Showing papers in "The Journal of Hellenic Studies in 1949"

Comments on Some Archaic Greek Inscriptions

Abstract: The following miscellany consists mainly of comments on various archaic inscriptions already published, but also includes four unpublished stones from Crete, observed during a six months' stay in Greece in 1947. Two of these are archaic, the other two considerably later, and therefore added separately at the end. All are listed geographically, under the headings of the relevant volumes of Inscriptiones Graecae or Inscriptiones Creticae ; where the inscription discussed is not included in that volume, the heading is bracketed. Grateful acknowledgment is here made to N. Platon, Ephor of Crete and Director of the Candia Museum, for permission to photograph and publish nos. 8–11, and to G. Kotzias, Ephor of Attica, for permission to photograph nos. 1–2.

Lunar Mansions and Early Calendars

Abstract: Lunar mansions are twenty-eight constellations or single stars on the route of the Moon during the twenty-eight nights of its visibility. As a mere astronomical curiosity they could neither attract nor reward much attention. Accordingly learned discussions have been limited to descriptions, to controversies where and when they were first established, in Babylonia, India, or China, or to catalogues of the medieval evidence. But if it is realised that they were not observed for their own sake but because the revolution of the Moon was the basis of early time-reckoning which led to the creation of the first calendar, conclusions of more than limited interest can be produced by relating astronomical to religious problems. And this interest will be further increased by the realisation that our zodiac is nothing but the successor of the mansions as it served first the lunisolar, and then the solar, year, of which the former was a device to bring the monthly revolutions of the Moon into harmony with the annual revolution of the Sun, and the latter was based on the revolution of the Sun alone.But how can we find material to reconstruct a system which was superseded in the remote past, seeing that even the victorious system remains in important respects mysterious, e.g. the reasons for the strange selection of the signs and the presence among them of animal and human figures? We are helped by two circumstances. One is the natural conservatism of our calendars, astrological prognostics, and magical texts: these often preserve traces of earlier stages of human thought. The second circumstance is less natural.

The World of the Etruscan Mirror

Abstract: The drawings we shall be looking at are those engraved on the backs of bronze hand-mirrors. The shape of the mirror is circular. The handle is sometimes made in one piece with the disc; but sometimes, especially in the earlier period, it was made separately of wood and bone, and joined to the disc by means of a tang. At a guess there may be fifteen hundred such mirrors. The quality of the drawing varies from good to bad. The range of subject is wide. There are, first, scenes from everyday life, especially, as is natural, toilet-scenes and courting-scenes; and secondly, scenes in which the lovers are not ordinary mortals, but divinities or heroes and heroines. Among these it is not surprising that two couples are especially popular: Aphrodite, and Adonis; Helen, and Paris or Menelaos. But there are also a very great number of heroic scenes that have no connection with toilet or courting. Sometimes one can see why a particular subject is chosen to decorate a mirror: the interest in Helen extends to the egg from which she was born. If Tyro is a favourite, one might perhaps guess that it is for the sake of the perfect complexion which gave her her name: but nearly always the subject chosen testifies only to the boundless love of the Etruscans for Greek heroic legend and Greek heroic characters, a love which women shared with men. Some legends are represented with more circumstance on Etruscan mirrors than in any extant Greek monument; of others there is no Greek representation, only an echo in a late writer; to others an Etruscan mirror is the only witness. Etruscan ladies could read: the personages are very often named; and these hundreds of inscriptions not only enable us to identify the persons and increase our knowledge of the myths, but are an invaluable aid to the study of the Etruscan language. The names of Greek heroes, heroines, and minor deities appear in Etruscanized versions, from which much may be learned about the character of the Etruscan tongue.

The intellectual adventure of ancient man : an essay on speculative thought in the ancient Near East

Abstract: The people in ancient times the phenomenal world was teeming with life; the thunderclap, the sudden shadow, the unknown and eerie clearing in the wood, all were living things. This unabridged edition traces the fascinating history of thought from the pre-scientific, personal concept of a "humanized" world to the achievement of detached intellectual reasoning. The authors describe and analyze the spiritual life of three ancient civilizations: the Egyptians, whose thinking was profoundly influenced by the daily rebirth of the sun and the annual rebirth of the Nile; the Mesopotamians, who believed the stars, moon, and stones were all citizens of a cosmic state; and the Hebrews, who transcended prevailing mythopoeic thought with their cosmogony of the will of God. In the concluding chapter the Frankforts show that the Greeks, with their intellectual courage, were the first culture to discover a realm of speculative thought in which myth was overcome.