This Romano-British mosaic of combating gladiators speaks to the tradition of these bloody contests. It turns out, they were sanguineous in multiple ways — not only with the frequent slayings of the losers, but also in the way gladiator blood was revered for medicinal purposes.First appearing in the records about 260 BCE, gladiator fights originally […]
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In 1888, all of Britain was captivated by a string of goulish murders of indigent women in London’s East End slums. The perpetrator was of course Jack the Ripper, Britain’s most famous serial killer. What went on in the Whitechapel District of London that year has captivated the imaginations of millions of people since.It is
The Great Awakening had a lot of impact. Not only did it lay the groundwork for countless American high school students to read _The Scarlet Letter_, but it created a mood of religious dynamism that inspired many to begin their own Christian denominations. Like this person here, the “Publick Universal Friend,” neé Jemima Wilkinson, born
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Happy Halloween, yunz’ all! In honor of the day, I thought it appropriate to do a post about the Bloody Mary apparition, which terrified many pubescent girls in the United States in the 1970s and ’80s.Trying to see if you could summon Bloody Mary was a genuine folk tradition. Because it was spread by word
We might not realize it, but the Christian culture of today carries with it a footprint of the spiritual universe of the Ancient Mediterranean world. Although modern scientific models overlay most of our ideas about what the universe looks like, the pagan, Christian, and Jewish religions of Ancient Rome had undergone a sort of revolution
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Featured here is an evening sky shot of Faiyum, which for millennia was an important oasis in Egypt and definitely a place on my bucket list to see one day. The region preserves an unusual amount of evidence from the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Two recurring themes emerge from these sources — the concern with
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Islamic demons, anyone? The famous Jinn (our word “genie” is derived from it) appeared in pre-Islamic mythology, but once the Arabian Peninsula had been taken over by the Muslim conquests of the seventh century, they were incorporated into this monotheistic religion. In early Islam, believers thought of the Jinn as mortal beings, albeit with superhuman
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There are so very many eccentric and grand homes built by early 20th-century millionaires, and they draw me like honey draws a fly. The exquisite pictures here all feature just one structure in the palace complex called the Quinta da Regalreira built by Antonio Augusto Carvalho Monteiro dating to 1904 — it is the “Initiation
This second-century BCE Etruscan urn shows the death of Actaeon. The myth was popular in the Ancient Mediterranean world and tells a story about a fated hunter, Actaeon, who gazed at the virginal Goddess Artemis/Diana. This forbidden act caused the Goddess to transform the man into a stag, and he was then devoured by his
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How we treat the dead reflects much about what the living believe. In the Ancient Mediterranean, pagan cultures considered the proper burial of the deceased to be of critical importance: otherwise, the dead person’s spirit would have a restless afterlife. On the other hand, the world of the living was to be kept separate from
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In the United States today is the Thanksgiving holiday, and a common symbol (besides a turkey cross-dressing as a Pilgrim) is the cornucopia, or “Horn of Plenty”. This sounds like a magical item from the modern gaming world, but it goes back to Ancient Greek and Roman times. Here, for instance, is a fourth-century
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This painting documents one of the oldest stories ever recorded, and it’s all about how evil entered the world. And the blame goes straight onto women, and frankly it’s exhausting. _Eva Prima Pandora_, or “Eve the First Pandora”, done by Jean Cousins around 1550, conflates the stories of the Ancient Greek first mortal woman,
This is the skeleton of 4926, who is the star subject of a recent excavation by Albion Archaeology in in the fenlands of Cambridgeshire, UK. You see him here, laid out as he was in his burial, a man between 25-35 years old. He was part of a small village in Late Roman Britain, and
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It’s my tradition each year to celebrate the season with historically themed Christmas carols — and so here you go: “Baldwin, it’s cold outside!” Set to the tune of “Baby it’s cold outside,” by Frank Loesser, this cover deals with the first super bad Viking raid in Western Europe. In 793, the pagan Norsemen attacked
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The Pantheon of Ancient Rome is one of my favorite buildings because its architecture is so distinct. The late second-century historian Cassius Dio attributed the dedication of the temple to “all the Gods,” but he was speculating — ‘pantheus” might have referred to one deity (albeit a superlative one). Why is that important? Well,
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What could be more fun on a Friday than stories about travel and tawdry Popes? How about the Baroque-era Vatican in 17th-century Rome and a pope from the ridiculously wealthy Italian family, who went to war for Papal territory and drove the apostolic see into great debt? Pictured here is the Baldacchino, the enormous
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One of the eeriest Medieval practices was the ceremonial burial of the anchorite, or the “Servicium Recludendi” as one litany calls it. Imagine being in the head-space of an anchorite, in which you were so concerned about devoting your life to prayer and abjuration of this world that you willingly entombed yourself in a prayer
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This unusual garment is called a “Bishop’s Mantle,” because of its similarity to the robes worn by such clergymen, but if you look closely, you’ll see it’s made up of linked chains — and is actually armor. In fact, it probably was only dubbed a “Bishop’s Mantle” by 19th-century antiquarians, and we might think
To the northwest of the Fertile Crescent of ancient Mesopotamia, in the southeast of modern Turkey, lie the ruins of one of the most important archaeological sites in human history: the stone monuments of Göbekli Tepe. Only discovered in the 1990s (earlier archaeologists has thought the remains medieval), Göbekli Tepe sprawls over twenty acres
I know this rock doesn’t look like much, but it’s actually really cool. It’s an Ancient Roman _pomerium_ stone, unearthed this past July of 2021, and is only the eleventh to be found. The pomerium was a religious boundary marker for the city of Rome, and inside its borders certain activities were completely taboo.
