A bard travels through the streets, gathering an audience as he goes, and then starts to recall the adventures of heroes and the tales of the gods. In the ancient world, word of mouth was one of the...
Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu are the two main deities in the dualistic doctrine of Zoroastrianism. The former is the supreme deity of this religion, whereas the latter is the evil, destructive spirit...
The Māori, or the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand , use a special word Matariki , which identifies the cluster of stars known to astronomers as the Pleiades, and to mythologists and...
When discussing the creation myths of the ancient Greek gods, as told by the poet Hesiod (750-650 BC), it is best to imagine an audience huddled around a single speaker by way of a fire pit in the...
In the early ninth century an Irish warrior-priest Cormac mac Cuilennáin, who would become king, wrote Sanas Cormaic in which he presented the ancient creation myths of the Celts . In the early 20th...
Tiamat is an ambiguous deity who played an important role in the creation myth of ancient Mesopotamia . She was their personification of the primordial sea, from which the first generation of gods...
All cultures and religions have their creation stories - some seem more familiar and others perhaps seem farfetched. One creation story is of the god Mbombo who vomited the world, humans, and the...
Lake Titicaca is located in the Andes between Bolivia and Peru. It is the largest freshwater lake in South America, and is also regarded as the highest navigable lake in the world. Lake Titicaca is...
The largest pre-Hispanic civilization in the Americas was the Inca Empire and from their capital city of Cusco, rulers known as Sapa Inka (Quechua for "the only Inca”) controlled a vast territory...
[Editorial by Thomas O Mills, Hopi Cultural Center in Second Mesa, Arizona, USA ] I am sometimes asked, “How can we help the Hopi People?” Having lived with the Hopi for a number of years, I can...
The Egyptians did not build the pyramids. No one living in the area can tell you; who built them, why they were built, when they were built, how they were built or why the pyramids at the complex...
Semar is probably one of the oldest characters in Indonesian mythology who was said to not have been derived from Hindu mythology. He was made famous by performances of Wayang (Shadow Puppets) in the...
Ife is an ancient city of the Yoruba located in the south-western part of modern day Nigeria. Based on the archaeological evidence, the urbanization of the site may be dated back to around 500 AD...