Strange Creatures: Anthropology in AntiquityTraces 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. |
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Hesiod's view of the evolution of human culture contains something of the double - vision on the past that will later become so familiar . He is the first Greek writer to establish what becomes later a dominant view , that the first age ...
these fundamental principles are to be found both in Presocratic and later philosophical cosmologies.10 Thales , traditionally the earliest of the Greek physicists , seems to have held that only one element , water , was necessary for ...
This sort of crossing of natural boundaries later becomes a significant feature of Greek ideas of India , where , it seems , such minerals are part of organic nature . 20. See pp . 61-91 . 21. A good example of this is Hesiod's ...
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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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| Title | Strange Creatures: Anthropology in Antiquity |
| Author | Gordon Lindsay Campbell |
| Edition | illustrated |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Academic, 2006 |
| Original from | Indiana University |
| Digitized | 11 Jun 2009 |
| ISBN | 0715633910, 9780715633915 |
| Length | 256 pages |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |