I had come to Athens for the first time and made a pilgrimage to its democratic Assembly, Plato's Academy, and ...

Key factors in the collapse of the Mayan civilization may have been located deep within a Mexican cave, as University of Cambridge-led researchers analyzed the chemical makeup of stalagmites that help ...

The fall of the world’s earliest cities has long looked like a riddle of vanished peoples and abandoned streets. A growing body of climate research now points to a simpler, starker driver: water, and ...