Olympic Games (Greek Ὀλυμπιάς): festival in Olympia with athletic contests, celebrated every four years in honor of the supreme god Zeus.Olympic Games
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Orality: the way in which information spreads through (predominantly) illiterate societies. The study of oral literature has helped classicists and historians to evaluate the origins of their information.In the early twentieth century, scholars studying the formal characteristics of ancient texts,…
Tyre (Phoenician רצ, ṣūr, "rock"; Greek Τύρος; Latin Tyrus): port in Phoenicia and one of the main cities in the eastern Mediterranean.
Europa (mosaic from Byblos)
To…
Palimpsest: a piece of writing material, usually parchment or leather, from which a text has been eraded to reuse it for another text. Sometimes, the first text remains legible.Ancient writing materials were precious, especially parchment. When a text was no longer needed, a…
Velleius Paterculus (c. 20 BCE - after 30 CE) Roman officer, senator, and scholar, author of a brief Roman History.In his Roman History, the Roman officer-historian Velleius Paterculus (20 BCE - after 30 CE) has included a description of the…
Pelasgians (Greek Πελασγοί): legendary indigenous population of Greece.The Limits of Knowledge
Herodotus
The ancient Greeks only understood their direct neighbors. For example, the…