Demon: Did you mean...?

Winged female demon, Sicily, 6th BCE, Limestone. Nye Carlsberg Glyptotek (Copenhagen, Denmark). Made with Memento Beta (now ReMake) from Autodesk. The kneeling position indicated fast movement in early Greek art. Such relief...

Ninurta (identified with Ningirsu, Pabilsag, and the biblical Nimrod) is the Sumerian and Akkadian hero-god of war, hunting, and the south wind. He first appears in texts in the early 3rd millennium BCE as an...

René Descartes (1596-1650) was a French mathematician, natural scientist, and philosopher, best known by the phrase 'Cogito ergo sum' ('I think therefore I am'). He published works on optics, coordinate geometry, physiology, and...

The anthropomorphic god Indra was the most important god in the Vedic religion and he later became a major figure in Hinduism and an important deity in Buddhism, Cham and Chinese tradition. For the Aryas he...

Bes is the ancient Egyptian god of childbirth, fertility, sexuality, humor, and war, but served primarily as a protector god of pregnant women and children. He is regularly depicted as a dwarf with large ears, long-haired and bearded, with...

Unlike the rich corpus of ancient Egyptian funerary texts, no such “guidebooks” from Mesopotamia detail the afterlife and the soul's fate after death. Instead, ancient Mesopotamian views of the afterlife...

In ancient Mesopotamia, the gods informed every aspect of daily life, including the practice of medicine. Gula, the Sumerian goddess of healing, presided over the medical arts, guiding...

The religion of the Etruscans included a myriad of gods, goddesses, and minor divine beings, some of which were indigenous and some were imported, especially from Greece, and then given their own particular Etruscan attributes...

How the Hopi Indians Reached Their World is the creation story of the Native American Hopi nation (the Hopi tribe of Arizona) located today within the Navajo Nation reservation. The legend details the ascent...

Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld is a Sumerian poem pre-dating The Epic of Gilgamesh and featuring its central characters. It is sometimes included in modern-day translations as Book 12 but is usually omitted...