COLLECTION
Stories connected by a shared idea.
No text from the age of the pyramids says who carved the Great Sphinx or what it was called. More than a thousand years later, a prince dreamed in its shadow that the god would make him king if he freed it from the sand.
Read story 12 min readIn the Hall of the Two Truths the dead denied forty-two sins, one before each judge, and watched their heart weighed against the feather of Maat while a monster waited. The papyri buried with them show the beam level: the heart had to balance, not to be light.
Read story 11 min readOn a mountain in the far northwest, the old books say, the Lord on High kept his capital on earth, guarded by a nine-headed beast, and the Queen Mother of the West grew peaches that ripen once in three thousand years. A Han emperor gave its name to real mountains, and the historian who recorded it did not believe him.
Read story 13 min readTwo eagles sent by Zeus were said to have met at Delphi, and there Apollo shot a she-dragon and took over an oracle that had belonged to Earth. For centuries a woman of Delphi gave his answers from a tripod, and whether a gas from the rock helped her is still argued.
Read story 14 min readMost of the Mexica dead set out on a four-year road, past clashing mountains and a wind of obsidian blades, across a river on the back of a yellow dog, to the lord of Mictlan. Sahagún says the road ended in "the nine hells", but the famous list of nine levels comes from a single colonial codex.
Read story 11 min readA woman on a white horse carries Oisín over the sea to the Land of Youth, and when he comes home three hundred years later and touches the ground, he is old and blind. The poem that tells the journey was written in County Clare around 1750, but the old man who tells it to St Patrick is centuries older.
Read story 11 min readA district magistrate pays for a broken peony with his coat, walks into a mountain in the sea and marries a fairy. A year later he comes home to find that more than eighty years have passed on earth, or sixty, by the dates his own story gives.
Read story 11 min readA fisherman nets a blade, a rebel finds its hilt in a banyan, and after the war a golden turtle takes the sword back into a Hanoi lake. The 15th-century chronicle tells only how the sword was found, and the oldest stories of the lake, from around 1800, end with a lost sword and a king draining the lake to find it.
Read story 11 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 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 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 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 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 hall roofed with shields, a boar eaten every day and whole again by evening, dead warriors who cut each other down for sport and then sit down to drink, and the women who choose who will die. Most of the picture comes from Snorri Sturluson, writing in Christian Iceland around 1220. The older poems do not always agree with him.
Read story 13 min readAn eagle in the crown, a dragon at the roots and a squirrel running between them: the Eddic poems give the world ash three roots and endless wounds. They also speak of nine worlds, but no medieval text says which nine.
Read story 10 min readHomer's gods feast on a real mountain, snowy and many-ridged, between Thessaly and Macedonia, yet the Odyssey already pictures an Olympus that no wind, rain or snow can reach. In 1961, on one of its peaks, builders found the remains of sacrifices to Zeus.
Read story 8 min read
