Echoing through the ages, the poetry and stories of Ovid and Herodotus have left their fingerprints on the arts from painting and sculpture to pop culture. From some of the earliest oral traditions and the first written texts of the west, we can glimpse the ancient world from the peaks of the Alps, across the waters of the Mediterranean, through the deserts of Arabia, the steppes of Persia, and up the winding course of the Nile past the tombs of pharaohs and into the highlands of the Kushite empire. These were the inspirations from which both the poet and the historian drew to weave a tapestry that would become the basis for history, the origin of fantasy, and the root of myth for millennia.