COLLECTION
Stories connected by a shared idea.
Twin 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 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 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 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 readA giant stole Thor's hammer and would give it back only for Freyja as his bride, so Thor went to the wedding in her veil. The poem survives in a single manuscript, and Snorri, who tells so many stories of Thor, never mentions it.
Read story 11 min readThrown out of heaven, Susanoo comes down by a river in Izumo, makes a serpent with eight heads drunk and cuts it to pieces. In its tail is the sword that became one of Japan's imperial regalia. Izumo's own record of its gods never mentions the serpent.
Read story 9 min readA three-year-old who has never spoken asks the king for an iron horse, grows into a giant, routs the invaders and rides into the sky. The two oldest notices of him have no child and no horse, and the 15th-century texts arm him with a sword, not bamboo.
Read story 12 min readOdysseus helped take Troy, then spent ten more years trying to get home. Homer is precise about why: he blinded the sea god's son, and his crew ate the cattle of the Sun.
Read story 10 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 readAn archer shot down the suns that were burning the world, and a woman stole the elixir of immortality and fled to the moon. Today they are the married couple of the Mid-Autumn Festival. The oldest texts tell two separate stories.
Read story 8 min readJason sailed to the far end of the Black Sea for a fleece of gold, and Medea, the king's daughter, helped him take it. The Odyssey already calls his ship "famed of all", and later tellers kept changing it, down to who killed Medea's children.
Read story 11 min read
