Sumerian Mythology: Did you mean...?

The rise of Sumerian civilization in southern Mesopotamia (c. 6000–2300 BCE) represents one of the earliest transformations from agrarian village life to urban state formation. Located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, this alluvial...

The Gutians were a West Asiatic people who are thought to have lived around the Zagros Mountains in a region referred to as Gutium. They had no written language and all that is known of them comes from their enemies, including the Akkadians...

Elements of Norse mythology abound in The Lord of the Rings, and none is so compelling as the ring itself. The One Ring is reminiscent of magic rings in Norse lore, especially Odin's Draupnir or Andvaranaut from the legend of the Volsungs...

The Matter of Aratta is the modern-day title for a collection of four poems – Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, Enmerkar and En-suhgir-ana, Lugalbanda in the Mountain Cave, and Lugalbanda and the Anzud Bird – concerning the rivalry between...

Achilles The hero of the Trojan War, leader of the Myrmidons, slayer of Hector and Greece's greatest warrior, who sadly came unstuck when Paris sent a flying arrow guided by Apollo, which caught him in his only weak spot, his heel. Adonis...

Elves and dwarves represent minor divine figures in Norse mythology. Elves (álfar) and dwarves (dvergar) have in common their talent for creating precious objects, skill, agility, and moral ambiguity. Dwarves appear in several important stories...

Mesopotamian science and technology developed during the Uruk period (circa 4000-3100 BCE) and the Early Dynastic period (circa 2900-2350/2334 BCE) of the Sumerian culture of southern Mesopotamia. The foundation of future Mesopotamian advances...

Elam was a region in the Near East corresponding to the modern-day provinces of Ilam and Khuzestan in southern Iran (though it also included part of modern-day southern Iraq) whose civilization spanned thousands of years from circa 3200 to...

This hymn to the goddess Ishtar is written in Sumerian; after every line in Sumerian, the text is translated in Akkadian. Such translations have been invaluable to modern scholars. They reflect how the Sumerian language had become difficult...

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...