‘Lockdown’ is a word we now see on a daily basis as the 2020 coronavirus pandemic requires limiting the movements and activities of communities during the mass quarantine of most of the world’s...
Doomed to forever roll a huge boulder up a steep hill, Sisyphus is a figure in Greek mythology who represents an impossible task. As his punishment in the Greek Underworld , each time Sisyphus neared...
A new study suggests that Europe has been ‘global’ for over a millennium. The evidence for this claim comes from a set of shared cultural practices spread over a wide area in early Medieval Europe...
Royal courts were always a hotspot for intrigues, secrets, schemes, and love affairs. Where prestige and power reign, true love is often nowhere to be found. But in those cases when royal passions...
Israeli archaeologists excavating in Jaffa have made further discoveries beneath the streets of this ancient Greek settlement, but this time, they’ve discovered a baby’s skeleton buried in a jar!...
A naturally mummified man was found to have had a grasshopper diet for several months before he died. His body was found in 1937 when a young man called Guy Skiles was exploring in a rock-shelter...
Excavators in Cyprus have discovered a series of “sensational finds” of death cult artifacts dating to 3,500 years ago, during the Bronze Age. A vessel used as a cult funerary object, a seal with...
In days of old, the dead were buried with a silver coin (the shiner the better) so that the souls of the faithful departed could pay the toll to the deathless demon ferryman of the underworld: Charon...
Ancient beliefs are often a complex puzzle and putting the pieces together can often be extremely challenging. Time has its way with unwritten traditions, and little of what wasn’t written down...
The technical sophistication of the Middle Ages tends to be underestimated. Near the end of the High Middle Ages, mechanical technology such as clocks and water mills, for example, were becoming...
It’s official. Ireland – the home of Halloween traditions – has banned Halloween parties and traditional trick-or-treating festivities this year as tackling Covid-19 remains top of government’s...
For some time, people have debated whether or not human beings could spontaneously combust, or burst into flames, without an external heat source. However, over the past 300 years, there have been...
The Aokigahara forest is situated on the north-western side of Japan’s famous Mount Fuji. It was born 1,100 years ago, when Mount Fuji erupted, spewing out lava for miles which later transformed into...
By far, Loki’s most well-known children are the ones he had with the giantess Angurboda. These include the wolf Fenrir, the Midgard Serpent Jormugandr, and the goddess Hel. Legends say that the...
In 2014 a construction project required Swiss anthropologist Amelie Alterauge of the University of Bern Institute of Forensic Medicine to investigate a very unusual burial in a 400-year-old cemetery...
The most widely read work of Florentine politician and writer Dante Alighieri, the Divine Comedy dictates a tale of the three realms of the afterlife as believed by the Italians of the Middle Ages...