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Petrarch (1304-1374 CE), full name Francesco Petrarca, was an Italian scholar and poet who is credited as one of the founders of the Renaissance movement in art, thought, and literature. Petrarch actively searched for 'lost' ancient manuscripts...

Tiamat is the Mesopotamian goddess associated with primordial chaos and the salt sea best known from the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish. In all versions of the myth, following the original, Tiamat always symbolizes the forces of chaos, which...

Phillis Wheatley (l. c. 1753-1784) was the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry and become recognized as a poet, overcoming the prevailing understanding of the time that a Black person was incapable of writing, much less...

Edda is a term used to describe two Icelandic manuscripts that were copied down and compiled in the 13th century CE. Together they are the main sources of Norse mythology and skaldic poetry that relate the religion, cosmogony, and history...

The English historian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) wrote and published his seminal work History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire between 1776 and 1788. The dominant theme of Gibbon's six-volume work is that the fall of the Roman Empire...

The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant is a literary work from the Middle Kingdom of Egypt (2040-1782 BCE) which illustrates the value society placed on the concept of justice and equality under the law. In the story, a peasant named Khun-Anup...

In the wake of the downfall of the Western Roman Empire and the intellectual collapse of Athens, Byzantine scholars engaged in preserving the Classical Greek language and its literature. Thus they became the guardians of a vanished culture...

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an Enlightenment philosopher who, as author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is widely credited as the founder of feminism. Wollstonecraft called for equal education opportunities for men and women...

Lao-Tzu (l. c. 500 BCE, also known as Laozi or Lao-Tze) was a Chinese philosopher credited with founding the philosophical system of Taoism. He is best known as the author of the Laozi (later retitled the Tao-Te-Ching translated as “The Way...

The Akkadian poet Enheduanna (circa 2300 BCE) is the world's first author known by name and was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad (Sargon the Great, reign 2334-2279 BCE). Whether Enheduanna was, in fact, a blood relative of Sargon's or the...