We’ve all heard the expression “to die laughing” to refer to a bout of uncontrollable laughter. But did you know that it actually happens? When looking at the Hellenistic bust of Chrysippus housed at...
History is filled with bizarre stories about death, and the ancient Greeks are no exception. While the great intellectual Empedocles is said to have jumped into a volcano, in a misguided attempt to...
While John Dalton, an English chemist and physicist, is the man credited today with the development of atomic theory at the turn of the 19th century, a theory of atoms was actually formulated 2,500...
The Upanishads are a genre of texts that form the final and last section of the Vedas. The Upanishads were composed orally in Sanskrit, and the earliest surviving ones dating to the 1st millennium BC...
The Antikythera computer was the culmination of advanced mathematics, astronomy, metallurgy and engineering. It incorporated the philosophy and science of Aristotle, the gears of Ktesibios, the...
Ancient Greece, and Athens in particular, played a crucial role in the development as well as the history of Western Civilization. The center of Athenian life was the Agora, an open space at the...
Experts believe that they have found the oldest work on Confucian teachings in Japan. The find dates back almost 1500 years when the Japanese nation was only just emerging. This collection of...
“I tell you: one must still have chaos within oneself, to give birth to a dancing star” (Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra). By conservative estimates, the European Renaissance spans the historical...
Pythagoras is perhaps the most famous figure in the group of ancient Greek philosophers known as the Pre-Socratics. This is largely due to the Pythagorean Theorem, a mathematical theorem that is...
One of the unique philosophical teachings of ancient Greece was Cynicism – a moral and virtuous teaching that really emphasized the pursuit of a pure, honest life. Today we are going to take an in-...
Socrates, the most famous philosopher of all time, had one of the most subtle and complicated minds we have on record. His death was a dark moment in Athenian and human history, but his thinking and...
Socrates and his successors Plato and Aristotle are perhaps the best known and most influential philosophers of ancient Greece. Nevertheless, Greek philosophy had already been flourishing for more...
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was born in the middle of the Humanism movement – a search for the lost wisdom of the classical age that broke with the rigid schemes of the Middle Ages. It provided an...
The Bhagavad Gita is one of the most important religious texts in Hinduism as well as one of the most seminal religious texts in the world, alongside the Bible , the Quran , the Torah and the...
The Aztec Empire was the largest and most successful Mesoamerican empire in terms of size and demographics. It stretched across highlands, coastal plains, valleys, and forests. It is not surprising,...
The Frog and the Mouse, The Fox and the Stork, The Boy Who Cried Wolf – these, and many other wonderful fables were a big part of childhood for many of us. But now that childhood is gone, did we stop...