The Orientalizing Revolution 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 The Orientalizing Revolution PDF full book. Access full book title The Orientalizing Revolution by Walter Burkert. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Walter Burkert
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674643642
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Get Book
Book Description
Ancient Greek culture is often described as a miracle, owing little to its neighbors. Walter Burkert argues against a distorted view, toward a more balanced picture. "Under the influence of the Semitic East--from writers, craftsmen, merchants, healers--Greek culture began its unique flowering, soon to assume cultural hegemony in the Mediterranean."
Author: Walter Burkert
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674643642
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Get Book
Book Description
Ancient Greek culture is often described as a miracle, owing little to its neighbors. Walter Burkert argues against a distorted view, toward a more balanced picture. "Under the influence of the Semitic East--from writers, craftsmen, merchants, healers--Greek culture began its unique flowering, soon to assume cultural hegemony in the Mediterranean."
Author: Walter Burkert
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Get Book
Book Description
The rich and splendid culture of the ancient Greeks has often been described as emerging like a miracle from a genius of its own, owing practically nothing to its neighbors. Walter Burkert offers a decisive argument against that distorted view, replacing it with a balanced picture of the archaic period "in which, under the influence of the Semitic East, Greek culture began its unique flowering, soon to assume cultural hegemony in the Mediterranean". Burkert focuses on the "orientalizing" century 750-650 B.C., the period of Assyrian conquest, Phoenician commerce, and Greek exploration of both East and West, when not only eastern skills and images but also the Semitic art of writing were transmitted to Greece. He tracks the migrant craftsmen who brought the Greeks new techniques and designs, the wandering seers and healers teaching magic and medicine, and the important Greek borrowings from Near Eastern poetry and myth. Drawing widely on archaeological, textual, and historical evidence, he demonstrates that eastern models significantly affected Greek literature and religion in the Homeric age.
Author: Walter Burkert
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674539181
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 552
Get Book
Book Description
For this first English edition of his distinguished study of Pythagoreanism, Weisheit und Wissenschajt: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaos, und Platon, Walter Burkert has carefully revised text and notes, taking account of additional literature on the subject which appeared between 1962 and 1969. By a thorough critical sifting of all the available evidence, the author lays a new foundation for the understanding of ancient Pythagoreanism and in particular of the relationship within it of "lore" and "science." He shows that in the twilight zone when the Greeks were discovering the rational interpretation of the world and quantitative natural science, Pythagoras represented not the origin of the new, but the survival or revival of ancient, pre-scientific lore or wisdom, based on superhuman authority and expressed in ritual obligation.
Author: Walter Burkert
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674023994
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 191
Get Book
Book Description
At the distant beginning of Western civilization, according to European tradition, Greece stands as an insular, isolated, near-miracle of burgeoning culture. This book traverses the ancient world's three great centers of cultural exchange--Babylonian Nineveh, Egyptian Memphis, and Iranian Persepolis--to situate classical Greece in its proper historical place, at the Western margin of a more comprehensive Near Eastern-Aegean cultural community that emerged in the Bronze Age and expanded westward in the first millennium B.C. In concise and inviting fashion, Walter Burkert lays out the essential evidence for this ongoing reinterpretation of Greek culture. In particular, he points to the critical role of the development of writing in the ancient Near East, from the achievement of cuneiform in the Bronze Age to the rise of the alphabet after 1000 B.C. From the invention and diffusion of alphabetic writing, a series of cultural encounters between "Oriental" and Greek followed. Burkert details how the Assyrian influences of Phoenician and Anatolian intermediaries, the emerging fascination with Egypt, and the Persian conquests in Ionia make themselves felt in the poetry of Homer and his gods, in the mythic foundations of Greek cults, and in the first steps toward philosophy. A journey through the fluid borderlines of the Near East and Europe, with new and shifting perspectives on the cultural exchanges these produced, this book offers a clear view of the multicultural field upon which the Greek heritage that formed Western civilization first appeared.
Author: Walter Burkert
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520047709
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 250
Get Book
Book Description
"Tantalizingly rich . . . this is a splendid book."--Greece and Rome "Burken relegates his learned documentation to the notes and writes in a lively and fluent style. The book is recommended as a major contribution to the interpretation of ancient Greek myth and ritual. The breadth alone of Burkert's learning renders his book indispensable."--Classical Outlook "Impressive. . . founded on a striking knowledge of the complex evidence (literary, epigraphical, archaeological, comparative) for this extensive subject. Burkert offers a rare combination of exact scholarship with imagination and even humor. A brilliant book, in which . . .the reader can see at every point what is going on in the author's mind--and that is never uninteresting, and rarely unimportant."--Times Literary Supplement "Burkert's work is of such magnitude and depth that it may even contribute to that most difficult of tasks, defining myth, ritual, and religion. . [He] locates his work in the context of culture and the historv of ideas, and he is not hesitant to draw on sociology and biology. Consequently his work is of significance for philosophers, historians, and even theologians, as well as for classicists and historians of Greek culture. His hypotheses are courageous and his conclusions are bold; both establish standards for methodology as well as results. "--Religious Studies Review
Author: Walter Burkert
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226080857
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 140
Get Book
Book Description
We often think of classical Greek society as a model of rationality and order. Yet as Walter Burkert demonstrates in these influential essays on the history of Greek religion, there were archaic, savage forces surging beneath the outwardly calm face of classical Greece, whose potentially violent and destructive energies, Burkert argues, were harnessed to constructive ends through the interlinked uses of myth and ritual. For example, in a much-cited essay on the Athenian religious festival of the Arrephoria, Burkert uncovers deep connections between this strange nocturnal ritual, in which two virgin girls carried sacred offerings into a cave and later returned with something given to them there, and tribal puberty initiations by linking the festival with the myth of the daughters of Kekrops. Other chapters explore the origins of tragedy in blood sacrifice; the role of myth in the ritual of the new fire on Lemnos; the ties between violence, the Athenian courts, and the annual purification of the divine image; and how failed political propaganda entered the realm of myth at the time of the Persian Wars.
Author: Patricia Curd
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199722447
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 608
Get Book
Book Description
In the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. a new kind of thinker appeared in Greek city-states, dedicated to finding the origins of the world and everything in it, using observation and reason rather than tradition and myth. We call these thinkers Presocratic philosophers, and recognize them as the first philosophers of the Western tradition, as well as the originators of scientific thinking. New textual discoveries and new approaches make a reconsideration of the Presocratics at the beginning of the twenty-first century especially timely. This handbook brings together leading international scholars to study the diverse figures, movements, and approaches that constitute Presocratic philosophy. More than a survey of scholarship, this study presents new interpretations and evaluations of the Presocratics' accomplishments, from Thales to the sophists, from theology to science, and from pre-philosophical background to their influence on later thinkers. Many positions presented here challenge accepted wisdom and offer alternative accounts of Presocratic theories. This handbook includes chapters on the Milesians (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes), Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, the Pythagoreans, the atomists, and the sophists. Special studies are devoted to the sources of Presocratic philosophy, oriental influences, Hippocratic medicine, cosmology, explanation, epistemology, theology, and the reception of Presocratic thought in Aristotle and other ancient authors.
Author: Michael A. Rinella
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739146866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358
Get Book
Book Description
Pharmakon: Plato, Drug Culture, and Identity in Ancient Athens examines the emerging concern for controlling states of psychological ecstasy in the history of western thought, focusing on ancient Greece (c. 750-146 BCE), particularly the Classical Period (c. 500-336 BCE) and especially the dialogues of the Athenian philosopher Plato (427-347 BCE). Employing a diverse array of materials ranging from literature, philosophy, medicine, botany, pharmacology, religion, magic, and law, Pharmakon fundamentally reframes the conceptual context of how we read and interpret Plato's dialogues. Michael A. Rinella demonstrates how the power and truth claims of philosophy, repeatedly likened to a pharmakon, opposes itself to the cultural authority of a host of other occupations in ancient Greek society who derived their powers from, or likened their authority to, some pharmakon. These included Dionysian and Eleusinian religion, physicians and other healers, magicians and other magic workers, poets, sophists, rhetoricians, as well as others. Accessible to the general reader, yet challenging to the specialist, Pharmakon is a comprehensive examination of the place of drugs in ancient thought that will compel the reader to understand Plato in a new way.
Author: Carolina López-Ruiz
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674269950
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 441
Get Book
Book Description
“An important new book...offers a powerful call for historians of the ancient Mediterranean to consider their implicit biases in writing ancient history and it provides an example of how more inclusive histories may be written.” —Denise Demetriou, New England Classical Journal “With a light touch and a masterful command of the literature, López-Ruiz replaces old ideas with a subtle and more accurate account of the extensive cross-cultural exchange patterns and economy driven by the Phoenician trade networks that ‘re-wired’ the Mediterranean world. A must read.” —J. G. Manning, author of The Open Sea “[A] substantial and important contribution...to the ancient history of the Mediterranean. López-Ruiz’s work does justice to the Phoenicians’ role in shaping Mediterranean culture by providing rational and factual argumentation and by setting the record straight.” —Hélène Sader, Bryn Mawr Classical Review Imagine you are a traveler sailing to the major cities around the Mediterranean in 750 BC. You would notice a remarkable similarity in the dress, alphabet, consumer goods, and gods from Gibraltar to Tyre. This was not the Greek world—it was the Phoenician. Propelled by technological advancements of a kind unseen since the Neolithic revolution, Phoenicians knit together diverse Mediterranean societies, fostering a literate and sophisticated urban elite sharing common cultural, economic, and aesthetic modes. Following the trail of the Phoenicians from the Levant to the Atlantic coast of Iberia, Carolina López-Ruiz offers the first comprehensive study of the cultural exchange that transformed the Mediterranean in the eighth and seventh centuries BC. Greeks, Etruscans, Sardinians, Iberians, and others adopted a Levantine-inflected way of life, as they aspired to emulate Near Eastern civilizations. López-Ruiz explores these many inheritances, from sphinxes and hieratic statues to ivories, metalwork, volute capitals, inscriptions, and Ashtart iconography. Meticulously documented and boldly argued, Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean revises the Hellenocentric model of the ancient world and restores from obscurity the true role of Near Eastern societies in the history of early civilizations.
Author: Walter Burkert
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118724976
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 519
Get Book
Book Description
"Greek Religion . . . already has the standing of a classic, and the publication of an English version, which incorporates new material and is in effect a second edition, demands a toast . . . Anyone who pretends to survey Greek religion must be phenomenally learned. Burkert is. His book is a marvel of professional scholarship." London Review of Books "This book has established itself as a masterpiece, packed with learning but also rich in ideas and connections of every sort. Its appearance in a good English translation is an event not only for Hellenists but for all those interested in the study of religion . . . nobody else could have produced an account of the subject of comparable range and power. This will be the best history of Greek religion for this generation." New York Review of Books Cover illustration: detail from an Attic vase, 450 B.C., showing a victory sacrifice (The Mansell Collection).
