The Historical Atlas of World Mythology is a multi-volume series of books by Joseph Campbell that traces developments in humankind's mythological symbols and stories from pre-history forward.
Campbell is perhaps best known as a comparativist who focused on universal themes and motifs in human culture. He first conceived of the Historical Atlas in the late 1970s as an extension of his works, The Mythic Image and The Masks of God. Like those books, the Historical Atlas of World Mythology intended to show the ways in which those universal themes and motifs were expressed differently by different cultures in different times and places.
Heavily illustrated and annotated, with numerous charts and maps to show both variations and similarities in different cultures' expressions of mythic themes, this series was intended to serve both academic and lay readers.
The Historical Atlas was left incomplete when Campbell died in 1987.
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