Sometimes the past is

Sometimes the past is hidden in plain sight. Every day we bump into and use elements of an era that has long since vanished, little remnants of a different culture from long ago, stuck inside our

modern world. 3,000 years ago, the superpower of the Mediterranean were the Phoenicians. They were a naval empire with a focus on

international trade and commerce, but beyond goods and services they also spread

something far more lasting. Language. A great example is the Phoenician word for bull, which they called

Ellaif. It was drawn as the simple shape of a rounded nose with two horns off the back of it.

It was easy to carve into clay with just two stones. with two

strokes, strokes, a sort of long stretched out letter C

with a vertical line slicing down across the open end.

Around 800 BC, those Phoenicians rubbed off on their neighbors, the

ancient Greeks. The Greeks, you see, love the characters that the Phoenicians used for their

writing system, so they borrowed and adapted it.

That symbol for the Aleph got turned horns downward and over time the curved n was sharpened.

Oh and the Greeks changed its name too. to Alpha, and 2,000 years later, it's still around as the letter A.

Like I said, sometimes the past is hidden in plain sight.

It might be a word or a tool or even a food,

but more often than not, it's a story,

a tale that's been told for so long that people forget that it has real historical roots.

It makes sense, doesn't it?

Everyone loves an entertaining story, and the ones that thrill and chill us are easy to pass on from generation to generation, but buried within

that concept is a darker truth. Most frightening legends exist because someone in the past did something truly horrifying.

I'm Aaron Mankey and this is LORE. lower. If I'm honest, we could tell this sort of story just about anywhere.

...