We’re almost at the end of the list of the twelve Olympian gods of ancient Greece. We’ve covered almost all the famous ones by now, but in the ones that remain we see perhaps a gap in between what the Greeks saw as important, and what we see as important today. We have covered the
There were twelve “core” gods of the ancient Greek pantheon. In the first of these articles we looked at the Big Three, that is Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, and in the second we looked at the main goddesses. Now we get into the really interesting stuff: the specialists. The greater gods may have had responsibilities,
The Bronze Age Collapse was, definitively, the end of the Bronze Age. By the time the ancient civilizations had picked up the pieces and rediscovered how to write and interact with each other again they had an entirely new and exciting discovery to work with: iron. Iron can be made into harder and more durable
For those of you who watched the recent sequel to Gladiator, imaginatively named Gladiator II, firstly you have our sympathies. Whatever that mess was, it was closer to ill-conceived fantasy than a heroic, historical epic. But amidst the pointless diversions, the weirdly cheap sets and the endless toga flapping from a poorly cast and out-of-form
The main problem in understanding the Bronze Age Collapse is that we don’t really know what happened. This may look like an oversimplification but it is not. It is, instead, the simple truth. Of the four great civilizations that faced disaster in this 12th century BC collapse: the Mycenaean Greeks, the Hittites, the Assyrians and
Pytheas is not a familiar name, even to those familiar with the ancient world. But in this man we see a resolve, a determination to explore and to discover, which merits him a place among the greats. The world used to be a smaller one than it is now. For the civilizations of ancient Europe