COLLECTION
Stories connected by a shared idea.
A white horse knelt by a well, then rose into the sky and left an egg. The boy inside became the first king of Silla, and two more royal houses began with a chest from the sea and a golden chest in a tree.
Read story 13 min readA voice on a hilltop told nine chiefs to sing to a turtle, and six golden eggs came down from the sky. The first boy out founded Gaya, and his queen sailed in under a red sail from a land called Ayuta.
Read story 13 min readHe beat the storm-calling Chiyou with the help of a drought goddess, and rode a dragon into the sky from the foot of Mount Jing. Sima Qian made him the first sovereign of Chinese history, but no inscription names him before the 4th century BCE.
Read story 10 min readHis father stole a soil that grew by itself to block the flood and was put to death for it; Yu dug the waters a way to the sea and became the founder of China's first dynasty. In the oldest witnesses he is not yet a king, but a worker sent by Heaven.
Read story 10 min readLed by their god, the Mexica walked for generations from Aztlan until they saw an eagle on a cactus growing from a rock in a lake, and there they built Tenochtitlan, today Mexico City. The serpent in the eagle's beak on Mexico's flag is missing from the oldest pictures of the scene.
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 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 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 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 readA river god's daughter, shut away by a king, was followed by the sunlight and laid an egg. The boy who broke out of it fled across a bridge of fish and turtles and founded Goguryeo, and the kingdom itself carved his story in stone in 414.
Read story 11 min readJapan's oldest book does not begin with a king but with brine: two gods stir the sea with a jewelled spear, circle a pillar, get it wrong once, and give birth to the islands.
Read story 5 min readA god came down from heaven, and a bear kept to a dark cave until she became a woman. Their son Dangun founded Joseon. The oldest text that tells it was written in the 1280s, and it quotes two books no one has ever found.
Read story 6 min readHow Vietnam tells its own beginning: a dragon lord from the water, a fairy from the mountains, one sac of a hundred eggs, and a parting that founded the realm of Văn Lang.
Read story 6 min read
