Myths & Legends

Short, surprising cards on myths & legends. Each one is labelled Established, Debated or Speculative, so you always know how solid the evidence is.

• A self-taught printer found a flood story older than Noah's on a clay tablet.

  Established. In 1872, George Smith, a British Museum assistant who had left school young, was sorting tablets from an ancient library at Nineveh. On one…

• Was there a real Trojan War?

  Debated. For centuries, Troy was thought to be pure legend. In the 1870s, Heinrich Schliemann dug into a mound called Hisarlik in Turkey and found a…

• A Native American story may remember a volcano that exploded 7,700 years ago.

  Debated. About 7,700 years ago, Mount Mazama in Oregon erupted so violently that it collapsed, leaving the bowl that now holds Crater Lake. The…

• The kraken was real. We just call it the giant squid.

  Established. Sailors' tales of a huge many-armed sea monster go back at least to a Norwegian account from 1180. In 1853, a giant squid washed up on a…

• Did elephant skulls give the Greeks the idea of the Cyclops?

  Speculative. Dwarf elephants once lived on Mediterranean islands like Sicily, Malta, Crete and Cyprus. Their skulls have one big hole in the middle,…

• Could the story of the Seven Sisters be 100,000 years old?

  Speculative. Look at the Pleiades star cluster and you will probably count six stars. Yet cultures across the world, from ancient Greece to Aboriginal…

• For centuries, Europe's 'unicorn horns' were whale teeth.

  Established. The spiral horns sold as unicorn horn in Europe came from the narwhal, a small Arctic whale. The 'horn' is really a tooth that grows out…

• You say the names of Norse gods every week.

  Established. Tuesday is Tiw's day, Wednesday is Woden's day, Thursday is Thor's day and Friday is Frigg's day. These names come from Old English.…