KUED Programs

The Egyptian pharaohs tried to create immortality for their god-king legacy. They attempted it with mummification and huge tombs, but most were destroyed by grave robbers and the passage of time.

The Khmer Empire, now modern Cambodia, was largely unknown until the nineteenth-century discovery of the ruins of Angkor Wat, an astonishing temple complex. Long abandoned, its huge and beautiful symmetry reveals it as an attempt to create a Hindu concept of Heaven, here on earth.

The Phoenicians did not create an empire, but several city-states such as Byblos and Carthage. They were very successful seafaring traders. Their most influential legacy is the creation of a simple alphabet for business transactions.

The Romans ruthlessly conquered Carthage and the rest of the Mediterranean region, but also gained the allegiance of most of the people they subdued. How? By giving them citizenship and including them in the benefits of empire, best exemplified by one of Rome’s good emperors, Hadrian.

Like the Romans, the Incas conquered a large number of cultures, binding them together with a network of roads. The Incas also showed remarkable engineering skills in buildings and terraced farming fields, as at Machu Picchu.