Across the world, prehistoric cultures have marked the landscape with monuments expressed as mounds, circles, and ditches. Anthropologists frequently interpret these structures in light of their astronomical or religious focus, but recent research by Lynne Kelly has argued for a more pragmatic function. It turns out, cultures transitioning from nomadism to full-time agriculture across the […]
Prehistoric Mound Markers and Their Functions Read More »
The “Exeter Book,” – aka Exeter, Cathedral Library, MS 3501 f. 112v – contains about 100 riddles in Old English. This example is number 45. If you are a Tolkein fan, you might remember Golem asking riddles at one point in _The Hobbit_: it was this genre that inspired Tolkein. The “Exeter Book” was recorded
The “Exeter Book” of Riddles Read More »
Medieval maps did not share modern objectives with cartography: the _mappae mundi_ (“maps of the world”) were not designed to find one’s way with landmass shown to scale, but rather to convey a schematic idea of the major parts of creation. The map here (Bartholomeus Anglicus, _De propriatatibus rerum_, Ahun 1480 (BnF@gallicabnf, Francis 9140, fol
Medieval T-O Maps – “De Propriatatibus Rerum” Read More »
Here are the Indian deity Krishna and his beloved gopi (milkmaid) and constant companion Radha, playing the ancient Indian board game known as chaturanga. In Sanskrit, “chaturanga” means “four-limbs,” and in this game, the name refers to a millenia-old Indian military setup that included four branches: elephants, chariotry, cavalry, and infantry. Chaturanga was the predecessor
Ancient Indian Board Game Chaturanga Read More »
The interpretation of art highly depends on context. This figurine from the late Classical Maya world (600-900CE), for instance, might appear to modern viewers as a seated woman with a pained expression: indeed, the figure has a hunched back. The statue might even evoke pity in us — but these impressions and sentiments were probably
Ancient Mayan Interpretation of Art Read More »
The odd-shaped object you are looking at is none other than the Liver of Piacenza. This slightly three-dimensional object d’arte was fashioned by Etruscans living in the second century BCE. The main disk represents a sheep’s liver, with the three protrusions standing for the gall bladder and two other parts of a liver (called the
The Liver of Piacenza and Haruspicy Read More »
This is Seshat, the Ancient Egyptian Goddess of wisdom and writing. It is also the name of an extremely ambitious historical database run by Peter Turchin, a professor of evolutionary biology and a mathematician at the University of Connecticut. He is trying to collect big data about human civilizations in order to predict human behavior
Goddess Seshat and a Historical Database? Read More »
“The Priestess of Delphi,” by John Collier (1891). This haunting painting of one of the famous oracles from Ancient Greece – known as the Sibyls – is reflective of the lack of certainty modern scholars have about what specific prophecies the oracles pronounced. We know that the Romans truly believed that one of the Sibyls
Importance of Sibyls Oracles in the Ancient World Read More »
Religious traditions across history have commonly developed rituals around purity and how to properly bury the dead: quite often, these areas overlapped. In the ancient period of the Zoroastrian religion (developing in modern Iran), records of disposing human corpses in a non-polluting way were documented as early as the fifth century BCE. Zoroastrians thought that
After-Death Religious Traditions of the Zoroastrians Read More »
Shown here is a carved relief of the Ancient Roman goddess known as Bona Dea. Usually she holds a cornucopia in one hand and a bowl in the other from which snakes feed. These attributes demonstrate her role in fertility, for which she was worshipped throughout the Roman centuries — mainly by women of all
Ancient Roman Goddess Bona Dea and her Festivities Read More »
This is Erwin Schrodinger, Nobel-prize-winning architect of the famed equation with his name — along with silhouettes of his famous alive-and-dead cats. Born in Austria on 1887, Erwin’s chronic struggles with tuberculosis had him confined in a sanitorium in the 1920’s: it was during his stay that he developed his famous wave equation. Many conclusions
Schrodinger’s Cat and Life Read More »
This giant pile of rocks lies close to an outlook called The Pinnacle along the Appalachian Trail, and is an example of a “cairn,” albeit gone overboard. Stacking stones into towers has served as a direction marker, memorial, or spiritual commemoration across many world cultures. The term cairn is Gaelic, and means “a heap of
The Pinnacle Along the Appalachian Trail Read More »
Although popular culture promotes an idea that the belief in magic flourished mainly in the Medieval European past, maybe declining with the onset of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th-century, this is not necessarily the case. As Owen Davies, author of _Grimoires: A History of Magic Books_, relays, the so-called “Modern” era of Western history
The Modern Era’s Rise and Spread of Magic Read More »
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
Ancient Greek Myth of Cassandra Read More »
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
Julian Peters “I Have Come to Consume the World” Read More »
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
Ancient Carved Sarcophagi Read More »
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,
Celtic God Sucellus Read More »
People have claimed to see ghosts throughout recorded history. Stories about the “revanants,” or “those who return,” commonly state that these spirits startle the living, but they have not always been associated with evil forces. The association of ghosts with malevolence really got going in Ealy Modern Europe with the emergence of Protestant Christianity. Hitherto,
Lavater’s “Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght” Read More »
These two lovebirds are Shiva and the Goddess Bhairavi, from an exquisite painting dating from the Mughal Dynasty in India, c. 1630-35. Today’s yoga practices are very anesthetized relative to the ways undertaken by yogis, particularly in the left-handed Tantric tradition. The two figures dwell in the charnel grounds – you can see the smoky
Shiva and the Goddess Bhairavi Read More »
“The Lord and Lady of the Charnel Grounds/Pal Durdak Yab Yum,” 15th-c painting. Tibetian Buddhist traditions took much from Ancient India . . . As with the two Hindu deities featured in yesterday’s post, the juxtaposition of enlightenment with death and male-female pairings stands out. Tibetian art is highly symbolic, and the male-female, or “Yab-Yum,”
The Lord and Lady of the Charnel Grounds Read More »
