THE STORY INDEX
A growing collection of myths and legends, with their origins, variations, and sources.
Every year on the 23rd of the twelfth lunar month, Vietnamese families send their kitchen gods to heaven on a carp, with two men's hats and one woman's. Their tale, a wife and two husbands who died in one fire, was already written down in 1659, but the gods' names, their number and even the meaning of Ông Công have shifted since.
Read story 12 min readA golden turtle gave a king its claw to fire his crossbow, and his daughter married the son of his enemy. The oldest version, written in China, has no turtle, no goose feathers and no pearls: only a princess in love and a crossbow sawn through.
Read story 15 min readA man so poor that he and his father shared one loincloth hid in the sand, and the princess who found him there made him her husband. In the oldest full telling they become merchants and Buddhists, and their city rises in one night and vanishes in another, leaving a marsh behind.
Read story 12 min readA servant who said his wealth was his own was left on a sandbank to starve, until a white bird from the west dropped the seeds of an unknown melon. In the oldest text he never carves his name on a melon or sends one out to sea: the king simply remembers him.
Read story 9 min readThe Gauls had taken Rome and were climbing its last hill in the dark when Juno's sacred geese woke the defenders. Livy tells the story in full, but Polybius, the oldest historian whose account survives, says only that the Gauls made a treaty and went home.
Read story 12 min readOn the night before Epiphany an old woman comes down Italian chimneys to fill children's stockings with sweets, or with coal. She is often called a Roman goddess in disguise, but her name is the name of the Christian feast, and the oldest texts we found that make a figure of it are Tuscan poems of the 15th and 16th centuries.
Read story 10 min readFarmers prayed to Father Mars to keep sickness off their land, his shield fell from the sky in the reign of Numa, and Augustus built him a temple as the Avenger. The Romans told only a few stories of their own about him; most of the rest they borrowed from the Greek Ares.
Read story 12 min readAn Etruscan army reached Rome's wooden bridge, and Horatius Cocles held it while the Romans cut it down behind him. In Livy he swims home to a statue and a gift of land. In Polybius, the oldest account, he leaps into the river and gives up his life.
Read story 10 min readShe sang Apollo's answers from a cave above the Bay of Naples, led Aeneas down to the dead, and in Ovid asked for as many years as grains of dust in her hand but forgot to ask for youth. Rome guarded the books said to be hers for centuries; the Sibylline Oracles read today are not those books.
Read story 13 min readIn a small round temple in the Forum, with no statue of the goddess in it, six priestesses kept the fire on which Rome's safety was thought to depend. They were chosen as little girls, bound for thirty years, and kept the flame until the end of the 4th century CE.
Read story 14 min readAeneas carried his father out of burning Troy, left Dido in Carthage and won a bride in Latium by war. Virgil made him the ancestor of the Romans, but Greek writers had brought him west centuries earlier, and in the Roman story he never founds Rome.
Read story 14 min readJanus kept the doors of Rome and of heaven, looked both ways at once and gave his name to January. Ovid tells him that Greece has no god to match him. Yet the Roman year did not always begin in his month.
Read story 18 min readRome's second king was said to take his laws from a goddess who met him by a spring at night, to bargain with Jupiter over the cure for lightning, and to be buried with his own sacred books. The books were dug up and burned in 181 BCE, and the Romans themselves doubted the story that he had studied with Pythagoras.
Read story 13 min readA childless king of Kish pulls an eagle out of a pit, and the eagle carries him up towards the heaven of Anu to find the plant of birth. The tablets break off before the end, and the ancient sources disagree on whether he ever had a son.
Read story 12 min readBefore it was a stone giant at an Assyrian gate, a lamassu was a spirit that walked beside a person, and could walk away. The kings carved it with five legs, so that it stands from the front and strides from the side, and their inscriptions say what it was there to do.
Read story 10 min readTwin boys were left to drown in the Tiber, a she-wolf gave them suck, and one of them died when the walls of Rome went up. The Romans told the story in several versions side by side, and the famous bronze wolf may be medieval.
Read story 15 min readAdapa, the sage of Eridu, broke the wing of the South Wind and was called up to heaven, where he refused the bread his god had warned him against. It was the bread of life, and the longest copy of his story was found not in Iraq but in Egypt.
Read story 10 min readHe lived in the fresh water beneath the earth, gave every god a task, ate the eight plants of Dilmun and, after a drinking contest, handed his divine powers to Inanna. To the Babylonians he was Ea, the god who warned the flood hero.
Read story 13 min readInanna went down through seven gates to her sister's realm, was turned into a corpse, and came back only by handing the demons a substitute: her husband Dumuzi. For a century it was read as a myth of the seasons, which the Sumerian poem never says.
Read story 10 min readThe gods made him from a pinch of clay to be a match for the king of Uruk; he grazed with the gazelles, learned bread and beer from Shamhat, wrestled Gilgamesh in a doorway and became his friend. In the older Sumerian poems, though, Enkidu is Gilgamesh's servant.
Read story 11 min readEnlil set him to guard the cedars, and Gilgamesh and Enkidu killed him to make their names. A tablet that reached the Sulaymaniyah Museum in 2011 fills his forest with birdsong and monkeys, and leaves the heroes wondering what they will tell Enlil.
Read story 11 min readA god spoke to a reed wall, a man built a boat, and after the flood the gods gathered like flies at his sacrifice. Gilgamesh hears it from Utnapishtim himself, but scribes were copying the story a thousand years before the epic's Nineveh tablets, with the hero called Atrahasis.
Read story 13 min readMarduk killed the sea goddess Tiamat, split her like a fish and made heaven and earth from her body, and the poem was recited to his statue at Babylon's New Year festival. It never describes Tiamat as a dragon, and the famous relief said to show their fight portrays another god and another monster.
Read story 14 min readTwo-thirds god and a third human, Gilgamesh watched his friend die, crossed the world to the one man who had escaped death, and lost the plant of youth to a snake. The epic is very old, but it is not the oldest story ever written.
Read story 12 min read
