Ancient Egyptian Civilization
Primordial Gods
Minor Gods
Ancient Egyptian Mythology
The Tuatha Dé Danann are among the most important supernatural beings in Irish mythology. Medieval Irish texts describe them as a powerful people associated with magic, warfare, healing, skilled craftsmanship,…
The Norse creation myth does not begin with gods building a finished universe from nothing. It begins with a vast empty space called Ginnungagap, bordered by forces of cold and…
Odin was one of the most powerful and complex gods in the Norse world. He is best known as the All-Father, a god associated with wisdom, war, death, poetry, magic,…
The Dagda was one of the most important divine figures in early Irish mythology and a leading member of the Tuatha Dé Danann. He appears as a king, warrior, druid,…
Every night, Ra was believed to cross the Duat in his solar barque while Apophis tried to stop him. Every morning, the rising sun meant that the journey had succeeded…
Tutankhamun died at around nineteen years old, after a reign of less than a decade and without a surviving heir. His death opened the way for Ay and later Horemheb…
The Assyrian Empire did not disappear the moment Nineveh fell in 612 BCE. Assyrian forces continued resisting from Harran, Egypt intervened on their side, and the struggle for control of…
Ancient Egypt is often linked to the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under Narmer around 3100 BCE. But that unification was probably the final stage of a longer political…
The Battle of Thermopylae is remembered as a heroic Greek defeat, but its importance went far beyond the death of Leonidas and the Spartans. Once the pass fell in 480…
Ramses II turned the Battle of Kadesh into one of the most famous victory stories of the ancient world. His inscriptions show him standing almost alone against the Hittite army,…
Loki was never a simple enemy of the Norse gods. He caused disasters, deceived allies, and repeatedly pushed the Æsir into danger, but he also helped them escape crises and…
Persephone’s return from the Underworld was not simply the end of a family tragedy. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, it was the compromise that allowed the earth to become…
Set’s defeat by Horus did more than settle a dispute between two gods. It helped define one of the central ideas of Egyptian kingship: Horus became the rightful heir of…
Hannibal came closer than any foreign commander of his generation to breaking Roman power. After crushing a massive Roman army at Cannae in 216 BCE, he had opened a crisis…
Hammurabi is remembered as the king who made Babylon one of the great powers of the ancient world. But when he came to the throne around 1792 BCE, that outcome…
Sparta won the Peloponnesian War in 404 BCE, but it stopped short of destroying the enemy it had spent nearly three decades fighting. Athens lost its walls, most of its…
If Akhenaten’s religion had survived his death and become Egypt’s permanent faith, the country would have faced far more than a change of gods. The real challenge would have been…
If Ragnarök had never happened, the Norse gods might have escaped the deaths foretold for them—but the survival of the old world would come at a surprising cost. Odin would…