What exactly is roleplay? Some folks love it, some folks hate it. But just what IS roleplay anyhow? Like so many questions in life, the answer is "that depends."

At its core, all roleplay (RP) is an interactive endeavor. Many different kinds of RP exist in the universe, but at AncientWorlds people have focused on interactive writing which can be categorized into four major types. Enactment of a scenario can be conducted in the chat room. Game playing can be transacted via written story moves. People also can engage in spontaneous and freewheeling interactive story writing. The other possibility is pre-planned interactive story writing. For the purpose of keeping us all on the same page, I will designate these four styles as "live timing," "role gaming," "informal interactive writing" (informal RP) and "formal interactive writing" (formal RP).

All four styles have certain common elements. First, you need a character (or characters). The characters portray the particular slant and perspective you wish to bring to the roleplay. Second, you need a setting--when and where will the action take place? (Dramatists call this the mise en scène. Science fiction writers call it the "ficton.") Third, you need some other people to work with. Fourth you need a scenario or storyline. Finally, you need an agreed upon set of guidelines or rules. (The rules may or may not be explicitly set out somewhere. Explicit rules for role gaming are a more obvious need than they are for other forms of RP. But unless people agree on some basics, things don't work out very well.)

Live timing on the internet typically takes place in a chat room. People agree to meet in a specific chat and write "in character" for a particular length of time. Think of it as a spontaneous play, written by many people, which is carried out through dialog with a minimal amount of exposition or description. For example, some folks might want to "do" a Robin Hood scenario. One person portrays Robin, another is Maid Marion, and so forth. There isn't much pre-planning, as the whole point is to keep the action impromptu. It's much like improvisational theatre in that things are live and you really don't know what the next person is going to say or do. Live timing can be quite exhilarating if you get the right group of people together!

Role gaming is at the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of formality. The point of this type of RP is the game not the writing. The scenario is incidental to the moves of the game and those moves are governed by a complex set of rules. Unlike a play or a story, there is no pre-determined plot. Nor are the characters narrative driven. Instead, the role gamer acts with one goal: to win the game. The best way to explain this is to give a specific example.

It is not known when humans first began using names though the practice is certainly very old, probably extending far into prehistory. Although all cultures use names, naming customs vary greatly from people to people. In some cases they are very simple, such as those of many Indonesians who use just a single name. On the other hand, traditional Chinese naming practices were very complex. Chinese males were given different names at various points in their lives, in addition to a surname and sometimes a generation name. Names serve several purposes. Most importantly they help distinguish us from one another. Imagine how difficult it would be to refer to people if we did not use names. Instead of saying Bob one would have to say something like the short red-headed man who lives down the street. Some names carry information about our roots, such as family or clan names. They are generally inherited. Names can serve other purposes as well, such as the Chinese generation name which identifies the generation of the bearer, or the names used by some African cultures which describe the order in which siblings were born. Given names, what westerners call first names, are generally bestowed at some point after the birth of the child.

This article looks at the etymology (i.e. the linguistic origin, or meaning) and history of all types of given names. To tweak your interest Im going to give some random samples from cultures represented here at AncientWorlds as illustrations of what has been stated previously. I hope this will encourage people from across the site to research their family names and get the cities here to perhaps update family descriptions and learn the meanings of names we take so much for granted when we create a persona for a character here.

Ancient Greek Names. The names listed here were used in ancient Greece.
ACACIUS m Ancient Greek. Latinized form of AKAKIOS
ACHAICUS m Biblical, Ancient Greek. Latinized form of the Greek name Achaikos, which referred to the region in Greece called Achaia, situated on the northern coast of the Peloponnesus. In the New Testament this is the name of a Corinthian Christian who aided Saint Paul.
AGAPE f Greek, Ancient Greek Derived from Greek agape meaning "love". This name was borne by at least two early saints.
AGAPIOS m Greek, Ancient Greek Masculine form of AGAPE. This was the name of a saint from Caesarea who was martyred under the Roman emperor Diocletian.
ALEXANDRA f German, Scandinavian, Dutch, English, Greek, Portuguese, Romanian, Czech, Hungarian, Ancient Greek. Feminine form of ALEXANDER. This was the name of the domineering wife of Nicholas II, the last czar of Russia.
ALEXANDROS m Greek, Ancient Greek Ancient and modern Greek form of ALEXANDER

Ancient Egyptian Names.The names listed here were used in Ancient Egypt.
AMENHOTEP m Ancient Egyptian. Pronounced: aw-men-HO-tep. Means "peace of Amon" from the name of the Egyptian god Amon combined with hotep "peace, satisfaction". This was the name of four pharaohs of the New Kingdom, including Amenhotep III, known as the Magnificent, who ruled over Egypt during a time of great prosperity.
IMHOTEP m Ancient Egyptian. Pronounced: im-HO-tep. Means "he comes in peace" in Egyptian. This was the name of the architect, priest, physician and chief minister to the pharaoh Djoser. Imhotep apparently designed the step pyramid at Memphis.
NEFERTARI f Ancient Egyptian. Means "the most beautiful" in Egyptian. This was the name of an Egyptian queen of the New Kingdom, the favourite wife of Rameses II.
RAMESES m Ancient Egyptian Pronounced: RA-me-seez. Means "son of Ra", composed of the name of the supreme Egyptian god RA combined with the Egyptian root mes "son" or mesu "be born". Rameses was the name of eleven Egyptian kings of the New Kingdom. The most important of these were Rameses II who campaigned against the Hittites and also built several great monuments, and Rameses III who defended Egypt from the Libyans and Sea Peoples.

Late Roman Names. The names listed here were used in early Christian Rome
AMADEUS m Late Roman. Means "love of God", derived from Latin amare "to love" and Deus "God". A famous bearer was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a composer from Austria.
CALLISTUS m Late Roman. Pronounced: ka-LIS-tus. Late Latin name which was derived from Greek kallistos "most beautiful".
COLUMBA m Late Roman. Pronounced: kawl-UM-ba. Late Latin name meaning "dove". Saint Columba was a 6th-century Irish monk who established a convent on the island of Iona off the coast of Scotland. He is credited with the conversion of Scotland to Christianity.
GERONTIUS m Late Roman. From a Late Latin name perhaps deriving from Greek geron "old man".
HONORIA f Late Roman. Feminine form of HONORIUS
HONORIUS m Late Roman. Late Latin name which meant "honour". This was the name of an emperor of the West Roman Empire and also the name of four popes. JOHANNES m German, Dutch, Scandinavian, Late Roman Ancient Latin and modern German form of JOHN. The astronomer Johannes Kepler and the composer Johannes Brahms are famous bearers of this name.

Among the crowds of foreigners who flocked to the Forum after Caesar's funeral to mourn 'in their own fashion', Suetonius singles out for specific mention the Jews, who 'came and stood round the pyre several nights in succession'.

That the Jews in particular should want to remember Caesar in this way is not surprising. A Jewish army under Antipater had helped to extricate him from a wholly embarrassing situation of his own making, when boxed within the palace confines in Alexandria in 47 while dallying with Cleopatra. When he got back to Rome, he responded with a series of measures which helped the Jews in Judaea as well as those elsewhere in the Roman Empire. These are described in Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews XIV, 10. He also appointed Antipater procurator (administrator) of Judaea, with the long-term consequence that Antipater's younger son in due course ruled the country as Herod the Great.

The Jews round the pyre in Rome were certainly expressing their sorrow; since such expressions were also used at times of national disaster, it may be that there was a sense of this too. The centrepiece of a funeral ceremony was the lamentation for the dead, in the form of sharp, repeated exclamations by men and women in separate groups. When it was an only son who had died, the cries were especially heart-rending. There would be an address in the form of a formal lament, such as that of David for Saul and Jonathan, composed for the occasion from a variety of stock texts, and sung by male and female professional singers -- daughters sometimes followed their mothers into the profession of public lamentation.

The ritual of grief, and of national disaster, was outwardly marked by tearing one's clothes and replacing them with a vestigial piece of sackcloth -- in protest against a projected alliance with Egypt, Isaiah went around in mourning gear for three years. Mourners debased themselves by covering their heads with earth or ashes, or by lying in ashes. A funeral was a strictly secular occasion. Priests were forbidden to risk defilement by association with a corpse, unless it was of an especially close relative.

Caesar died at 55 (or 57 according to Mommsen). By traditional Jewish standards, this was still quite young. The writer of Psalm 90, which is attributed to Moses, suggests 70 or even 80 as a normal old age. According to a tradition of the second century CE, there are 14 (as opposed to the Shakespearean 7) ages of mankind, ranging from 5 to 100 years old. Since Moses is said to have died at 120, it has become customary, when someone says how old they are, to respond, 'May you live to 120!'

To the Israelites, however, as to Orthodox Jews today, cremation was unthinkable. Coffins were not used. The dead were buried fully clothed in single or communal graves, or in a burial cave or tomb, accompanied by various offerings, which might be in the form of pottery vessels or other objects. Such a burial allowed the shade of the dead soul to have an existence in the underworld of Sheol, and, by a later tradition, for the bones to be available for resurrection after the Messiah has restored the Israelites to their proper land. In that way the ritual was not unlike the Roman practice of preserving a bone of a cremated corpse and putting it in the ground, so that its spirit could join those of the other spirits of the dead. The Israelites, however, did not worship their dead; they avoided anything that might endanger the uniqueness of God's dominion.

Augustus was indulgent to the Jews, but even more so to Herod the Great, who had to pay for the privilege with bribes. Herod's massive, nationwide reconstruction programme also had to be paid for. On one occasion he secretly broke into the tomb of David in search of cash; there was nothing except a cache of furniture and other artefacts made of gold, which he appropriated. He then decided to search further into the tomb, where the bodies lay of David and Solomon, only for two of his guards to be consumed in a spontaneous eruption of fire!

There is another protective fire story. Simeon Bar Yochai was a pupil of Rabbi Akiva, who was brutally put to death by Hadrian's victorious administration in 135 CE. For making adverse comments about Rome, Simeon too was sentenced to death. He fled, with his son, and hid in a cave for 13 years, subsisting on the pods from a carob tree and water from a spring which had miraculously appeared, and sitting buried in the sand all day to preserve their clothes. When the prophet Elijah materialised and informed them that it was safe to return to civilisation, Simeon went back to his teaching, and collected a group of disciples to whom he revealed his mystical secrets. A ring of fire burned round his academy, preventing entry to those who were not worthy of his instruction.

Simeon is said to have died on the minor festival of Lag Ba-Omer, on which an annual pilgrimage is still made to his supposed tomb in Meron, Upper Galilee.

Sources
Bailey, Cyril, The Religion of Ancient Rome (1907)
De Vaux, Roland, Ancient Israel: its life and institutions (2nd edn 1965)
Goldberg, David and Rayner, John, The Jewish People: their history and religion (1987)
Jacobs, Louis, The Jewish Religion: a companion (1995)
Kamm, Antony, The Israelites: an introduction (1999)
Unterman, Alan, Dictionary of Jewish Lore and Legend (new edn 1997)
Vriezen, Th. C., The Religion of Ancient Israel (1967)

Athenian statesman and general (c. 510-c. 451 B.C.E) who played an active part in building up the Athenian empire in the period following the Greco-Persian Wars.

Cimon was the son of Miltiades, the architect of the victory at the Battle of Marathon against the Persians in 490. His impressive performance in the victorious sea battle against the Persians at Salamis in 480, led to his election as strategos -one of Athens' 10 annual generals. In 478 he helped Aristides to secure the transference of the leadership of the Greek forces from Sparta to Athens and he became the principal commander of the Athenian-led alliance known as the Delian League.

Cimon's first task was to drive out the Spartan general Pausanias from Byzantium, who had been dismissed on suspicion of treason. He then removed Eion in Thrace from Persian hands (476/75) and soon after this he won the island of Skyros for Athenian settlers and returned back to Athens the supposed remains of Theseus, Athens' legendary hero.

Cimon's greatest triumph took place in 466 when, as leader of an allied fleet of 200 ships, crushed the much larger Persian fleet near the mouth of the River Eurymedon in Pamphylia and subsequently defeated the King's forces on land. He then returned to the Aegean and drove the remaining Persians out of the Thracian Chersonese. When the rich island of Thasos seceded from the Delian League, Cimon besieged it and forced it to surrender to him (463).

In 461, Cimon was ostracised. On his return to Athens, he worked for peace with Sparta. When peace was achieved in 451, he once again mounted a big, naval expedition against Persia in order to recapture Cyprus. During the siege of the city of Kition, however, he died of sickness or a wound.

Babylonian documents indicate that the ethical and moral beliefs of the people stressed goodness and truth, law and order, justice and freedom, wisdom and learning, and courage and loyalty. Mercy and compassion were espoused, and special protection was accorded widows, orphans, refugees, the poor, and the oppressed. Immoral and unethical acts were considered transgressions against the gods and the divine order and were believed to be punished by the gods accordingly.

No one was considered to be without sin, and therefore all suffering was held to be deserved. The proper course for Babylonians unhappy with their condition in life was not to argue and complain but to plead and wail, to lament and confess their inevitable sins and failings before their personal god, who acted as their mediator in the assembly of the great gods. Religious skepticism existed and may have been more prevalent than sources reveal.

For the Babylonians, death was indeed the consuming dread and a source of great despair. The Babylonian generally believed that at death the disembodied spirit descends to the dark nether world, and that human existence beyond the grave is at best only a dismal, wretched reflection of life on earth. Any hope of an eternal reward for the righteous and deserving was absent; everyone was impartially consigned to the world below. It is not strange that the most popular, dramatic, and creative Babylonian literary work, the Gilgamesh Epic, centers on a vain quest for eternal life.

A Bit about Gilgamesh:
Gilgamesh was two-thirds god and one-third man. Gilgamesh is a hero -- more beautiful, more courageous, more terrifying than the rest of us; his desires, attributes, and accomplishments epitomize our own.
Yet he is also mortal: he must experience the death of others and die himself.
How much more must a god rage against death than we who are merely mortal!

Gilgamesh is told by Siduri, "the woman of the vine" - You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they alloted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice.

The discovery of the great treasure of Sutton Hoo - the richest archaeological find in England and one of the most extensive Germanic burials ever found - began with a death. In 1934, Colonel Frank Pretty died, leaving his wife Edith and his young son Robert his Edwardian mansion and estate overlooking the River Deben. The widow, Edith Pretty, suffered from ill health in the years that followed, and sought comfort through regular visits to her mentor, a spirit medium, with whom she sought to make contact with her dead husband.

Edith Pretty's interest in things spiritual seems to have turned her attention to one of her estate's more unusual features: the ancient burial mounds which she could see from her home's south facing bay window. Local people told stories that the mounds were haunted by shadowy figures and that an apparition of a man on a white horse was sometimes seen in the vicinity. Her nephew, a dowser, also insisted that gold treasure was to be found in the mounds. So Edith contacted a local museum, which recommended a local self-taught archaeologist, Basil Brown, to begin excavations of the main mound.

So, on June 20th 1938, the first exploratory excavations began and they were soon to reveal something no-one expected. Despite an attempt at grave robbery some centuries before, Brown found that "Mound 1" contained an Anglo-Saxon ship burial, complete with a burial chamber filled with treasures and other artefacts. Excavations have continued on Mound 1 and its companions in the decades since, and Sutton Hoo is now celebrated as one of the archaeological wonders of the ancient Germanic world. Laid in the ship-tomb were weapons, a rich helmet, a harp, cooking gear, elaborate jewelry and adornments, drinking horns, a cache of coins and items from as far away as Egypt, Byzantium and Ireland.

It is now generally believed that this was the grave of Raedwald, King of East Anglia and holder of the title of Bretwalda. While Raedwald had converted to Christianity, it seems that he was laid in a pagan grave with pagan rites, probably indicating a reversion to the older faith before his death or, perhaps, a fear of breaking with the funeral traditions of his ancestors. The acidic sand of his grave means that no trace of his body remains, but the items within the burial chamber make a powerful, and powerfully pagan, statement about his status, his power, and his military prowess.

In Raedwald's time (624 AD), "Sutton Hoo" stood closer to the coastline than it does today - near a promontory which would have been able to be seen from the sea. This feature - called a heoh in Old English - gives the place its name ("heoh" = "Hoo"), while "Sutton" means "south-town/place". It is likely that the burial ground stood opposite an East Anglian royal hall, possibly at nearby Melton or (as the name suggests) Kingston. This would have given the kings of East Anglia ready access to the sea lanes which connected the south-east of their kingdom to the other lands of the Germanic world, such as the west coast of Jutland and the mouth of the Rhine. From here they could also have sailed quickly up the coast to the other major river routes of their kingdom, the Waveney and the Wash. Some evidence of Scandinavian influence found in the grave also indicates trade, diplomatic and (possibly) dynastic links much further afield, since the closest analogues to the Sutton Hoo site can be found in very similar graves from the same period at Vendel and Valsgarde in Sweden.

All this indicates that, even some 200 years after the first Germanic migrations to England, these people were still very much sea tribes - linked to their cousins amongst the tribes of continental Germania and Scandinavia. The ship in Raedwald's grave had long since vanished, but the impression it left along with the rivets and nails it left behind have given archaeologists a wealth of information about it. To begin with, it was not specially constructed for the burial - it had been a working, sea-going ship. A patched section of its hull shows that it had been repaired at least once. Evidence indicates that it had been rowed by 28 men, or 14 pairs of oars. Since the burial chamber's remains obscures the centre of the keel, it is unknown if it also had a mast, but a replica of the ship has shown that it could easily have been both rowed or sailed. Once this vessel was chosen as the burial ship for the dead king, it would have been rowed up the River Deben, probably to modern Ferry Point, and then dragged up the hill on rollers to the Hoo.

Getting the ship to the burial site would have been a huge enough labor, but burying it beneath a huge funerary mound was an even larger undertaking. There are over 700 cubic metres of earth in the mound, rep resenting about 600 man-hours of work. This means 10 men working five hours a day would have taken two weeks to build the mound, which would make the labor equivalent to gathering in an entire harvest.

But the investment in labor was nothing compared to the relative wealth and richness represented by the artefacts laid in the grave with the dead king. In a peak-roofed wooden chamber in the centre of the ship they laid out the body, wearing his huge, pure gold belt buckle which weighed half a kilo in its own right, and his enameled and garnet-inlaid shoulder clasps. His sword was by his side, with its rich and elaborate baldric harness and his helmet lay next to his head. Also at his belt was his enameled purse containing a small fortune in exotic gold coinage. Around him were set many other items, ranging from the practical (cauldrons, maple bowls and drinking horns) to the unusual (a sceptre which may also be a symbolic whetstone, or two silver baptismal spoons marked "Saul" and "Paul")

Precisely what funeral rites accompanied all this effort is uncertain, though the end of the poem Beowulf describes a similar burial as the hero's lamenting subjects lay him in his burial mound. Like Raedwald's mound, Beowulf's is described as being constructed on a headland - the poem even calls it a "heoh". In this case the body was burned in a huge pyre, with a mound built over the ashes. Then they placed neck rings and other treasures in the burial, along with the mail shirts and weapons they had burned with the body:

They left the earl's wealth, in the earth's keeping
The gold in the dirt, it dwells there yet
Of no more use to men than in ages before.

The twelve of his noblest warriors rode in procession around the mound, singing a lament to their dead king and lord and praising his prowess in battle.

Something similar may have happened for Raedwald. He was to lie undisturbed until sometime in the Seventeenth Century, when robbing burial mounds became common. In the case of Raedwald's tomb the robbers stopped, or were disturbed, just short of the burial chamber and so the king's grave and its "gold in the dirt" remained undisturbed until the much later death of Colonel Frank Pretty led "the earl's wealth" to be brought back to the light of day.

In Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula the 30-metre high El Castilo step pyramid was the centre piece of Chichen Itza, a holy city of the Mayan civilization controlled by priests and maintained by the labour of the local peasantry. The principal gods in the Mayan pantheon were associated with the forces of nature and creation, and since Yucatan was an arid, sunbaked land the greatest boon to be requested of these deities were rain, fertility and a plentiful harvest of corn.

At rainmaking ceremonies, priests burnt a kind of resin which gave off a thick black smoke in simulation of rain clouds. To calculate the appropriate times for planting and ritual, the Mayans relied on the outstanding knowledge of their astronomers who had developed a remarkably sophisticated system of time keeping. El Castillo itself was designed partly as an architectural diagram of the calendar; its four flights of steps, 364 in all to which was added one more, up to the temple's sanctum, for a total number equal to that of a solar year.

Around the year 1,000 Yucatan was invaded by the Itza tribe, who brought with them the cult of a feathered serpent god and the practice of human sacrifice, learnt from the Toltecs of Northern Mexico. At rainmaking ceremonies and other major sacrificial rites worshippers, assembled at the base of the temple, while the nobles drew barbed thongs through their tongues and ears, spilling their blood on to pieces of bark for presentation to the gods. Above them in the sanctum children tied to the altar raised their voices in imitation of frogs, whose croaking heralded the coming of rain.

Gorgeously attired priests divided into different orders officiated at the ceremonies. One order held the arms and legs of the victim - often prisoners of war - while another split open their chests with flints to pluck out their hearts. The lifeless bodies were then hurled down the pyramid steps and submerged, together with offerings of gold, jade and copper, in a nearby well