The myth of Prometheus is one of the oldest in Ancient Greek mythology. In the _Theogany_, dating from around 700 BCE, the author Hesiod tells the story of how the God Zeus took vengeance on his Titan rival for giving humans the knowledge of fire — he had Prometheus chained to a rock, and each […]
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Oh, Biblical archaeologists: you had me at the name the “Cave of Horror”.Last week (March, 2021) Israel announced new findings from a series of archaeolologial digs conducted around a series of caves in the Dead Sea area. In a race against the potential looters also excavating the region, a number of fantastic discoveries were made:
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My four-year old nephew has learned about swear words. Coaching her son about the importance of context, she tells him “words have power, don’t they?” (My sister is very smart).Some words, of course, have more combustibility than others, but readers here no doubt can agree that their power lies in the mind of the person
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In the ancient world if you were worried about your health you might travel to a religious temple of a healing deity to seek treatment. The God-hero Asclepius had at least 700 structures dedicated to him alone. The Ancients ascribed healing to the effects of prayer, supernatural rituals, or medicine — often these treatments
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Betcha never studied this Ancient Greek Goddess back in school. Might I introduce to you Baubo, the female deity of bawdy sex jokes?.Baubo’s mythology, as told by the horrified Church fathers Clemens of Alexandria and Arnobius from the third century CE, centers on the critical role that Baubo played in the story of Demeter. When
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This marble plaque from the Ancient Roman port city Ostia Antiqua shows a birthing scene, and you will no doubt notice that no men are present. Although the medical profession in Ancient Greece and Rome required extensive training and usually eliminated women from being doctors, enormous exceptions were made when it came to the treatment
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This is one of the entrances to the famed palace complex of the Alhambra, one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen. Specifically, this area is known as the “Gate of Justice” or “Esplanade’s Gate”, built by the Sultan Yūsuf I of Granada in 1348. It is also one of the most famous
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The Ancient Romans were definitely not prudish about sex, but their ideas about when the act was healthy and when it wasn’t are certainly foreign to moderns. The first-century encyclopedist Pliny the Elder wrote that “sexual intercourse is good for lower back pain, for weakness of the eyes, for derangement, and for depression”. On the
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These Chinese tiny stick drawings contain precious information — very few could understand it in the second century BCE when they were inscribed in silk and placed in the famous Mawangdui tomb, but modern astronomers have studied such markings to learn about the history of celestial objects of the distant past.These are renderings of different
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The way medical knowledge has spread across the globe over time is fascinating. Now, of course, the internet makes things easy — that’s why the mRNA technology that produced two of the major COVID vaccines could be developed so quickly. Throughout recorded history, the Ancient Greek tradition was the most influential source of medicial studies
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The Ancient Romans loved their baths — this is a circular pool from the baths in the eponymously named town of Bath in England. Although the custom of public bathing had come from Ancient Greece, by the early 400s CE Rome had 856 bathouses throughout the Empire.These were places of beauty and comfort — heating
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I have a good story for this Mother’s Day in the U.S.. It comes from a Hindu myth found in a sacred text called _The Bhagavata Purana_ (8th-10th c), which tells the story of the maternal love of Yasoda for her foster son, the God Krishna.Yasoda had no idea that she was raising a divine
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Until my student @pookastanley did a research project on the role of the Evil Eye in the Ancient Greek tradition, I had not realized how enduring and powerful this idea has been. Its history extends at least as far back as the 6th century BCE when Greek “eye cups” appear in the archaeological record, as shown in
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It doesn’t look like much now, but this is one of the oldest stone buildings in all of history. It is the Tower of Jericho. It stands on the West Bank of Palestine, and it is 11,000 years old.Now it is dwarfed by the layers of earth that have built up around it in the
This is the super cool Nebra Sky Disk, which most archaeologists think is the oldest picture of an actual astronomical scene. Looking at the bronze (the blue-green patina might have been deliberate) background with the gold ornamentation, ancient peoples could have been able to figure out when it was time to put an extra month
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This is a replica of a Roman copy of a Greek fifth-century original of a man called Epimedes. We actually don’t know if he looked like this, because he lived earlier (6th-c BCE). But the eyes closed thing Epimedes has going on here is what I liked, because it’s the face many of us make
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Today’s post is about the history of a symbol — one which appeared in numerous civilizations across time and whose meaning reflected the concerns of each culture it appeared in. I’m talking about the snake that eats its own tail — the ouroboros.In Ancient Egypt the ouroboros appeared in the 13th-century tomb of “King Tut”
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In Rome during the first and second centuries, explicit evidence abounds about heterosexual desire for women, such as in the story of Europa, featured here in this first-century fresco from Pompeii. Another appears in the novel __Leucippe and Clitophon_, which relays the repeated abductions of the heroine Leucippe, who successfully escapes and consumates her romance
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Slavery in the Ancient Roman Empire was an entrenched and ubiquitous part of life. Around one of every seven people in the second century was enslaved, and that fact shaped the social lives of Romans in all sorts of ways, including how they thought about sex.This is a sketch of a fourth century CE slave
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The prevalence of slavery in Ancient Rome impacted the sex lives of Roman men, both free and slave. One of the ways it did was by how people thought about male-to-male sexual intercourse.In Classical Athens, there was a common practice of pederasty among men of different ages: an older man was a sort of tutor
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