Extraordinary natural occurrences and appearances were traditionally explained in myths, legends or so called Tall Tales. They fall in the larger genre of folklore and different from myths or legends they are relatively young or have known or contemporary authorship....
Sculpture of fish god from Lepenski Vir, likely to have been part of the people’s spiritual responses to flooding. Credit: Mickey Mystique/Wikimedia Commons In a beautiful article from 2019, Patrick Nunn gives a couple of examples for protection architecture that...
In Greek and Roman Antiquity extreme weather events and natural disasters like droughts, earthquakes and floods were a frequent occurrence. They also offered important stages for the display of political power. Political leaders would rush to the occasion to help the...
This is the famous section from the 28. book of the "Res Gestae", the history written by Roman historian Ammianus who lived from around 330 - 400 CE. It describes the earthquake and tsunami of July 21. 365 CE which shook the whole Mediterranean. The scene described by...
The "Palestrina Mosaic" or "Nile mosaic of Palestrina", a town near Italy's capital Rome, is a late Hellenistic floor mosaic depicting the Nile in its passage from the Blue Nile to the Mediterranean. Around 100 BCE, Nile landscapes were quite a fashion in Roman art....
"Throughout Cascadia (southern Canadian and northern US-American west coast), earth shaking and/or tsunamilike effects are frequently described in stories about the acts and personalities of supernatural beings, often in the guise of animals. Many stories from western...
From an article by Patrick Harrigan in the Colombo Sunday Times in 1989: "One example of a recurrent storytelling motif that appears and re-appears under various guises is that of characters or even whole kingdoms that are said to be 'sunken' or gone 'underground' and...
"At the beginning of time, the surface of the Earth was primeval ocean where this great serpent swam or lay. The daughter of the highest deity (who dwelt in the heavens and had birds as servants) came down from the upper realm and spread a handful of earth to form the...
It might be time for a clarification. Since flood myths play quite a big role in cristian creationist ideology and since there is a lot of material online on the subject hosted on creatonist propaganda websites, I feel I need to distance myself from the creationist...
In the Greek myth of Decalion and Pyrrha, the couple recreates mankind after the universal deluge by throwing rocks over their shoulders to let them grow into men and women. Why rocks? And why over their shoulders? Is this how a community, a city is rebuilt? Ovid...