Articles about the origins of cultural traditions, celebrations, and customs
A 12-year-old child buried with deer antlers 100,000 years ago. Neanderthals debated over flower offerings. Royalty interred alongside dozens of sacrificed servants. From a simple pit in the ground to pyramids — and from ancient rites to the modern funeral industry — we explore what each burial reveals about the society that built it.
The Bible did not arrive as a single volume — it was assembled over more than a thousand years through fierce debates over which texts deserved to be called sacred. Why does the Catholic Old Testament contain seven books that Protestant Bibles omit? How did early Christians decide which gospels to keep and which to discard? And where does the Quran fit into this story of Abrahamic scripture? From the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Council of Trent, this is the story of how the world's most printed book took shape.
Dining etiquette is not a universal code — it is a mosaic of contradictions shaped by religion, hierarchy, and history over millennia. From the last morsel no one dares to take, to where belching is a compliment, to the rituals of pouring drinks across Korea, Japan, China, Georgia, and West Africa — this article explores how seemingly opposite table manners actually perform the same social functions, and how China's Clean Plate Campaign shows tradition and ecology coming into direct negotiation.
Why is Christmas on December 25th? The Bible never specifies a date for Jesus's birth, yet the whole world celebrates on this day. From the theological calculations of the early church and Roman solar festivals to the German origins of the Christmas tree and the Dutch roots of Santa Claus — the story of how Christmas became what it is today stretches across two thousand years of history.
The jiangshi — a stiff, hopping corpse that feeds on qi rather than blood — was born from China's deep-rooted beliefs about proper burial, ancestral land, and the fate of souls lost far from home. From the Qing Dynasty scholars who first documented these tales, through the eerie corpse-walking traditions of Xiangxi province, to the explosive Hong Kong cinema boom of the 1980s that brought the hopping vampire to the world, the jiangshi is a window into centuries of Chinese thought on death, the soul, and the bonds between the living and the dead.