Enheduanna’s name means ‘Ornament of Heaven’. She wrote hymns and myths more than 4000 years ago, studied the stars and yet is almost entirely unknown in the present day.
Jason Momoa as Aquaman in the forthcoming film.
IMDB
An expert argues our connection with these figures is longstanding. They are embedded in our myths and help us explore deeper questions about being human.
Giovanni Lanfranco’s Norandino and Lucina Discovered by the Ogre (1624): in many societies giants were long part of received wisdom.
Wikimedia Commons
Tales of giants can be found around the world - in Wales, in Australia, and the Pacific Islands. They helped people explain the sometimes cataclysmic changes to the environment they saw around them.
Even if mermaids aren’t real, they’ll likely feature in human stories for many years to come. Very few mythical creatures are found in so many diverse cultures, across so many years without changing.
An 1894 image of Lambton fighting the worm from the book More English Fairy Tales.
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A monstrous worm that features in English mythology shares remarkable similarities with the watery serpents of Indigenous stories.
The “Burney Relief,” which is believed to represent either Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddess of love and war, or her older sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the underworld (c. 19th or 18th century BC)
BabelStone
Sex was central to life in ancient Mesopotamia. And the authors of Sumerian love poetry, depicting the exploits of divine couples, showed a wealth of practical knowledge about the stages of female sexual arousal.
There is a rich tradition of trees in mythology.
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From the Thirteen-Storey Treehouse to the Magic Faraway Tree, kids loves treehouses. These books tap into a rich tradition of mythology, which takes characters into forests to come to terms with life.
The sun was worshiped as a deity in many cultures – and witnessing it get extinguished could be a particularly terrifying event.
Prometheus statue at Rockefeller Center, Manhattan. The inscription behind it is a paraphrase of Aeschylus that reads: “Prometheus, teacher in every art, brought the fire that hath proved to mortals a means to mighty ends”.
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James, aged 8, of Sydney wants to know: are zombies real?
Ishtar (on right) comes to Sargon, who would later become one of the great kings of Mesopotamia.
Edwin J. Prittie, The story of the greatest nations, 1913
Love, it is said, is a battlefield, and it was no more so than for the first goddess of love and war, Ishtar. Her legend has influenced cultural archetypes from Aphrodite to Wonder Woman.