Strange Creatures: Anthropology in AntiquityBloomsbury Academic, 2006 M06 8 - 185 pages Traces the anthropological and ethnological theories of the ancient Greeks and Romans from the creation of the world to the invention of the Americas. In ancient Greek and Roman thinking, whether the world is flat or spherical it will have imaginary boundaries and liminal areas where the norms of nature and culture are thought to break down. Analogies are constantly drawn between 'primitive' peoples at the 'edges of the world' and 'primitive' people in prehistory. Distance, both in time and space, leads to difference, and the idea that strange things happen out there or happened back then dominates Greek and Roman thinking on other cultures. This book examines ancient ideas of the creation of the world, the beginnings of life and origin of species, humans and animals, utopias and blessed islands, and 'barbarian' cultures beyond the Mediterranean world, before going on to trace the influence of ancient anthropological and ethnological thought on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.We begin with primordial chaos and end with the invention of the Americas, taking in on the way many strange creatures, among them the noble or ignoble savages of Britain, Gaul and Ireland, the Man-faced Ox-creatures of Empedocles, the Dog-heads of India, the Amazons, Centaurs, Columbus, and the Tupinamba of Brazil. |
From inside the book
Results 1-3 of 33
40 This is not of course the only factor involved , and in truth various cultural
boundaries may exist at different times in ... More normally we might expect a
blessed land to be summoned into existence on an island , as we saw above , or
far ...
cultural d animere the euhemerising accounts of first - discoverers , but Pelasgus
' discoveries move the Arcadians only from the first wild wandering stage of
existence , in which they had no technologies at all and ate a beast - like diet of ...
If , as Herodotus says , the northern peoples , who should know about the
Hyperboreans if they did exist , know nothing of them , perhaps the poor
Hyperboreans , to save their mythical existence , have had to decamp and move
off into the ...
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Contents
The Origin of Life and the Origin of Species | 17 |
Ancient Theories of Prehistory and the Evolution of Society | 39 |
Blessed Islands and Blessed Lands | 61 |
Copyright | |
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