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Books > Religion & Spirituality > Non-Christian religions > Pre-Christian European & Mediterranean religions
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Dragon World
(Hardcover)
Tamara Macfarlane; Illustrated by Alessandra Fusi
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R327
R304
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Meet the fire-breathing beasts of mythology in this beautifully
illustrated book brimming with scaled behemoths. Journey into the
deepest depths of the oceans and the highest tips of the tallest
mountains to discover the fascinating history of dragons! This
illustrated picture book blends fiction and fantasy, separates fact
from myth, and is the perfect introduction to the breathtaking
world of dragons! Ideal for kids aged 7-9 years. Inside the pages
of this captivating fantasy book for children, you'll discover
fascinating dragon facts and more! - Includes 23 profiles of famous
dragons - Discover maps of where dragons originated from across the
continents - Explanations of the historical and cultural
significance of dragons around the world - Informative spreads on
the folklore surrounding dragons uncover secrets about dragon eggs,
treasure, and history Soar across continents and discover the most
incredible dragon myths and legends. Prowl through the pages to
discover rare dragon species. Find clues on how to track them and
master how to draw them. This awe-inspiring, magical book will
breathe fire into the minds of little dragon-lovers everywhere!
Exciting, informative text and beautiful hand-painted illustrations
bring these fire-breathing beasts of mythology to life in the most
spectacular way! Up-to-date retellings of classic dragon stories
from Asia, Europe, Africa and North America will boost your child's
imagination and keep them engaged. It's the ultimate gift for kids
who are fascinated by mythical creatures and fans of Harry Potter
and How to Train your Dragon.
Was religious practice in ancient Rome cultic and hostile to
individual expression? Or was there, rather, considerable latitude
for individual initiative and creativity? Joerg Rupke, one of the
world's leading authorities on Roman religion, demonstrates in his
new book that it was a lived religion with individual
appropriations evident at the heart of such rituals as praying,
dedicating, making vows, and reading. On Roman Religion
definitively dismantles previous approaches that depicted religious
practice as uniform and static. Juxtaposing very different,
strategic, and even subversive forms of individuality with
traditions, their normative claims, and their institutional
protections, Rupke highlights the dynamic character of Rome's
religious institutions and traditions. In Rupke's view, lived
ancient religion is as much about variations or even outright
deviance as it is about attempts and failures to establish or
change rules and roles and to communicate them via priesthoods,
practices related to images or classified as magic, and literary
practices. Rupke analyzes observations of religious experience by
contemporary authors including Propertius, Ovid, and the author of
the "Shepherd of Hermas." These authors, in very different ways,
reflect on individual appropriation of religion among their
contemporaries, and they offer these reflections to their
readership or audiences. Rupke also concentrates on the ways in
which literary texts and inscriptions informed the practice of
rituals.
Routledge Library Editions: Myth reissues four out-of-print
classics that touch on various aspects of mythology. One book looks
at the work of Martin Buber on myth, and another on the school of
Gernet classicists. Another book studies comparative mythology and
the work of Joseph Campbell, and the last book in the set looks at
the role of the gods and their stories in Indo-European mythology.
1. Martin Buber on Myth S. Daniel Breslauer (1990) 2. The Methods
of the Gernet Classicists: The Structuralists on Myth Roland A.
Champagne (1992) 3. The Uses of Comparative Mythology Kenneth L.
Golden (1992) 4. The War of the Gods Jarich G. Oosten (1985)
The first modern study of prehistoric religion in Ireland to draw
on the combined evidence of archaeology, literature and folklore to
illuminate practice and belief from the earliest human habitation
in the island down to the advent of Christianity in the fifth
century AD. An excellent book... a highly accessible and lively
assessment of continuity and change in belief and religion from
pre-Celtic times through to the arrival of St Patrick. ...Afine
book and to be recommended to a wide readership, especially to all
those who think that Irish history started in 1601. IRISH STUDIES
REVIEW DAITHI O HOGAIN was Professor of Folklore at University
College Dublin.
Genealogy of the Pagan Gods by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) is an
ambitious work of humanistic scholarship whose goal is to plunder
ancient and medieval literary sources so as to create a massive
synthesis of Greek and Roman mythology. The work also contains a
famous defense of the value of studying ancient pagan poetry in a
Christian world. The complete work in fifteen books contains a
meticulously organized genealogical tree identifying approximately
950 Greco-Roman mythological figures. The scope is enormous: 723
chapters include over a thousand citations from 200 Greek, Roman,
medieval, and Trecento authors. Throughout the Genealogy, Boccaccio
deploys an array of allegorical, historical, and philological
critiques of the ancient myths and their iconography. Much more
than a mere compilation of pagan myths, the Genealogy incorporates
hundreds of excerpts from and comments on ancient poetry,
illustrative of the new spirit of philological and cultural inquiry
emerging in the early Renaissance. It is at once the most ambitious
work of literary scholarship of the early Renaissance and a
demonstration to contemporaries of the moral and cultural value of
studying ancient poetry.
This revised translation of Fritz Graf's highly acclaimed
introduction to Greek mythology offers a chronological account of
the principal Greek myths that appear in the surviving literary and
artistic sources and concurrently documents the history of
interpretation of Greek mythology from the 17th century to the
present. First surveying the various definitions of myth that have
been advanced, Graf proceeds to examine topics such as the
relationship between Greek myths and epic poetry, the connection
between particular myths and shrines or holy festivals, the use of
myth in Greek song and tragedy, and the uses and interpretations of
myth by philosophers and allegorists.
From the turn of the fifth century to the beginning of the
eighteenth, Christian writers were fascinated and troubled by the
"Problem of Paganism," which this book identifies and examines for
the first time. How could the wisdom and virtue of the great
thinkers of antiquity be reconciled with the fact that they were
pagans and, many thought, damned? Related questions were raised by
encounters with contemporary pagans in northern Europe, Mongolia,
and, later, America and China. Pagans and Philosophers explores how
writers--philosophers and theologians, but also poets such as
Dante, Chaucer, and Langland, and travelers such as Las Casas and
Ricci--tackled the Problem of Paganism. Augustine and Boethius set
its terms, while Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury were important
early advocates of pagan wisdom and virtue. University theologians
such as Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, and Bradwardine, and later
thinkers such as Ficino, Valla, More, Bayle, and Leibniz, explored
the difficulty in depth. Meanwhile, Albert the Great inspired
Boethius of Dacia and others to create a relativist conception of
scientific knowledge that allowed Christian teachers to remain
faithful Aristotelians. At the same time, early anthropologists
such as John of Piano Carpini, John Mandeville, and Montaigne
developed other sorts of relativism in response to the issue. A
sweeping and original account of an important but neglected chapter
in Western intellectual history, Pagans and Philosophers provides a
new perspective on nothing less than the entire period between the
classical and the modern world.
In this book, Angelika Neuwirth provides a new approach to
understanding the founding text of Islam. Typical exegesis of the
Qur'an treats the text teleologically, as a fait accompli finished
text, or as a replica or summary of the Bible in Arabic. Instead
Neuwirth approaches the Qur'an as the product of a specific
community in the Late Antique Arabian peninsula, one which was
exposed to the wider worlds of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires,
and to the rich intellectual traditions of rabbinic Judaism, early
Christianity, and Gnosticism. A central goal of the book is to
eliminate the notion of the Qur'an as being a-historical. She
argues that it is, in fact, highly aware of its place in late
antiquity and is capable of yielding valuable historical
information. By emphasizing the liturgical function of the Qur'an,
Neuwirth allows readers to see the text as an evolving oral
tradition within the community before it became collected and
codified as a book. This analysis sheds much needed light on the
development of the Qur'an's historical, theological, and political
outlook. The book's final chapters analyze the relationship of the
Qur'an to the Bible, to Arabic poetic traditions, and, more
generally, to late antique culture and rhetorical forms. By
providing a new introduction to the Qur'an, one that uniquely
challenges current ideas about its emergence and development, The
Qur'an and Late Antiquity bridges the gap between Eastern and
Western approaches to this sacred text.
Homer's tale of the abduction of Helen to Troy and the ten-year war
to bring her back to Greece has fascinated mankind for centuries
since he related it in The Iliad and The Odyssey. More recently, it
has given rise to countless scholarly articles and books, extensive
archaeological excavations, epic movies, television documentaries,
stage plays, art and sculpture, even souvenirs and collectibles.
However, while the ancients themselves thought that the Trojan War
took place and was a pivotal event in world history, scholars
during the Middle Ages and into the modern era derided it as a
piece of fiction. This book investigates two major questions: did
the Trojan War take place and, if so, where? It ultimately
demonstrates that a war or wars in the vicinity of Troy probably
did take place in some way, shape, or form during the Late Bronze
Age, thereby forming the nucleus of the story that was handed down
orally for centuries until put into essentially final form by
Homer. However, Cline suggests that although a Trojan War (or wars)
probably did take place, it was not fought because of Helen's
abduction; there were far more compelling economic and political
motives for conflict more than 3,000 years ago. Aside from Homer,
the book examines various classical literary sources: the Epic
Cycle, a saga found at the Hittite capital of Hattusas, treatments
of the story by the playwrights of classical Greece, and
alternative versions or continuations of the saga such as Virgil's
Aeneid, which add detail but frequently contradict the original
story. Cline also surveys archaeological attempts to document the
Trojan War through excavations at Hissarlik, Turkey, especially the
work of Heinrich Schliemann and his successors Wilhelm Doerpfeld,
Carl Blegen, and Manfred Korfmann. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short
Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds
of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books
are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our
expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and
enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly
readable.
James H. Breasted (1865-1935) was the foremost influence in
introducing Americans to the culture of ancient Egypt. He founded
the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and was the
author of History of Egypt and Ancient Times: A History of the
Early World, among other works.
The concept of pharaonic Egypt as a unified, homogeneous, and
isolated cultural entity is misleading. Ancient Egypt was a rich
tapestry of social, religious, technological, and economic
interconnections among numerous cultures from disparate lands. In
fifteen chapters divided into five thematic groups, Pharaoh's Land
and Beyond uniquely examines Egypt's relationship with its wider
world. The first section details the geographical contexts of
interconnections by examining ancient Egyptian exploration,
maritime routes, and overland passages. In the next section,
chapters address the human principals of association: peoples, with
the attendant difficulties of differentiating ethnic identities
from the record; diplomatic actors, with their complex balances and
presentations of power; and the military, with its evolving role in
pharaonic expansion. Natural events, from droughts and floods to
illness and epidemics, also played significant roles in this
ancient world, as examined in the third section. The final two
sections explore the physical manifestations of interconnections
between pharaonic Egypt and its neighbors, first in the form of
material objects and second, in the powerful exchange of ideas.
Whether through diffusion and borrowing of knowledge and
technology, through the flow of words by script and literature, or
through exchanges in the religious sphere, the pharaonic Egypt that
we know today was constantly changing-and changing the cultures
around it. This illustrious work represents the first synthesis of
these cultural relationships, unbounded by time, geography, or
mode.
By offering, for the first time in a single edition, complete
English translations of Apollodorus' Library and Hyginus' Fabulae
--the two most important surviving "handbooks" of classical
mythography--this volume enables readers to compare the two's
versions of the most important Greek and Roman myths. A General
Introduction sets the Library and Fabulae into the wider context of
ancient mythography; introductions to each text discuss in greater
detail issues of authorship, aim, and influence. A general index,
an index of people and geographic locations, and an index of
authors and works cited by the mythographers are also included.
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