Tree: Did you mean...?

The Temple at Uppsala was a religious center dedicated to the Norse gods Thor, Odin, and Freyr located in what is now Gamla Uppsala in Sweden. It is described by the 11th-century historian Adam of Bremen as the most significant pagan site...

Maya religious beliefs are formed on the notion that virtually everything in the world contains k'uh, or sacredness. K'uh and k'uhul, similar terms which are used to explain the spirituality of all inanimate and animate things, describe the...

Karakorum (aka Qaraqorum, modern name: Harhorin) is located in the Orkhon Valley of central Mongolia and was the capital of the Mongol Empire from 1235 to 1263. Ogedei Khan (r. 1229-1241) ordered its construction, and had a walled palace...

How we celebrate Christmas today is largely shaped by a small group of authors who recorded festive traditions in the 19th century. These authors include Washington Irving (1783-1859), Clement Clarke Moore (1779-1863), and Charles Dickens...

How the Rabbit Lost His Tail is a Sioux legend, part origin myth and part didactic tale, explaining why the rabbit looks as it does, why the owl is a night bird, and how one should treat a member of one’s family and also one’s community...

As the 15th century ended, Europeans were still mostly in the dark about the Eastern world. Early travelers like Marco Polo had given the West tidbits of information, but these accounts were too highly colored and fragmentary to provide a...

Dodona in Epirus, north-west Greece, lies in a valley on the eastern slopes of Mt. Tomaros and was famed throughout the ancient Greek world as the site of a great oracle of Zeus. The site was expanded in the Hellenistic period, and one of...

The term 'mythology' comes from the Greek mythos (story-of-the-people) and logos (word or speech), meaning the spoken story of a people. Every civilization of the ancient world developed a belief system, which is characterized as 'mythology'...

Utu (also known as Shamash, Samas, and Babbar) 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 but was known as Shamash (Samas) to the Akkadians...

Lumbini is a village, archaeological site, and place of pilgrimage honored as the birthplace of Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha, l. c. 563-483 BCE) located in modern-day Rupandehi District of Nepal, Province 5, near the Indian border. It was...