Here, in all their wonder and splendor, are the Mythologies of Mankind -- from pre-Biblical Egypt and pre-Homeric Greece to the farthest reaches of Africa, the Orient, the Pacific, and the Americas -- all gathered into one mammoth volume of unprecedented scope and beauty, and illustrated with an incomparable assemblage of authentic paintings, sculptures, symbols, idols, ritual and sacrificial objects, many rarely seen by modern Western eyes. This monumental work is the first complete encyclopedia of world mythology. Originally published in France by the famouse house of Larousse, it contains of course all the well-loved myths of Classical Antiquity. But more than half the book is devoted to the strange and unfamiliar mythologies of civilizations other than our own... from Peru to Persia, from Tahiti to Togoland.