Epic: Did you mean...?

Writing is the physical manifestation of a spoken language. It is thought that human beings developed language circa 35,000 BCE as evidenced by cave paintings from the period of the Cro-Magnon Man...

Medieval literature is defined broadly as any work written in Latin or the vernacular between c. 476-1500, including philosophy, religious treatises, legal texts, as well as works of the imagination. More narrowly, however...

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...

Utu-Shamash (also known as Babbar, Samas, Shamash, and Utu) is the Sumerian god of the sun and divine justice. He is the son of the moon god Nanna and the fertility goddess Ningal in the Sumerian tradition...

Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 BCE), better known to most modern readers as Virgil, was one of the greatest poets of the early Roman Empire. His best-known work, the Aeneid, told of a Trojan prince, Aeneas, who escaped the burning of Troy...

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was a German composer of Romantic music most famous for his epic operas like The Ring, Tannhäuser, and Tristan and Isolde. Wagner was concerned throughout his career with the theme of redemption through...

Unlike the rich corpus of ancient Egyptian funerary texts, no such “guidebooks” from Mesopotamia detail the afterlife and the soul's fate after death. Instead, ancient Mesopotamian views of the afterlife...

Persian literature derives from a long oral tradition of poetic storytelling. The first recorded example of this tradition is the Behistun Inscription of Darius I (the Great, r. 522-486 BCE), carved on a cliff-face c. 522...

The Death of Gilgamesh is a Sumerian poem relating the death and afterlife of the famous hero-king of Uruk, who had become a legendary figure. The piece is dated to before the Ur III Period (2047-1750 BCE), and although its...

This map follows the legendary voyage of Jason and the Argonauts, one of the great epic tales of Greek mythology. Their journey, dating back to traditions of the late Bronze and early Iron Ages but best preserved...