Gender: Did you mean...?

Hummingbirds, called huitzillin ("wee-TZEEL-een") in the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, are one of the most recognizable and striking species in the avian world. While these pollinators are known in the Western imagination for their vibrant...

A columbarium is an underground chamber, which the Romans used for preserving the ashes of the dead. During the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, hundreds of columbaria lined the consular highways leading out of Rome, although now only some two dozen...

The poem Lokasenna belongs to the Poetic Edda, a bulk of Old Norse poetry written down in Iceland in the 1200s but based on linguistic features dating back as far as the 900s. In this invaluable resource for Norse mythology, Lokasenna stands...

Women in the New Testament are presented for the most part along the contours of both Jewish and Greco-Roman concepts of the social construction of gender roles. Women’s value to society was in their role in procreation. There are some exceptions...

The story of Ruth and Naomi is found in the book of Ruth in the Jewish Scriptures. The Scriptures are traditionally divided into three sections: Torah (the first five books assigned to Moses), the Prophets (Nevi’im), and Writings (Ketuvim...

Antisemitism is a modern term that describes prejudice and hostility to Jews and Judaism. The term is derived from the later social scientific categorization of the subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Amharic...

An inscription on an Egyptian papyrus dating from the 2nd century CE relates that the goddess Isis, bestowing gifts on humanity at the beginning of time, gave as much power and honor to women as she did to men. This brief passage reflects...

For many people, the origins of the Christian church are shrouded in obscurity outside of the biblical narratives concerning Jesus Christ and his Jewish followers. Yet, after the crucifixion of Jesus and the initial missions work across the...

The 8th November is celebrated as Archangels Day in Greece, but on that November day in 1977 CE something remarkable happened: an excavation team led by Professor Manolis Andronikos were roped down into the eerie gloom of an unlooted Macedonian-styled...

In the decades of the 20s and 30s of the 1st century CE, a Jew from the town of Nazareth in the Galilee began preaching that the God of Israel would soon intervene in history, restoring that nation to God's original plan and glory. From this...