Ancient text

Works written by ancient Greek and Roman authors have made a major impact on the world’s culture and society. They profoundly shaped medieval thought, as you can discover in Cillian O’Hogan’s article The Classical Past on the Polonsky England and France 700-1200 project website. Compared to their afterlife and significance,...

A 1,500-year-old book that contains a previously unknown gospel has been deciphered.

Description Revamped my Trucian alphabets. It's much more detailed and easy to understand, now; I'm thinking I might change/add a few things, though. A few interesting notes: Before the invention of writing utensils, Trucians wrote by either scratching messages into wooden tablets with their claws or by dipping their claws into colored dyes. Trucians write top-bottom, left-right. The Trucian alphabet has no lower-case letters. The Trucian higher-number system (#'s 9+) operates through the…

Period: Late Imperial. Date: early 3rd century A.D.. Culture: Roman, Egyptian. Medium: Papyrus. Dimensions: H.: 4 x 3 1/8 in. (10.2 x 7.9 cm). Classificatio...

As long as humanity has had beliefs in a higher power, the use of magic, spells, curses, and incantations have featured widely across cultures. A number of influential texts or ‘grimoires’ (textbooks of magic) were developed over the centuries, many of which became the books of choice for secret societies and occult organizations that endured well into the twentieth century.

Located at the gateway to the Sahara desert in what is now Mali, within the confines of the fertile zone of the Sudan, Timbuktu is one of the cities of Africa whose name is the most heavily charged with history. Founded in the 5th century, it became an intellectual and spiritual capital, reaching its golden age in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Perhaps not as well-known as other grimoires, the Galdrabok, an Icelandic ‘book of magic’, is one of the most important surviving documents for the practices and understanding of occult practices in Iceland in the late Medieval era. It offers a unique insight into the various elements that contributed to a national magical tradition in Iceland at the time of its compilation.

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A close up of ancient Greek text from Ephesus, Turkey.

Lunar eclipses figured prominently in the prognostications of the Babylonian seer. This text was part of the temple ritual. Specific roles and chants are assigned to different types of priests and laypeople. Aromatic woods are to be burned on an altar throughout an eclipse; dirges are to be sung; people are to remove their headgear and cover their heads with their garments, then wail and cry aloud, begging the gods to save them, their cities, and their shrines. The text conceives of an…