In The Ramayana, Rama appears before King Janaka, performs a task, and the King gives him the beautiful Princess Sita as his bride. What is that task?

The oldest writing in China is inscribed on an object, which is then thrown into a fire. The object cracks, and the cracks are used to predict the future. They are called:

Serpents appear in the mythology of many cultures. Because they shed their skin, they often represent healing or rebirth. Because many live in water, they are thought to be:

Like the Cyclops and the Hundred-Handed giants of Greek mythology, other cultures have stories of terrible monsters created before the gods were born. In Norse mythology, they were:

The Chinese creation myth begins with an egg. Inside is chaos, from which a living being forms. He breaks out of the egg to separate the light from darkness. His name is: 

In Japanese mythology, the first two beings are a man, Inzanagi, whose name means “He who invites,” and Inzanami, whose name means “she who…”

In Norse mythology, Balder dreams of Nfelheim, and his mother makes everything in creation promise to never harm him. She neglects to ask one thing, and Loki fashions spear from it that kills Balder. The one thing that can kill Balder is:

The oldest writing in India is the Vedas. They are short poems of faith written by many authors over centuries. They were complied by later writers, each collection unique to that poet. A collection of Vedas is called:

In Japanese mythology, the first two humans, Inzanagi and Inzanami have a child. They set him adrift on the waters because he was born:

China’s oldest philosophy is Tao Ti Ching, which explains how the forces of the universe work. One example is: “Thirty spokes will converge in the hub of a wheel, but the use of the cart will depend upon the part of the hub that is void.” The author of this work is:

Norse social structure included clans whose members were either blood relatives or had married in. The clan chief owed an obligation to the family of slain warriors, which was often paid in cattle or:

In The Ramayana, the demon king Ravana abducts the Princess Sita, and carries her away in a flying chariot. She manages to alert a tribe of monkeys by:

Shintoism is the ancient religion of Japan. There is no founder and no central text. A simple gate marks the boundary between the sacred and profane, defining a holy place. It is called a:

In Japanese mythology, Amaterasu is the goddess of the sun, married to the moon, and sister of the storm god. When the storm god visits her, he causes havoc in her life. When Amaterasu can take no more, she:

In Norse mythology, goddesses riding winged horses carry heroes who died bravely in battle to Asgard. After crossing a rainbow bridge, they feast on boar and wait for the end of the world. The palace where they feast is called:

Poems in Sanskrit are collected in Sutra, which means “thread.” The best known in the west is the Kama Sutra, which contains:

In Norse mythology, Yggdrasil is a giant ash tree whose branches and roots hold the Nine Worlds. Among them is Asgard, home of the gods, Midgard, home of humans, and Nifelheim, home of:

Hinduism features a trinity of gods called “trimurti.” It includes the creator Brahma, shown in artworks with multiple faces. Shiva the destroyer has four arms. Vishnu the preserver has:

In Hindu mythology, the god Vishnu appears on earth many times, as a man, as a crocodile, and even as a man-lion. In one epic, he appears as Krishna to deliver a discourse on life to a young soldier. The appearance of a god in physical form is called:

In The Ramayana, Rama and the demon king Ravanna fight one-on-one. Rama finds that every time he cuts off one of Ravanna's many heads another grows back in its place. This is similar to the figure in Greek mythology:

The Japanese island of Hokkaido has its own mythology, the Kotan Utunnai. It is told in an unusual way: in first person, without a named narrator, and the events unfold as if in:

In Chinese mythology, the Great Goddess Nu Kua creates humans out of clay. Because it takes too long to fashion each one by hand, she finds something that allows her to create humans faster by spinning them off. The hand-made ones are highborn, the others are common. The thing she uses to spin them off is a:

Shintoism is the ancient religion of Japan. There are two rituals of purification in Shintoism. One involves burning a sacrifice of rice, Saki, fruit or tree branches. The other involves:

In the Chinese myth Chi-Li Slays the Serpent, a giant snake devours a young girl once a year. The villagers know he is ready to feed because:

In the Kotan Utannai of Hokkaido, the hero grows up in a hut with a woman he thinks is his older sister. She eventually tells him that she rescued him as a baby, raised him as her own, but he is from another family. For proof, she gives him his father's: