Strange Creatures: Anthropology in AntiquityBloomsbury Academic, 2006 M06 8 - 256 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
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... discussions of the secondary scholarship . I have included references to secondary scholarship in the notes as a guide to further reading , especially on topics I have treated in too little depth or detail . The particular texts I have ...
... discussion that takes place on the day after Socrates ' account of the ideal state in the Republic . Critias first relates the story of Atlantis , and then Timaeus takes up with an account of the origins of the world , its composition ...
... discussion of both the Ethiopians and Hyperboreans see Romm , 1992 , 45-67 to whom I am indebted in this section . 72. Trans . L & B . 73. Trans . L & B . 74. Trans . Waterfield , 1998 . 75. See Levine , 1989 , and above pp . 82-4 . 76 ...
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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