The temple of Hera in Olympia, Elis, Greece
Why did people want to punch Socrates?
Where did Egyptians bury your liver?
How old are the Rocky Mountains?
Once every four years, men from all over Greece
came to compete in a great athletic festival in Elis, in western Greece
(The men wouldn't let women compete). This was called the Olympic games
because the place was called Olympia. The Olympic Games were a religious festival to
honor the Greek gods Zeus and Hera.
The temple of Hera in Olympia, Elis, Greece
We don't know when men first began celebrating the Olympic Games, but
they were certainly already doing it in the time of Homer,
by 776 BC. And they were celebrated from
then on, every four years without fail, until people converted to Christianity
and the Roman Emperor Theodosius
banned the games in 393 AD. That's more than a thousand years! The games
were so regular that people used them to date by. They would say, I
was born in the second year of the twenty-fourth Olympiad (starting
from 776 BC). Can you figure out what year that would be in our reckoning?
The temple of Hera in Olympia, Elis, Greece
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