Prayer: Did you mean...?

The concept of a curse laid on a tomb or gravesite is best known from ancient Egypt but the practice was quite common in other civilizations of antiquity. The tomb or grave was the eternal home of the physical remains of the deceased to which...

Elephants were thought of as fierce and frightful monsters in antiquity, very real though rarely seen until the Hellenistic period. They were deployed on the battlefield to strike terror into the enemy, however, since fear was considered...

The Poor Man of Nippur (c. 701 BCE) is a Babylonian poem on the themes of the obligations of hospitality and revenge for an undeserved injury. A poor man of the city of Nippur feels mistreated when he visits the mayor and then goes to great...

The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola (1548) is a manual of disciplines formulated by Ignatius Loyola (l. 1491-1556) to prepare one spiritually for Christian service. They were initially developed between 1522-1524 by Loyola for himself...

The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831) is the first-person account given by the rebel slave leader Nat Turner (l. 1800-1831) to the attorney T. R. Gray (l. c. 1800-1843) following Nat Turner's Rebellion in Virginia (also known as the Southampton...

For how long do we build a household? For how long do we seal a document? For how long do brothers share the inheritance? For how long is there to be jealousy in the land(?)? The Epic of Gilgamesh, chapter 10, Tablet X. I have always...

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...

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c. 477-524/525) was a scholar in Late Antiquity who was imprisoned and executed by Theodoric (r. 493-526 CE) but was later idolised by medieval intellectuals. His most famous work was De consolatione philosophiae...

James Drummond MacGregor (1759-1830) was a Presbyterian minister in Pictou, Nova Scotia, who became the first published abolitionist in Canada through his A Letter to a Clergyman Urging Him to Set Free a Black Girl He Held in Slavery (1788...

The ancient Greeks believed the gods were an ever-present influence on humanity, for both good and bad. The belief that these gods might be influenced in turn is evidenced in the widespread building of temples dedicated to them as well as...