Pre-Columbian: Did you mean...?

Critias (l. c. 460-403 BCE) was an Athenian politician, poet, and playwright, one of Socrates' followers, Plato's second cousin, a leading member of the Thirty Tyrants of Athens, and leader of the oligarchy they established. He is referenced...

Melissus of Samos (l. c. 5th century BCE) was a Greek philosopher of the Eleatic School, considered the third great proponent of that philosophy's claim that reality is One, after Parmenides (l. c. 485 BCE) and Zeno of Elea (l. c. 465 BCE...

Gorgias of Leontini (l. c. 427 BCE) was a famous Greek Sophist who claimed that nothing exists and, even if it does, its nature cannot be understood and, even if it could be, one is not able to communicate that understanding to another person...

In which John Green teaches you about the changes wrought by contact between the Old World and the New. John does this by exploring the totally awesome history book "The Columbian Exchange" by Alfred Cosby, Jr. After Columbus "discovered"...

Philolaus (l. c. 470 to c. 385 BCE) was a Pythagorean philosopher who claimed that fire was the first cause of existence and heat the underlying source of human life. He is best known for his pyrocentric model of the universe, which replaced...

Protagoras of Abdera (l.c. 485-415 BCE) is most famous for his claim that "Of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not" (DK 80B1) usually rendered simply as "Man...

In the book of Genesis in the pre-flood period, Enoch was the son of Jared and the father of Methuselah. There are few details about Enoch. We learn that he lived 365 years, and then Enoch "walked faithfully with God; then he was no more...

The ancient Celtic pantheon consisted of over 400 gods and goddesses who represented everything from rivers to warfare. With perhaps the exception of Lugh, the Celtic gods were not universally worshipped across Iron Age Europe but were very...

In Norse belief, the soul of the deceased might wind up in any one of a number of afterlife realms. There was Valhalla, the realm of Odin where the dead warriors drank, fought, and told stories, Folkvangr ('the Field of the People'), the...

Xenophanes of Colophon (l.c. 570-c.478 BCE) is known as one of the Pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece, so-called because they pre-date Socrates (l. c. 470/469-399 BCE), recognized as the Father of Western Philosophy. The Pre-Socratics...