Genesis dedicates just five verses to Nimrod. In a book which gives several chapters to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Nimrod gets a paragraph. He is the son of Cush, a "mighty one on the earth," a hunter of some distinction, the ruler of a string of Mesopotamian cities, and then the narrative moves on without so much as a backward glance. This is unusual. Biblical minimalism usually means that either figure is unimportant, or the figure is so important that the tradition cannot q

“William found a remarkable hill, a fragment of a mountain” and “called it Myzithras because they shouted it thus, and he made it into a...

In 1860 the chairman of the Select Committee on the British Museum, questioning Sir Anthony Panizzi, the museum’s principal librarian,...

In the late third century Diocletian sent his colleague Maximian to Gaul to subdue the “country folk and bandits whom the inhabitants...

Whenever the eunuch is invoked, it’s almost always in the sense that he is a distortion or perversion of nature that only a people as...

Reading a church can be a daunting prospect. Weird Latinate or Greek-based terms are deployed to outline liturgical functions with even...