“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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Over three thousand years ago, in the Fertile Crescent that stretched from the eastern Mediterranean seaboard to the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, legends about horrific floods sent by the Gods to destroy humankind became prominent. For instance, in the literary works _Atrahasis_, the Bible, and _The Epic of Gilgamesh_, a single hero and his family
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The myth of Persephone has deep origins — It was old even in the Golden Age of 5th-c BCE Athens. The daughter of Demeter, Persephone was abducted by the God of the underworld as a forced bride. The grieving mother happened to be a fertility Goddess, and refused to allow the crops or any plants
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The Ancient Romans atttibuted the Goddess Vesta with the power to keep Rome safe and prosperous, and they conceived of these qualities with the symbols of fire, penises, and female chastity. Vesta’s ancient temple (third slide) in the city of Rome had sacred fires, tended to by full-time priestesses whose ritual care preserved the integrity
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We are approaching that holiday time of the year again: Saturnalia is almost upon us! The Ancient Romans celebrated this winter solstice festival for several days in late December. Although it was a religious festival, Romans thought of it as a fun, carnival time, when gifts were exchanged and lots of food consumed. The fifth-century
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This is one of the most famous pharaohs from Ancient Egypt: Hatshepsut (d. 1458 BCE). She was highly effective in all arenas — economic, foreign policy, religious affairs — but although those who lived under her rule recognized her authority, having a female ruler (even a super talented one) jarred too much with expectations about
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This closeup of a female figurine now at the Penn Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology is an example of similar ones common to the Kingdom of Judah in the 8th through 6th centuries. (The second image shows more.) Historians debate their meaning — did they represent the Cannanite Goddess Asherat, who was sometimes associated as
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The Ancient Roman deity Janus appears as a two-headed God. With one face looking backwards in time and the other forward, he was appropriately worshipped at the start of the New Year. Janus was invoked for good luck in all new undertakings, and today many of us continue a long tradition when we set out
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It’s almost New Year’s Eve, a time when many people gather for celebrations throughout the night and into the wee hours of the morning. Rationally we know that nothing really changes when the clock rolls from 11:59 to midnight – The new calendar year is a human invention, and yet we are conditioned to feel
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I hope you’re not too hungry as you read this, because it’s time to talk about cannibalism. Dear readers, although we might recoil now at the thought of consuming human flesh, it turns out that this practice is extremely ancient: cases among Homo Neanderthalis, another early human species called Homo Antecessor, and Homo Sapiens have
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Check out this early selfie: it’s a first-century CE Ancient Roman fresco showing a woman looking at herself in a mirror. The image is a rare subject in early art, largely attributable to the fact that mirrors were extremely expensive throughout most of human history. Often, they were made of polished stone, like obsidian, or
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