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Fragments of a hand-written medieval manuscript telling the story of Merlin the Magician from the legend of Camelot have been translated into English. The text tells of battles between King Arthur and King Claudas, as well as the romance between Merlin and Viviane — sometimes known as 'the Lady of Lake'. The seven pieces of parchment date back some 770 years, and were discovered in 2019 among the University of Bristol’s Special Collections Library by researchers trawling though the ancient tomes.... ...'The Suite Vulgate du Merlin was written in about 1220–1225, so this puts the Bristol manuscript within a generation...

Foreign religions grew rapidly in the 1st-century A.D. Roman Empire, including worship of Jesus Christ, the Egyptian goddess Isis, and an eastern sun god, Mithras. Of the religions that expanded rapidly in the 1st-century Roman Empire, worship of Mithras was particularly popular among Roman soldiers, who spread his cult during their far-flung travels... Mithras's temples, called Mithraea, are the best archaeological evidence of the god's worship, and most of them featured a characteristic depiction of Mithras slaying a bull, a scene called the tauroctony... In the later Roman Empire, Mithras blended in with another sun god, Sol Invictus, the "unconquered...