Heroes: Did you mean...?

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...

The extraordinary quality and quantity of the marble sculpture which adorned the 5th century BCE Parthenon in Athens made it the most richly decorated of all Greek temples. The sculpture, now mostly separated into the Parthenon Marbles (Elgin...

The Legend of Cutha (also known as the Cutha Legend and Kutha Legend) is a fictional work dated to the 2nd millennium BCE belonging to the genre known as Mesopotamian Naru literature. It features the Akkadian king Naram-Sin (r. 2261-2224...

World History Encyclopedia is joined by Jennifer Saint, who is going to tell us all about her debut novel Ariadne. Kelly (WHE): Do you want to tell us a little bit about the book? Jennifer Saint (author): The book is a retelling of the...

The Red Eagles is a Cheyenne hero tale featuring the popular champion Mok-so-is, the child hero best known from the legend Found in the Grass, popular among many Algonquin-speaking nations including the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Blackfoot. The...

Gilgamesh is the semi-mythic King of Uruk best known as the hero of The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2150-1400 BCE) the great Babylonian poem that predates Homer's Iliad and Odyssey by 1500 years and, therefore, stands as the oldest piece of epic...

Myths are a part of every culture in the world and are used to explain natural phenomena, where a people came from and how their civilization developed, and why things happen as they do. At their most basic level, myths comfort by giving...

The Code of Hammurabi was a set of 282 laws inscribed in stone by the Babylonian king Hammurabi (r. 1795-1750 BCE) who conquered and then ruled ancient Mesopotamia. Although his law code was not the first, it was the most clearly defined...

The samurai (also bushi) were a class of warriors that arose in the 10th century in Japan and which performed military service until the 19th century. Elite and highly-trained soldiers adept at using both the bow and sword, the samurai were...

The ancient Olympic Games were a sporting event held every four years at the sacred site of Olympia, in the western Peloponnese, in honour of Zeus, the supreme god of the Greek religion. The games, held from 776 BCE to 393 CE, involved participants...