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It can be argued of course, but a story has five important elements: the characters, the setting, the plot, the conflict and the resolution. These five essential narrative elements keep stories...
From Australia to Alaska, and from South America to Europe, ancient cultures responded to their environments and developed particular belief systems to interpret reality. Although all of them...
Scant referrals in the Bible alert to the presence of a vilified female deity destined to be banished into oblivion. Yet the Biblical referrals obscure the beloved benevolent mother-goddess Asherah,...
“The animal envoys of the Unseen Power no longer serve, as in primeval times, to teach and guide mankind. Bears, lions, elephants, ibexes and gazelles are in cages in our zoos. Man is no longer the...
In 1921, Frederick Soddy won the Noble Prize in chemistry for his research into radioactive substances and his studies of isotopes, yet curiously this Oxford scientist mused about a “ forgotten race...
The Revolt of the Batavi which occurred between 69 and 70 AD was an uprising against the Roman Empire led by the Batavi, a small but powerful Germanic population of Batavia on the Rhine delta. This...
For thousands of years ancient cultures depicted ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ (UAP) on rock art, but if these are not Ancient Aliens, as some popular media outlets would propose, what were the...
Conjuring up mystical images of secret initiation rites held under cover of darkness, the Eleusinian Mysteries had a reputation as a dark and dangerous festival. In fact, it was surrounded by such an...
In Egypt, the pharaoh, who was the living incarnation of Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris, would undergo at death a transformation from being the living Horus to being the dead and resurrected...
A woman's face, dubbed Hilda, was reconstructed from an ancient skull housed in The University of Edinburgh's Anatomical Museum. Hilda lived between 55 BC and 400 AD and was of Celtic origin. She was...
The world of late antiquity was extremely suspicious of novelty, anything, that is, that made claim to serious attention. Every innovation, whether of thought or technique, had to be justified in...
What is “lost knowledge”? As human civilizations arise and develop, they accumulate knowledge. That knowledge has many forms, from the pragmatic to the theoretical. In most cultures, there is a...
An ancient oracle told by a Pythian priestess says, “ But when the time shall come that the female conquers in battle, driving away the male, and wins great glory in Argos, then many wives of the...
It is an astonishing fact that, from the end of the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ and the settlement of Europe, a massive building program took place that was to transform Europe in a hitherto unsuspected...
The Late Bronze Age collapse of the 12th century BC is one of the greatest and most enduring puzzles of Mediterranean archaeology. A cosmopolitan age, perhaps one of the first true episodes of...
“ Thus television... has a prehistory in the domain of oriental folk-lore ,” wrote Berthold Laufer in 1928 in an article with the delightful title, The Prehistory of Television . Television was quite...
The Biblical Enoch corresponds to a remarkable degree with the figure of Etana in Sumerian tradition. It seems reasonable to assume that they belong to the same original tradition handed down in the...
In the heart of the Esquiline Hill in Rome, third century AD Emperor Licinius Gallienus enjoyed the tranquility of the Horti Liciniani , a luxurious complex of ancient Roman villas with large gardens...
Around 1165 AD a mysterious letter addressed to Manuel Comnenus, Emperor of Byzantium, began circulating around Europe. It was from a Prester John who claimed to “ exceed in riches, virtue and power...
In the 12th century BC, the collapse of the complex state system in the Near East led to the rise of ethnic group cohesion that had previously been largely fragmented. These ethnic groups morphed...
The ancient Chinese and South Asian cultures reflected an early interest in the idea that one could build a machine to take to the air, even if the technology to be able to do so was not yet...
Known as the Hidden Empire, Ethiopia’s official name, until recently, was Abyssinia. Its history fades back into the mists of time and for some reason, Ethiopia has largely been written out of world...
In the ancient world elephants were worshiped as divine symbols, harbingers of good luck and the carriers of wisdom, but they were also deployed to intimidate opposing armies and as highly-...
There are few people in the world today who have not at least heard of the tale of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the mysterious Garden of Eden . Their story is told in the first chapters of...