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. |
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To begin with myth : the origin of various Greek peoples and of individual founder
heroes is frequently explained in terms of ... The Athenians traced their origins
back to a legendary founder Erechtheus ( or the seemingly originally identical ...
Anaximander ' s theory of the origin of the human race will be discussed in
section three below , but for the present it suffices to say that he is reported to
have argued that the first life arose from a heated mixture of water and earth .
This idea ...
80 ( Pausanias , Description of Greece 10 . 5 . 9 ) Greek communion withood of
the Hypecode of divine lamelly , after a year The attribution of the origins of the
Delphic oracle to the Hyperboreans may seem quite perverse . What could it
mean ...
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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 | |
5 other sections not shown