Monotheism: Did you mean...?

Among the duties of any Egyptian monarch was the construction of monumental building projects to honor the gods and preserve the memory of their reigns for eternity. These building projects were not just some grandiose gesture on the part...

For over two centuries, ancient Judea was a restless province of the Roman Empire, marked by rebellions, shifting loyalties, and the tensions between imperial might and local identity. In his latest book, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion...

The ancient Egyptians understood that their gods had prevailed over the forces of chaos through the creation of the world and relied upon humanity's help to maintain it. The people of Mesopotamia held this same belief but felt they were co-workers...

The mythology of any civilization reflects its core values, greatest fears, and highest hopes and so it is with the mythology of ancient Persia. The great heroes like Karsasp, Thraetaona, and Rustum express particularly Persian values but...

Emerging from a small sect of Judaism in the 1st century CE, early Christianity absorbed many of the shared religious, cultural, and intellectual traditions of the Greco-Roman world. In traditional histories of Western culture, the emergence...

In ancient Egypt, if a woman were having difficulty conceiving a child, she might spend an evening in a Bes Chamber (also known as an incubation chamber) located within a temple. Bes was the god of childbirth, sexuality, fertility, among...

Many myths and falsehoods concerning the Egyptian practice of mummification have been promoted to the general public in movies, television shows, and documentaries. While these offerings are entertaining and fascinating to watch, the purposes...

The Marduk Prophecy is an Assyrian document dating to between 713-612 BCE found in a building known as The House of the Exorcist adjacent to a temple in the city of Ashur. It relates the travels of the statue of the Babylonian god Marduk...

The concept and function of angels in ancient Judaism were some of the many elements incorporated from contemporary cultures and religious views. The Hebrew malakh was translated into the Greek angelos, both of which indicated not their nature...

The Achaemenid Empire (c. 550-330 BCE) was the first great Persian political entity in Western and Central Asia which stretched, at its peak, from Asia Minor to the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia through Egypt. It was founded by Cyrus II (the...