Sources policy

What counts as a source

Primary sources (inscriptions, chronicles, letters, excavation reports) and the scholarship that interprets them: museum and university publications, encyclopaedias with named editorial standards, and peer-reviewed research. Popular summaries are used only to find the primary and scholarly material behind them.

How sources appear on the page

Every article ends with a Sources section. Items that we could verify online are linked directly; items we could not verify are listed without a link rather than linked to a guess. Statistics are attributed to whoever compiled them. Contested points are presented as contested.

Images

Illustrations are AI-generated reconstructions and are labelled as such. Photographs of sites as they look today are taken from Wikimedia Commons under CC0, public domain, CC BY or CC BY-SA licences, and the photographer and licence are shown in the caption.

Citing this site

Each article carries ready-made APA, Chicago and MLA citations at the end of the page. See Cite.