Sometimes the distant past seems exotic and remote, and sometimes it feels like today’s news headlines. The Ancient Greek myth of the prophetess Cassandra brings out both tendencies. Born into the Trojan royalty, beautiful Cassandra was cursed by the God Apollo after she changed her mind about sleeping with him. Although every utterance she predicted […]
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This watercolor by Julian Peters, called “I Have Come to Consume the World,” illustrates beautifully a central moment in the Hindu epic, _The Bhagavad Gita_. The _Gita_ is the most famous sacred scripture in Hinduism, dating to perhaps the second century BCE. This particular point comes in the eleventh chapter, when the hero Arjuna begs
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This is a contemporary rendition of the Ancient Roman leader, Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 BCE), recreated by Dutch anthropologist Maja D’Hollosy. To make it, D’Hollosy referenced a recent analysis of Caesar by Tom Buijtendorp, two contemporary busts, and coin imagery. The upshot of the composite sculpture illustrates a man who got into power despite, not
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Almost as soon as writing was invented, authors have developed ways of shielding their materials from unwanted viewings. Polybius the Greek (c. 208-125 BCE) [first image] describes how two of his compatriots, Cleoxenus and Democleitus, developed a method of cryptography that now goes by the name “Polybius Square.” [See second image.] By placing the Greek
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The force of the wind and elements that this figure has to brace himself against well represent the reputation of the Ancient Greek orator Demosthenes. Greeks and Romans described him as someone who fought against the destiny he seemed to have inherited to become one of the most skillful speech-makers of all time. Born in
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The term “swan song” comes from an Ancient notion that swans are mute throughout their lives, but sing a beautiful last melody as they are about to die. As far back as the Roman Pliny the Elder (in 77 CE), people have known this is not the case, but regardless, a swan song refers to
Here you see one of the finest sarcophagi of all time. Carved out of marble in the late second-century CE, the panel shown here despicts the God of wine, Dionysius, approaching the comatose maiden Ariadne, who lies in the lap of the God of death (Thanatos). The close arrangement and true-to-life proportions of the figures
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One of the frustrations of studying the distant past is knowing that the lenses of earlier times are ultimately inaccessible. We can take the religion of the Celts as a case in point. For centuries, these peoples left very little in the way of written sources, and so we must rely on the statues, inscriptions,
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Here you can see the grim and chaotic scenes of battle depicted in the Ludovici Battle Sarcophagus, made in the Roman Empire mid-third century CE. The horrifying conditions that Ancient Roman soldiers experienced have led to a debate as to whether PTSD extended farther back in time than the late 19th-century. Some of the symptoms
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This gladiator mural was unveiled just last week from the Ancient Roman city of Pompeii. The unusually graphic depiction of a bleeding fighter — holding his thumb up, a gesture to signal for mercy — was found by archaeologists in a building thought to have been a bar and brothel. Since we know that gladiators
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“The Kiss of the Enchantress,” painted by English artist Isobel Lilian Gloag (c.a. 1890) depicts a monster from Ancient Greek mythology called a Lamia. Like so many stories about horrifying females, the Lamia’s backstory involves a grizzly subversion of the ideal woman — she destroys children rather than nurtures them, and seduces men in order
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This skull from Ancient Rome has a tiny coin glinting out of its mouth: the money is an obal, one of the most notorious grave-goods of the Ancient Mediterranean. The literature of Greeks and Romans commonly asserts that the obal was meant to pay the price for the dead to be carried over the river
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The leader of all the Gods in Norse mythology, Odin, was routinely accompanied by his ravens named Huginn (“thought”) and Muninn (“mind”), appearing together in visual records as early as the sixth century The names of these birds called attention to Odin’s vast knowledge — the medieval Icelandic sources have Odin’s ravens fly all over
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Here you see an illustration of one of the most important medical textbooks in history: Avicenna’s _Canon of Medicine_. Written by 1025 CE, the _Canon_ represented a pinnacle of scientific progress in the Golden Age of Islam. Avicenna synthesized knowledge from the Ancient Greeks and Romans, Ancient and Medieval India, China, and Persian Muslim traditions
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The scratchings you see on this picture are not my students’ writings, which makes me glad for two reasons. First, they are written in Ancient Romano-British Latin. Second, the lead tablet shown here records a ritualistic curse — it is a type of item found widespread in the Ancient world. 130 examples alone, dating from
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You are looking at a late 3rd-c. CE Tauroctony, the sacred scene from the Roman Cult of Mithras. Frequently compared with the emerging religion of Christianity, Mithraism featured a savior deity who came down from the stars to save his adherents. Worshippers of this cult were all men, and they met in chambers that resembled
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In the far north-eastern part of China, the beautiful but deeply inhospitable Flaming Mountains lie. Travellers going across the Silk Road in ancient history avoided this area, skirting south to parts of the desert that contained waterholes and vegetation. The Turpan Oasis was one of these (see second photo), and it was in this region
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The “Ship of Theseus” is a philosophical thought experiment dating from the Ancient Greeks, and if you give it a minute, it might blow your mind. Writers such as the first-century essayist Plutarch construed the puzzle like this: imagine that the famed hero Theseus brought his ship home safely, and it was preserved for the
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This is an ink portrait of the famed Chinese demon-hunter Zhong Kui. It was done by the Shunzhi Emperor Fulin in the mid 17th-century, and the fact that a Chinese ruler would find such a hero compelling enough to paint testifies to the importance of Zhong Kui’s legends. In myths stretching back as far as
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Here is Charon, ferryman of the dead in Ancient mythology, as he steers his boat in the underworld along the river Styx. The Greeks and Romans who believed in this underworld also subscribed to a gloomy or frightening view of the afterlife, one which humans were subject to the whims of the Gods, who also
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