Beard: Did you mean...?

The Great Sphinx at Giza represents the 4th Dynasty ruler, Khafra, with a body of a lion guarding his pyramid. A thousand years later, the Sphinx had come to be revered as a god called "Horemakhet", which means "Horus in the horizon". Some...

A c. 1862 oil painting, Santa Claus, by William Holbrook Beard (1825-1900). (Rhode Island School of Design Museum)

Three-quarter-length portrait of John Brown, salt print, reproduction of daguerreotype attributed to Martin M. Lawrence, May 1859. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

A Roman boy's rite of passage, a ceremony or ritual marking a transitional period in life from childhood to adulthood, was the assuming of the toga virilis, the adult toga. The ceremony usually took place sometime between the boy's 14th and...

Blackbeard (d. 1718), otherwise known as Edward Teach (probably an assumed name), was an infamous English pirate who operated in the Caribbean and Atlantic during a surprisingly short career lasting just 15 months. With his long black beard...

The English historian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) wrote and published his seminal work History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire between 1776 and 1788. The dominant theme of Gibbon's six-volume work is that the fall of the Roman Empire...

Plebeians were members of the plebs, the hereditary social class of commoners in ancient Rome. Their exclusion from political power by the patricians, who claimed to be the descendants of the first senators, led to Conflict of the Orders...

The Riace Bronzes, also known as the Riace Warriors, are a pair of bronze statues most likely sculpted in Greece in the mid-5th century BCE and rescued from the Ionian Sea near Riace Marina, Italy in 1972 CE. Slightly larger than life-size...

Gaius Sallustius Crispus (86-35 BCE), better known as Sallust, was a Roman statesman and historian. He turned away from an unsuccessful career in both politics and the Roman army, choosing instead on a writing career and produced three major...

O Creator of the material world, at what distance from the holy man (should the place for the dead body be)?" Ahura Mazda replied: "Three paces from the holy man". (Vend. 8. 6-7) In September 2009 CE, one of my relatives suggested that we...