Ancient Mythologies PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Ancient Mythologies PDF full book. Access full book title Ancient Mythologies by Charles Kovacs. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Charles Kovacs
Publisher: Wynstones Press
ISBN: 9780946206520
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 184
Get Book Here
Book Description
The meaning of some of the world's great myths and legends springs to life in this collection of stories, retold here for children. Through the epic adventures of colorful characters--from kings and beggars to gods and demons--the reader may glimpse the ancient wisdom of early humankind. Spanning the centuries from Atlantis to the civilizations of India, Persia, Babylonia, and Egypt, the author portrays human development, from primitive hunters to builders of magnificent cities and the great pyramids. Buddha, Krishna, Rama, Zarathustra, Gilgamesh, Isis, and Osiris are just a few of the lively participants in the unfolding historical narrative.
Author: Charles Kovacs
Publisher: Wynstones Press
ISBN: 9780946206520
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 184
Get Book Here
Book Description
The meaning of some of the world's great myths and legends springs to life in this collection of stories, retold here for children. Through the epic adventures of colorful characters--from kings and beggars to gods and demons--the reader may glimpse the ancient wisdom of early humankind. Spanning the centuries from Atlantis to the civilizations of India, Persia, Babylonia, and Egypt, the author portrays human development, from primitive hunters to builders of magnificent cities and the great pyramids. Buddha, Krishna, Rama, Zarathustra, Gilgamesh, Isis, and Osiris are just a few of the lively participants in the unfolding historical narrative.
Author: Scott Morse
Publisher: Adhouse Books
ISBN: 9780977471515
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Ancient Book of Myth and War presents to you a time capsule, a glimpse into a strange and wondrous world, where myths and legends still roam freely and wars rage in the hearts and minds of the noble and the feeble alike. Experiments in color, shape, line and composition enrich each and every page, accompanied by text that will enlighten the audience with atmospheric facts concerning origins, eras and even media used in the production of the art itself. The Ancient Book of Myth and War is a fine art hardcover collection of images produced by some of the most highly sophisticated animation designers in the industry.
Author: Jean-Pierre Vernant
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 224
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Samuel Noah Kramer
Publisher: Library of Alexandria
ISBN: 1465517464
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 206
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Sumerians were a non-Semitic, non-Indo-European people who flourished in southern Babylonia from the beginning of the fourth to the end of the third millennium B. C. During this long stretch of time the Sumerians, whose racial and linguistic affiliations are still unclassifiable, represented the dominant cultural group of the entire Near East. This cultural dominance manifested itself in three directions: 1. It was the Sumerians who developed and probably invented the cuneiform system of writing which was adopted by nearly all the peoples of the Near East and without which the cultural progress of western Asia would have been largely impossible. 2. The Sumerians developed religious and spiritual concepts together with a remarkably well integrated pantheon which influenced profoundly all the peoples of the Near East, including the Hebrews and the Greeks. Moreover, by way of Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism, not a few of these spiritual and religious concepts have permeated the modern civilized world. 3. The Sumerians produced a vast and highly developed literature, largely poetic in character, consisting of epics and myths, hymns and lamentations, proverbs and "words of wisdom." These compositions are inscribed in cuneiform script on clay tablets which date largely from approximately 1750 B. C. a In the course of the past hundred years, approximately five b thousand such literary pieces have been excavated in the mounds of ancient Sumer. Of this number, over two thousand, more than two-thirds of our source material, were excavated by the University of Pennsylvania in the mound covering ancient Nippur in the course of four grueling campaigns lasting from 1889 to 1900; these Nippur tablets and fragments represent, therefore, the major source for the reconstruction of the Sumerian compositions. As literary products, these Sumerian compositions rank high among the creations of civilized man. They compare not unfavorably with the ancient Greek and Hebrew masterpieces, and like them mirror the spiritual and intellectual life of an otherwise little known civilization. Their significance for a proper appraisal of the cultural and spiritual development of the Near East can hardly be overestimated. The Assyrians and Babylonians took them over almost in toto. The Hittites translated them into their own language and no doubt imitated them widely. The form and contents of the Hebrew literary creations and to a certain extent even those of the ancient Greeks were profoundly influenced by them. As practically the oldest written literature of any significant amount ever uncovered, it furnishes new, rich, and unexpected source material to the archaeologist and anthropologist, to the ethnologist and student of folklore, to the students of the history of religion and of the history of literature.
Author: Adrienne Mayor
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691202265
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294
Get Book Here
Book Description
Traces the story of how ancient cultures envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices and human enhancements, sharing insights into how the mythologies of the past related to and shaped ancient machine innovations.
Author: Maurizio Bettini
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022603996X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 383
Get Book Here
Book Description
If you told a woman her sex had a shared, long-lived history with weasels, she might deck you. But those familiar with mythology know better: that the connection between women and weasels is an ancient and favorable one, based in the Greek myth of a midwife who tricked the gods to ease Heracles’s birth—and was turned into a weasel by Hera as punishment. Following this story as it is retold over centuries in literature and art, Women and Weasels takes us on a journey through mythology and ancient belief, revising our understanding of myth, heroism, and the status of women and animals in Western culture. Maurizio Bettini recounts and analyzes a variety of key literary and visual moments that highlight the weasel’s many attributes. We learn of its legendary sexual and childbearing habits and symbolic association with witchcraft and midwifery, its role as a domestic pet favored by women, and its ability to slip in and out of tight spaces. The weasel, Bettini reveals, is present at many unexpected moments in human history, assisting women in labor and thwarting enemies who might plot their ruin. With a parade of symbolic associations between weasels and women—witches, prostitutes, midwives, sisters-in-law, brides, mothers, and heroes—Bettini brings to life one of the most venerable and enduring myths of Western culture.
Author: G. S. Kirk
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520342372
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 314
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book attempts to come to grips with a set of widely ranging but connected problems concerning myths: their relation to folktales on the one hand, to rituals on the other; the validity and scope of the structuralist theory of myth; the range of possible mythical functions; the effects of developed social institutions and literacy; the character and meaning of ancient Near-Eastern myths and their influence on Greece; the special forms taken by Greek myths and their involvement with rational modes of thought; the status of myths as expressions of the unconscious, as allied with dreams, as universal symbols, or as accidents of primarily narrative aims. Almost none of these problems has been convincingly handled, even in a provisional way, up to the present, and this failure has vitiated not only such few general discussions as exist of the nature, meanings and functions of myths but also, in many cases, the detailed assessment of individual myths of different cultures. The need for a coherent treatment of these and related problems, and one that is not concerned simply to propagate a particular universalistic theory, seems undeniable. How far the present book will satisfactorily fill such a need remains to be seen. At least it makes a beginning, even if in doing so it risks the criticism of being neither fish nor fowl. Sociologists and folklorists may find it, from their specialized viewpoints, a little simplistic in places; and a few classical colleagues will not forgive me for straying far beyond Greek myths, even though these can hardly be understood in isolation or solely in the light of studies in cult and ritual. Others may find it less easy than anthropologists, sociologists, historians of thought or students of French and English literature to accept the relevance of Levi-Strauss to some of these matters; but his theory contains the one important new idea in this field since Freud, it is complicated and largely untested, and it demands careful attention from anyone attempting a broad understanding of the subject. The beliefs of Freud and Jung, on the other hand, are a more familiar element in the situation and have given rise to an enormous secondary literature, much of it arbitrary and some of it absurd. The author has tried to isolate the crucial ideas and subject them to a pointed, if too brief, critique; so too with those of Ernst Cassirer.
Author: Wendy Doniger
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226156408
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 390
Get Book Here
Book Description
Hindu and Greek mythologies teem with stories of women and men who are doubled. This text recounts and compares a range of these. The comparisons show that differences in gender are more significant than differences in culture.
Author: Claude Calame
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691114587
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 199
Get Book Here
Book Description
Surely the ancient Greeks would have been baffled to see what we consider their "mythology." Here, Claude Calame mounts a powerful critique of modern-day misconceptions on this front and the lax methodology that has allowed them to prevail. He argues that the Greeks viewed their abundance of narratives not as a single mythology but as an "archaeology." They speculated symbolically on key historical events so that a community of believing citizens could access them efficiently, through ritual means. Central to the book is Calame's rigorous and fruitful analysis of various accounts of the foundation of that most "mythical" of the Greek colonies--Cyrene, in eastern Libya. Calame opens with a magisterial historical survey demonstrating today's misapplication of the terms "myth" and "mythology." Next, he examines the Greeks' symbolic discourse to show that these modern concepts arose much later than commonly believed. Having established this interpretive framework, Calame undertakes a comparative analysis of six accounts of Cyrene's foundation: three by Pindar and one each by Herodotus (in two different versions), Callimachus, and Apollonius of Rhodes. We see how the underlying narrative was shaped in each into a poetically sophisticated, distinctive form by the respective medium, a particular poetical genre, and the specific socio-historical circumstances. Calame concludes by arguing in favor of the Greeks' symbolic approach to the past and by examining the relation of mythos to poetry and music.
Author: Paul Chrystal
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
ISBN: 1526766175
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Get Book Here
Book Description
A study of the Greek mythological wars between Olympians, Titans, giants, centaurs, lapiths and humans, and their significant influence on later cultures. Even though war and conflict generally feature prominently in Greek mythology, comparatively little has been written on the subject. This is surprising because wars and battles in Greek mythology are freighted with symbolism and laden with meaning and significance—historical, political, social and cultural. The gods and goddesses of war are prominent members of the Greek pantheon: the battles fought by and between Olympians, Titans, giants and Amazons, between centaurs and lapiths, were pivotal in Greek civilization. The Trojan War itself had huge and far-reaching consequences for subsequent Greek culture. The ubiquity of war themes in the Greek myths reflects the prominence of war in everyday Greek life and society, which makes the relative obscurity of published literature all the more puzzling. This book redresses this by showing how conflict in mythology and legend resonated loudly as essential, existentialist even, symbols in Greek culture and how they are represented in classical literature, philosophy, religion, feminism, art, statuary, ceramics, architecture, numismatics, etymology, astronomy, even vulcanology. Praise for War in Greek Mythology “An excellent study of the more military of the Greek myths, telling the stories while also acknowledging the many different versions of so many of them, and also the varying attitudes of the ancient Greeks to these stories.” —History of War
