Ancient History Encyclopedia joins Pelagios

We are happy to announce that Ancient History Encyclopedia is joining the Pelagios project. Ancient History Encyclopedia is a non-profit digital humanities company with the aim of providing reviewed ancient history information on the web. All content is submitted by volunteer historians, authors, and enthusiasts and is reviewed by our editors before being published. We strongly believe in open access education, which is why all our content is free and available under a creative commons license.

Our mission is to make people interested in ancient history; we want to engage our global audience, by not only presenting the facts but also by doing it in an interesting way. We believe that "story" is a key component in the word "history", and we aim to convey in all our published content our belief that history is the greatest story ever written.

Despite being a story, history is not linear (as it is taught in most school coursebooks), but rather a very parallel type of story, where everything is interlinked. This is why digital media are much better-suited to history education than books of the dead-tree type (which we still love, of course). At AHE pieces of information are tagged and shared across different but related subjects, and each page is built automatically, taking precisely the information that is relevant for that subject from our database of definitions, articles, events, and maps.

Interactive Map of the Ancient World (WIP)

We adhere to academic standards when it comes to research and citations, but our readership is far more diverse than that of an academic publication. While we love pointing to new research, we mainly publish definitions and articles presenting the ancient past along lines commonly-accepted enough to enable a student to reference them in coursework and for an instructor to accept them without question.

Many high schools and undergraduate college courses around the world point to AHE in their reading lists or use it for course material. Our mission is to let everyone learn about ancient history in an engaging and easy-to-understand way. We want our readers to get excited about ancient history, and then we want to point them to the more detailed, academic, or original sources (both on our site and across the internet).

Joining Pelagios is simply the next logical step: The more history we manage to link together, the more our readers can "dig deeper" and get lost in ancient times. The easier it is for students to find the vast amount of material that all Pelagios contributors have assembled, the better. We are very excited to be part of the vast network of data coming from high-quality websites and established institutions alike!