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 ...

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 ...

1. In the 10th century, the world’s most advanced civilization was the Baghdad-based Abbasid Caliphate, uniting the Islamic world from North Africa to Central Asia. We don’t have to go further than ...