What is the origin of the legend of the Christed Son who was born of a virgin on December 25th? I am sure you are familiar with his legend which states that he was born in a manger surrounded by...
Archaeologists performing excavations in the Urla-Cesme Peninsula in western Turkey recently found something remarkable. They uncovered the remains of a 2,500-year-old temple dedicated to the worship...
The Untersberg is a great mountain straddling the Austro-German border opposite Salzburg. It was reputed in local legend to be the seat of the god Wotan and to be haunted. The Knights Templar of the...
Archaeologists have unearthed ancient carved Assyrian reliefs of a king in a procession of gods and goddesses riding on animals and mythical creatures. The Assyrian carvings are almost 3,000 years...
This retelling of key parts of the Epic explores the unconventional idea that Gilgamesh was not searching for life eternal on Earth, as has been suggested as the theme of the Epic, but was instead...
The Burney Relief (known also as the Queen of the Night) is a terracotta plaque from ancient Mesopotamia . The relief is dominated by a nude female figure with wings and talons . She is usually...
Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of love, sex, and beauty and there are many tales of how she could entice both gods and mortals to lust after her. In one of the most famous images of the goddess, we...
Sexuality was central to life in ancient Mesopotamia, an area of the Ancient Near East often described as the cradle of western civilisation roughly corresponding to modern-day Iraq, Kuwait, and...
Louise Pryke / The Conversation As singer Pat Benatar once noted, love is a battlefield . Such use of military words to express intimate, affectionate emotions is likely related to love’s capacity to...
Though the Islamic State group (Daesh) recently plundered and wrecked a few ancient Assyrian cities, fighters recently successfully defended Erbil in Iraq, known long ago as Arbela. In that city,...
The Descent of Inanna (known also as ‘Inanna’s Descent to the Netherworld / Underworld’) is a piece of work in the literary corpus of ancient Mesopotamia. This story, which was originally written in...
Anahita was a goddess associated with water, fertility, wisdom, warfare, and eventually the planet Venus. During the Achaemenid dynasty in Persia, she became incorporated into the Zoroastrian...
The Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite, has a very distinctive image in classical arts. In 458 BCE, the playwright Aeschylus, in his play Agamemnon , used the name of Aphrodite to denote “beauty, charm...
So how did the oft-used legend of the Green Man eventually become chosen to be the legend of Jesus? Let us begin when it was the life story of the ancient Green Man and work forward to the time of...
'Bridegroom, dear to my heart; goodly is your beauty, honeysweet; lion, dear to my heart'. These are the passionate words of a lover to a king, from more than 4,000 years ago, in the oldest known...