GENERAL DESCRIPTION
GENERAL DESCRIPTION
Exploring Ancient World Cultures (EAWC) is an on-line course supplement for students and teachers of the ancient and medieval worlds. It features its own essays and primary texts. Over time it will include chapter-length histories for each of the eight "cultures" represented: The Near East, India, Egypt, China, Greece, Rome, Early Islam and Medieval Europe. Chapters on Rome, Greece and Medieval Europe will be appearing soon.
In addition, to its own resources, EAWC also includes a substantial index of internet sites, divided into five sub-indices: a chronology, an essay index, an image index, an internet site index and an electronic text index. Each sub-index is divided into sections, including one for each of the cultures represented. We have included directions for using the internet index on the index's main page.
EAWC is an associate site of the Argos Project, an internet search engine that limits the range of its responses to ancient and medieval resources. This means that most of the files that EAWC links to, along with most of those listed in the other associate sites, can be searched by way of Argos. Search boxes for Argos appear throughout the EAWC Internet Index. In addition, All of the links within EAWC that appear in SMALL CAPITAL LETTERS are direct links to Argos. These are particularly prominent in the chronology files. If you click one of them, you will be referred to an Argos return set. For an example, try EAWC.
If you are interested in contacting those responsible for this site, please address your correspondence to the General Editor, Anthony F. Beavers, at tb2@evansville.edu. If you wish to send correspondence via surface mail, please send it to Dr. Beavers at the following address: Department of Philosophy and Religion, The University of Evansville, 1800 Lincoln Avenue, Evansville, Indiana, 47722. We can also be reached by phone at 812-479-2682, and by fax at 812-479-2320.
EAWC was reviewed and included in Point's Index of the Top 5% of the World Wide Web and in Magellan, where it earned a 4-star (Magellan's highest) rating. In addition, EAWC was granted the Editor's Choice Award from Cyberschool Magazine for March, 1996, and it won the Best of the Net award from CNET. It has also been listed a couple of times on the pages of The Discovery Channel School which is part of The Discovery Channel On-Line, a website that supplements the television network, and it has been recognized by Archaeology Magazine, an official publication of the Archaeological Institute of America, as a member of the WWWorld of Archaeology. EAWC has also won an award from Education World and has been acknowledged by Houghton Mifflin's Education Place. It was reviewed in the April, 1996 issue of The Net magazine, where it received the highest ratings offered in the categories of "Content" and "Aesthetic Merit". It also won the "site of the day" award for August 27th, 1996, from Academe Today, the internet site of the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it was featured in INDnet Intersections, the quarterly newsletter of the Indiana Higher Education Telecommunications System, Fall 1996 edition. More recently, EAWC has been included in Pacific Bell's Blue Web'n Applications Library, which is reserved for "the best instructional lessons, activities, projects, resources, references, and tools on the Web," it has been "Fledge Approved" by McGraw-Hill Home Interactive, and it has been selected by World Wide Web Associates as a Top Ten winner (the top 1/10th of 1%) in the category of literature for 1996. EAWC received the "Gold Award" from NetGuide, which gave the site a five star rating (its highest) in all categories of evaluation (content, design and personality). EAWC is also a "recommended site" on the web pages of the History Channel.
EAWC was designed by Anthony F. Beavers. The computer programs that operate behind the scenes were developed by Hiten Sonpal. The data files for the chronology were compiled with the help of Stacy Keltner. Others who have contributed to this project in various ways include Edward A. Beach, Paul Beavers, Norman Bregman, Arthur Brown, Mike Carson, Larry Colter, William R. Connolly, Soumen De, Julia Galbus, Alison Griffith, Bill Hemminger, Deborah Howard, Alice Jenkins, Scott Laugel, Joseph Peterson, Ramanand Prasad, Robin Riat, John Richards, Ross Scaife, Gerald Seaman, Bernard Suzanne, Patrick Thomas, James Vinson, and Academic Computing Services personnel, Kevin Dick, James Evans, John Franklin, Keith Jackson and David Schleter.
We recognize that much of the value of EAWC derives from the work of other people who are not immediately connected with this project and who have worked to develop ancient world studies on the internet. We wish to express our gratitude to these people and in particular to those responsible for the texts and images listed in our internet index.
Exploring Ancient World Cultures was funded by grants from the University of Evansville.
For more information about this website or to report any problems, please email Tony Beavers.