Gifted Thracian bard in Greek legend. The best-known story involves Orpheus venturing into the underworld to try to bring back his wife Eurydike after she died from a snake bite. He lost her again just as they were returning to the upper world, after failing to keep a prohibition on looking back at her on the journey.
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Name origin: Greek god of blacksmiths, metalworking, carpenters, craftsmen, artisans, sculptors, metallurgy, fire, and volcanoes. He became renowned for his skill at craftsmanship; several of his myths involve his works for gods and mortals.
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Name origin: Greek king of Lydia, son of Zeus and the nymph Plouto. Through his son Pelops, Tantalos was the founder of the house of Atreus. By offering Pelops as a sacrifice to test the gods, he incurred their wrath and was sent to Tartarus.
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Name origin: Important Egyptian underworld god, husband of Isis. Osiris was originally a local deity from Lower Egypt who may have been a personification of fertility in the chthonic realms. He evolved to represent both fertility and death/resurrection.
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Name origin: Cretan mortal, son of the great craftsman Daedalus, who made wings held together with beeswax to help the two of them escape the island. Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun, nor too close to the sea. Overcome by giddiness while flying, Icarus disobeyed his father and came too close to the sun, and the heat melted the beeswax. He fell into the sea and drowned.
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Name origin: Greek goddess of love, beauty, pleasure and procreation. As one of the principal Olympian gods, there are multiple myths about her.
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Probably named for the Monterosa, a ship used by the University of Hamburg on their outings on the North Sea.
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Name origin: Don Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (1753-1811), a Catholic priest, leader of the Mexican War of Independence and recognized as the Father of the Nation. Due to the oppression of poor Mexicans by the Spanish colonisers, on 16th September 1810 he gave the call to arms that triggered the Mexican War of Independence, called the Cry of Dolores.
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Australian-British professor Gilbert Murray (1866-1957) helped Austria recover from World War I in 1920. He was an outstanding scholar of Ancient Greek literature, language and culture. Involved in the League of Nations from 1916, he was also president of the Ethical Union (now Humanists UK) in 1929 and 1930, and a founder of Oxfam.
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Named in honour of Ernst Heinrich Bruns (1848-1919), a German mathematician and astronomer, who also contributed to the development of the field of theoretical geodesy (measurement of the Earth’s relative geometry, gravity and orientation over time). He was mainly engaged in developing the theoretical side of Earth’s shape.
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