Notes and References
When two dates are given for a publication, the first refers to the hardback edition, the second to the paperback edition. Unless otherwise stated, pagination refers to the paperback edition.
INTRODUCTION: THE MOST IMPORTANT IDEAS IN HISTORY – SOME CANDIDATES
1. Michael White, Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer, London: Fourth Estate, 1997, page 3. Keynes also said: ‘I fancy his [Newton’s] pre-eminence was due to his muscles of intuition being the strongest and most enduring with which a man has ever been gifted.’ Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, London: Macmillan, 2003, page 458.
2. Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment, London: Penguin, 1990, pages 34 and 36.
3. James Gleick, Isaac Newton, London: Fourth Estate HarperCollins, 2003/ 2004, pages 101–108; Frank E. Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968, page 398n.
4. Joseph Needham, The Great Titration, London: Allen & Unwin, 1969, page 62.
5. Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind, London: William Heinemann, 2002, page 322.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., page 327.
8. Marcia Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition: 400–1400, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1997, page 249.
9. Harry Elmer Barnes, An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, volume two. From the Renaissance Through the Eighteenth Century, New York: Dover, 1937, page 825.
10. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Book 1, aphorism 129, quoted in Joseph Needham et al., Science and Civilisation in China, volume 1, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1954, page 19.
11. Ibid.
12. Barnes, Op. cit., page 831.
13. John Bowle, A History of Europe, London: Secker & Warburg/Heinemann, 1979, page 391.
14. Hagen Schulze, States, Nations and Nationalism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994/1996, page 395.
15. Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book, London: Collins Harvill, 1988.
16. Ibid., page 19f.
17. Barnes, Op. cit., pages 669ff.
18. Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, edited by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, two volumes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, volume 1, page 265.
19. Gellner, Op. cit., page 19.
20. Carlo Cipolla, Guns and Sails in the Early Phase of European Expansion, 1400–1700, London: Collins, 1965, pages 5 and 148–149.
21. Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, London: Pimlico, 1991, pages 298ff.
22. Johan Goudsblom, Fire and Civilisation, London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1992, pages 164ff.
23. Isaiah Berlin, The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History, edited by Henry Hardy, London: Chatto & Windus, 1996, pages 168–169.
24. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, London: Jonathan Cape, 1997, pages 200–202.
25. Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960, page 495.
26. Barnes, Op. cit., page 720.
27. Bronowski and Mazlish, Op. cit., page 259.
28. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1936/1964, page 23.
29. Edward P. Mahoney, ‘Lovejoy and the hierarchy of being’, Journal of the History of Ideas, volume 48, 1987, page 211.
30. Lovejoy, Op. cit., page 55.
31. Ibid., page 89.
32. Ibid., page 91.
33. Ibid., page 201.
34. Ibid., page 211.
35. Ibid., page 232.
36. Ibid., page 241.
37. Paul Robinson, ‘Symbols at an exhibition’, New York Times, 12 November 1998, page 12.
38. Gladys Gordon-Bournique, ‘A. O. Lovejoy and the history of ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas, volume 48, 1987, page 209.
39. This was similar to an idea of Hegel’s which he called ‘philosophemes’. See: Donald A. Kelley, ‘What is happening to the history of ideas?’, Journal of the History of Ideas, volume 51, 1990, page 4.
40. Philip P. Wiener (editor), Dictionary of the History of Ideas, four volumes, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973.
41. Kelley, Op. cit., pages 3–26.
42. James Thrower, The Alternative Tradition, The Hague: Mouton, 1980.
PROLOGUE: THE DISCOVERY OF TIME
1. Jacquetta Hawkes (editor), The World of the Past, London: Thames & Hudson, 1963, page 29.
2. Ibid., page 33.
3. James Sackett, ‘Human antiquity and the Old Stone Age: the 19th-century background to palaeoanthropology’, Evolutionary Anthropology, volume 9, issue 1, 2000, pages 37–49.
4. Hawkes, Op. cit., pages 30–34 and 147–148.
5. Ibid., page 27.
6. Glyn Daniel, One Hundred and Fifty Years of Archaeology (second edition), London: Duckworth, 1975, pages 25–26.
7. Bruce G. Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, page 53.
8. Ian Tattersall, The Fossil Trail, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995/1996, page 8; and Hawkes, Op. cit., pages 25–26.
9. Hawkes, Op. cit., pages 28–29.
10. Sackett, Op. cit., page 46.
11. Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (revised edition), Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1989, pages 32–33.
12. Trigger, Op. cit., pages 92–93.
13. James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000, page 146.
14. Ibid., page 105.
15. Peter Burke, ‘Images as evidence in seventeenth-century Europe,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, volume 64, 2003, pages 273–296.
16. Burke, Op. cit., pages 283–284.
17. Trigger, Op. cit., page 74.
18. Ibid., page 76.
19. Sackett, Op. cit., page 48.
20. Ibid.
CHAPTER 1: IDEAS BEFORE LANGUAGE
1. George Schaller, The Last Panda, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, page 8.
2. Robert J. Wenke, Patterns in Prehistory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, pages 119–120.
3. But see Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden: The Peopling of the World, London: Constable, 2003, page 10.
4. Journal of Human Evolution, volume 43, 2002, page 831, reported in New Scientist, 4 January 2003, page 16. Of course, action by wooden implements, if they existed, wouldn’t show up as remains.
5. Paul Mellars and Chris Stringer, The Human Revolution, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989, page 70 and chapter six, ‘Multi-regional evolution: the fossil alternative Eden’, by Milford H. Wolpoff. Chimpanzees are now thought not to be as closely related to man as once believed – see New Scientist, 28 September 2002, page 20. The most recent, but still disputed evidence puts the chimpanzee–human divergence back to 4–10 million years ago – see Bernard Wood, ‘Who are we?’, New Scientist, 26 October 2002, pages 44–47.
6. New Scientist, 13 July 2002, page 6; and 13 July 2002, page 6. As Bernard Wood points out, the Djurab desert is 150 kilometres (95 miles) west of the East African Rift valley, which means this area may no longer be regarded as the exclusive home of early humans: ‘Who are we?’, New Scientist, 26 October 2002, page 47. Sahelanthropus was later criticised as being a form of early ape, not an ancestor of man – see the Times Higher Educational Supplement, 25 October 2002, page 19. The find of a leg bone was reported in 2000, said to be the remains of our ‘Millenial Ancestor’, dated to six million years ago, which had upright posture. New Scientist, 15 December 2000, page 5. Stephen Oppenheimer says the earliest ‘clear evidence’ for bipedalism is seen in the skeleton of A. anamensis at four million years ago. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., page 5.
7. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., page 11.
8. Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind, London: Thames & Hudson, 1996, page 238.
9. Richard G. Klein with Blake Edward, The Dawn of Human Culture, New York: John Wiley, 2002, page 56.
10. Another theory is that the upright posture allowed for greater cooling of the body in the African heat, via the top of the head, which was now more exposed. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., page 5.
11. One recent theory argues that rapid climate change, which occurs every 100,000 years or so, is responsible for the development of intelligence: Times Higher Educational Supplement, 4 October 2002, page 29.
12. Klein with Edward, Op. cit., page 65.
13. This may have something to do with the fact that when mammals began to flourish, after the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago (after the earth was hit by an asteroid), the early species were nocturnal creatures and therefore required larger brains to process information from several senses – touch, smell and hearing as well as sight. Chimpanzees, for example, seem better at drawing inferences from acoustic clues than from visual ones. Mithen, Op. cit., pages 88 and 114.
14. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., page 11.
15. Mithen, Op. cit., pages 108–109.
16. Wenke, Op. cit., page 120.
17. Mithen, Op. cit., page 22. Homo habilis is known as Australopithecus habilis among some palaeontologists. See Bernard Wood, ‘Who are we?’, New Scientist, 26 October 2002, page 47.
18. Mithen, Op. cit., page 126.
19. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., pages 14–15. John Noble Wilford, ‘Experts place ancient toolmaker on a fast track to northern China,’ New York Times, 5 October 2004, citing a report in the then current Nature.
20. The latest H. erectus discoveries, at Dmanasi, in Georgia, consist of individuals with much smaller brains, with a 600 cc capacity. This suggests they moved out of Africa not because they were more intelligent than other hominids, or had better tools, but because, owing to climate, African conditions extended into Europe. Alternatively, these examples were actually children. The Times (London) 5 July 2002, page 14.
21. Wenke, Op. cit., pages 145–147.
22. Richard Rudgley, The Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age, New York: The Free Press, 1999, page 143.
23. Goudsblom, Fire and Civilisation, Op. cit., pages 16 and 34.
24. Ibid., pages 25–27.
25. Rudgley, Op. cit., page 88 and Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., page 428. A curious aspect to stone tool technology is that in some sites the hand-axes do not appear to have been used. This has prompted some palaeontologists to suggest that the accumulation of such ‘tools’ was in fact an early form of ‘peacock plumage’, in effect a showing-off device as an aid to attracting mates. Klein and Edgard, Op. cit., page 107. Even today, certain Eskimo groups distinguish between tools used on animals and tools used only on social occasions. Mellars and Stringer. Op. cit., page 359. H erectus is sometimes known as H. rhodesiensis in Africa but this term is falling into disuse.
26. Rudgley, Op. cit., page 163. Experiments conducted on Neanderthal bones, by Steven Churchill at Duke University in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, support the idea that they used both arms to thrust spears, not throw them. This, at 230,000–200,000 years ago. New Scientist, 23 November 2002, pages 22–23. Archaic H. sapiens is also known as H. helmei and H. heidelbergensis.
27. Rudgley, Op. cit., page 176.
28. Ibid., page 177.
29. Ibid., page 226.
30. Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., 214.
31. El País (Madrid), 12 August 2002, page 1.
32. Francesco d’Errico, ‘The invisible frontier. A multiple species model for the origin of behavioral modernity’, Evolutionary Anthropology, volume 12, 2003, pages 188–202.
33. Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., page 156.
34. This may also explain why Neanderthals made repeated use of caves for short periods of time: to build fires, raise the temperature in a confined space, and get at the meat. Then they moved on.
35. Rudgley, Op. cit., page 217. At the same time, these skeletons have been found only in areas relatively light on carnivores, which may mean that all we are seeing is the differential remains of other animals’ scavenging behaviour.
36. Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., page 217.
37. Ibid., page 219.
38. Paul Mellars, ‘Cognitive changes in the emergence of modern humans in Europe’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, volume 1, number 1, April 1991, pages 63–76. This view is contradicted by a study published later in the same journal, by Anthony E. Marks et al., which showed that there is no difference between burins produced by Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans. ‘Tool standardisation in the middle and upper Palaeolithic’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, volume 11, number 1, 2001, pages 17–44.
39. Mellars, Op. cit., page 70.
40. James Steele et al., ‘Stone tools and the linguistic capabilities of earlier hominids’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, volume 5, number 2, 1995, pages 245–256.
41. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991, pages 149–150.
42. Ibid., page 163.
43. Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness, New York: W. W. Norton, 2001, page 150.
44. Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, Op. cit., page 210.
45. Donald, A Mind So Rare, Op. cit., page 150.
46. John E. Pfeiffer, The Creative Explosion, New York: Harper & Row, 1982.
47. N. Goren-Inbar ‘A figurine from the Acheulian site of Berekhet Ram’, Mitekufat Haeven, volume 19, 1986, pages 7–12.
48. Francesco d’Errico and April Nowell, ‘A new look at the Berekhet Ram figurine: Implications for the Origins of Symbolism’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, volume 9, number 2, 1999, pages 1–27.
49. For the beads at Blombos cave, see: Kate Douglas, ‘Born to trade’, New Scientist, 18 September 2004, pages 25–28; for the ‘flute’, see: I. Turk, J. Dirjec and B. Kavur, ‘Ali so v slovenjii nasli najstarejse glasbilo v europi?’ [The Oldest musical instrument in Europe discovered in Slovenia?], Razprave IV, razreda SAZU (Ljubliana), volume 36, 1995, pages 287–293.
50. Francesco d’Errico, Paolo Villa, Ana C. Pinto Llona and Rosa Ruiz Idarraga, ‘A Middle Paleolithic origin of music? Using cave-bear bones to assess the Divje Babel bone “flute”’, Antiquity, volume 72, 1998, pages 65–79.
51. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., pages 115–117.
52. Ibid., page 127.
53. Mithen, Op. cit., page 174.
54. Ibid., page 175.
55. Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, volume 1, London: Collins, 1979, page 17.
56. The Times (London), 17 February 2003, page 7. New York Times, 12 November 2002, page F3.
57. International Herald Tribune, 16 August 2002, pages 1 and 7.
58. Stephen Shennan, ‘Demography and cultural innovation: a model and its implication for the emergence of modern human culture’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, volume 11, number 1, 2001, pages 5–16.
59. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., pages 112–113.
60. Mithen, Op. cit., page 195.
61. By the same token, the fact that the Neanderthals were around in the Ice Age, and produced no art that we know of, strongly suggests that they were intellectually incapable of producing such artefacts.
62. Mithen, Op. cit., 197.
63. Ibid.
64. Rudgley, Op. cit., 196.
65. At the el-Wad cave in the Mount Carmel area near Haifa in Israel, a piece of flint was discovered, dating to 12,800–10,300 BP, which had been modified as a sort of artistic double-entendre. From certain angles, the figure resembles a penis (say the modern palaeontologists), from another angle it looks like a set of testicles, though the actual carving, when examined in detail, represents a couple, seated, facing each other, and engaged in sexual intercourse. Rudgley, Op. cit., pages 188–189.
66. Eliade, Op. cit., page 20.
67. Scientific American, November 2000, pages 32–34.
68. Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., page 367. Randall White further reports that many of the beads were made of ‘exotic’ materials – ivory, steatite, serpentine – the raw materials for which were obtained in some cases from 100 kilometres (60 miles) away. This raises the possibility of early ideas of trade. Ibid., 375–376. Different sites had similar motifs (sea shells, for example) at similar excavation levels, showing that early aesthetic ideas radiated between peoples (an early form of fashion?). Ibid., page 377.
69. Mithen, Op. cit., page 200.
70. David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002, page 127.
71. Ibid., pages 199–200 and 216–217.
72. Ibid., pages 224–225.
73. Ibid., pages 285–286.
74. Will Knight and Rachel Nowak, ‘Meet our new human relatives’, New Scientist, 30 October 2004, pages 8–10.
CHAPTER 2: THE ORIGINS OF LANGUAGE AND THE CONQUEST OF COLD
1. The actual figures were 67 and 82 respectively, but this seems overly specific. Mithen, Op. cit., page 119.
2. Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., page 343.
3. Klein with Edgard, Op. cit., page 19.
4. The Nelson Bay inhabitants had ostrich shells which they used as water containers on their journeys inland; those at Klasies did not.
5. Mithen, Op. cit., page 250. For the lice research, see: Douglas, Op. cit., page 28.
6. Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., page 439.
7. Ibid., page 451.
8. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., pages 54 and 68.
9. Stuart J. Fiedel, The Pre-history of the Americas, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987, page 25.
10. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., page 215.
11. Ibid., page 225.
12. Brian Fagan, The Great Journey, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1987, pages 188–189.
13. Ibid., page 73.
14. Fiedel, Op. cit., page 27.
15. Fagan, Op. cit., page 79.
16. See Oppenheimer, Op. cit., page 233, for a map of the southerly routes.
17. Fagan, Op. cit., page 89.
18. Ibid., page 92. Though Berelekh is the most likely route taken by the palaeo-Indians, the Dyukhtai stone culture does not exactly resemble that found in north America and this is where another site comes in – Ushki, on the Kamchatka peninsula. Ushki is a large site of 100 square metres, where the stone tools at lower levels (12,000 BC) lack the wedge shape so characteristic of Dyukhtai. However, by later levels (8800 BC) the Dyukhtai tools are there. This raises the intriguing possibility that the Dyukhtai people pushed out the Ushki people, who were forced to look elsewhere. Fagan, Op. cit., pages 96–97. If Berelekh was the route taken, it would mean that early man travelled along the top of the world, walking or sailing (or rafting) along the shores of the East Siberian Sea and then the Chukchi Sea, to reach what is now Chukotskiy Poluostrov (Chukotsk peninsula). Uelen (Mys Dezhneva) is 50–60 miles from Cape Prince of Wales in Alaska. The very latest evidence traces the first Americans to the Jomon culture in Japan. International Herald Tribune, 31 July 2001.
19. Fagan, Op. cit., pages 108–109.
20. Ibid., page 111.
21. Frederick Hadleigh West, The Archaeology of Beringia, New York: Columbia University Press, 1981, pages 156, 164 and 177–178.
22. Fagan, Op. cit., pages 93ff.
23. Antonio Torroni, ‘Mitochondrial DNA and the origin of Native Americans’, in Colin Renfrew (editor), America Past, America Present: Genes and Language in the Americas and Beyond, Cambridge, England: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, Papers in the Prehistory of Language, 2000, pages 77–87.
24. There is some evidence for Monte Verde being dated to 37,000 years ago and for Meadowcroft at 19,000 years ago. See: Oppenheimer, Op. cit., pages 287 and 291. But many archaeologists remain unconvinced.
25. Hadleigh West, Op. cit., page 87.
26. Fagan, Op. cit., page 92; Hadleigh West, Op. cit., page 132.
27. According to Michael Corballis, professor of psychology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, language may have developed out of gestures. He makes the point that chimpanzees are much better at sign language than speaking and that, in their brains, the area corresponding to Broca’s area is involved with making and perceiving hand and arm movements. Deaf humans also have no difficulty developing sign languages. Corballis speculates that bipedalism enabled early man to develop hand and facial gestures first and that speech only developed after the rules had been laid down in the brain for grammar, syntax etc. See: Michael Corballis, From Hand to Mouth: The Origins of Language, Princeton, New Jersey, and London: Princeton University Press, 2002. For Kanzi’s ‘words’, see: Anil Ananthaswamy, ‘Has the chimp taught himself to talk?’, New Scientist, 4 January 2003, page 12.
28. Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., page 397.
29. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., page 27.
30. Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., page 406.
31. Ibid., page 412.
32. Ibid., chapter 10, ‘New skeletal evidence concerning the anatomy of middle Palaeolithic populations in the Middle East: the Kebara skeleton’, especially page 169. ‘Neanderthals not so dumb’, Mark Henderson, The (London) Times, 22 June 2004, page 4.
33. International Herald Tribune, 16 August 2002, page 1.
34. The gene was located in, among other sites, fifteen members of one family living in Britain, all of whom have profound speech defects and all of whom had a defective version of FOXP2.
35. Tore Janson, Speak, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, page 27.
36. Les Groube, ‘The impact of diseases upon the emergence of agriculture’, in David R. Harris (editor), The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia, London: University College London Press, 1996, page 103.
37. Johanna Nichols calculates there are 167 American language ‘stocks’. Stephen Oppenheimer observes there are far more languages in South America than in the north. He provides a table, of different parts of the world, calibrating language diversity and period of human occupation. His graph shows essentially a straight line – in other words, there is a strong relation between time depth and language diversity. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., page 299. For William Sutherland’s claim that there are 6,809 languages in the world, see New Scientist, 17 May 2003, page 22.
38. Rudgley, Op. cit., page 39.
39. Terence Grieder, Origins of Pre-Columbian Art, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982.
40. Oppenheimer, Op. cit., page 304.
41. Colin Renfrew and Daniel Nettle (editors), Nostratic: Examining a Linguistic Macrofamily, Cambridge, England: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 1999, page 5.
42. Ibid., page 130.
43. Ibid., pages 12–13.
44. Nicholas Wade, ‘Genes are telling 50,000-year-old story of the origins of Europeans’, New York Times, 14 November 2000, page F9.
45. Renfrew and Nettle (editors), Op. cit., pages 53–67; Merritt Ruhlen, The Origin of Languages, New York: Wiley, 1994. Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, The Great Human Diasporas, New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995, pages 174–177 and 185–186.
46. Renfrew and Nettle (editors), Op. cit., page 68.
47. Ibid., pages 68–69.
48. Ibid., pages 54 and 398.
49. Gyula Décsy, ‘Beyond Nostratic in time and space’, in Renfrew and Nettle (editors), Op. cit., pages 127–135.
50. Steven Pinker and P. Bloom, ‘Natural language and natural selection’, Behavioural and Brain Science, volume 13, 1990, pages 707–784. Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, London: Faber & Faber, 1996.
51. Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., page 485.
52. Ibid., page 459.
53. Ibid., pages 468–469.
54. Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, Op. cit., page 215.
55. Ibid., page 334.
56. Ibid., pages 333–334.
57. Mellars and Stringer, Op. cit., page 356.
58. Alexander Marshack, ‘Upper Palaeolithic notation and symbols’, Science, volume 178, 1972, pages 817–828.
59. Franceso d’Errico, ‘A new model and its implications for the origin of writing: the La Marche Antler revisited’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, volume 5, number 2, October 1995, pages 163–206.
60. Rudgley, Op. cit., page 74.
61. Ibid., page 77.
62. Ibid., page 79. ‘Three is the magic number alphabets have in common’, New Scientist, 12 February 2005, page 16.
63. Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, Op. cit., page 348.
CHAPTER 3: THE BIRTH OF THE GODS, THE EVOLUTION OF HOUSE AND HOME
1. Mithen, After the Ice, Op. cit., page 54.
2. Ibid., pages 12–13.
3. Chris Scarre, ‘Climate change and faunal extinction at the end of the Pleistocene’, chapter 5 of The Human Past, edited by Chris Scarre, London: Thames & Hudson, forthcoming, page 13.
4. David R. Harris (editor), The Origin and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia, London: University College London Press, 1996, page 135.
5. Ibid., page 144.
6. Ibid.
7. Goudsblom, Op. cit., page 47.
8. Scarre, Op. cit., page 11.
9. Harris (editor), Op. cit., pages 266–267. For the pig reference see Scarre, Op. cit., pages 9ff.
10. New Scientist, 10 August 2002, page 17.
11. Harris (editor), Op. cit., page 264. Bob Holmes, ‘Manna or millstone,’ New Scientist, 18 September 2004, pages 29–31.
12. Daniel Hillel, Out of the Earth, London: Aurum, 1992, page 73.
13. Mark Nathan Cohen, The Food Crisis in Prehistory, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
14. Groube, ‘The impact of diseases upon the emergence of agriculture’ in Harris (editor), Op. cit., pages 101–129.
15. V. G. Childe, Man Makes Himself, London: Watts, 1941.
16. Ibid., pages 554–555.
17. Jacques Cauvin, The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000 (French publication, 1994, translation: Trevor Watkins), page 15.
18. Ibid., page 16.
19. Ibid., page 22.
20. Ibid., pages 39–48. See also: Ian Hodder, The Domestication of Europe, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990, pages 34–35, for an allied theory.
21. Cauvin, Op. cit., page 44. See John Graham Clark, World Prehistory, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1977, page 50, for curvilinear houses at Beidha in Jordan.
22. Cauvin, Op. cit., page 69.
23. Ibid., page 125.
24. Ibid. See Erlich Zehren, The Crescent and the Bull, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1962, for an earlier discussion of bull tombs in the Middle East.
25. Cauvin, Op. cit., page 128.
26. Ibid., page 132.
27. Mithen, After the Ice, Op. cit., page 59.
28. Fred Matson (editor), Ceramics and Man, London: Methuen, 1966, page 241.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., page 242.
31. Ibid.
32. Goudsblom, Op. cit., pages 58–59.
33. Matson, Op. cit., page 244.
34. Mithen, After the Ice, Op. cit., page 372.
35. Matson, Op. cit., page 245.
36. Ibid., page 210.
37. Ibid., page 211. See Clark, Op. cit., page 55, for key radiocarbon dating for Tepe Sarab.
38. Matson, Op. cit., page 207.
39. Ibid., page 208.
40. Ibid., page 220.
41. Ibid. See also Clark, Op. cit., pages 61ff. for another outline of where pottery first appeared.
42. Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, Op. cit., volume 1, pages 114–115. Some of the dolmens are vast – one at Soto, near Seville in Spain, is 21 metres long and has as pediment a granite block that is 3.40 metres high.
43. Colin Renfrew, Before Civilisation, London: Cape, 1973, pages 162–163.
44. Ibid., page 164.
45. Ibid., page 165.
46. Alastair Service and Jean Bradbery, Megaliths and Their Mysteries, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979, page 33.
47. Ibid., page 34.
48. Ibid., page 35.
49. Chris Scarre, ‘Shrines of the land: religion and the transition to farming in Western Europe’, paper delivered at the conference ‘Faith in the Past: Theorising an Archaeology of Religion’. Publication forthcoming, edited by David Whitley, page 6.
50. Douglas C. Heggie, Megalithic Science: Ancient Maths and Astronomy in North-Western Europe, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1981, pages 61–64.
51. Eliade, Op. cit., page 117.
52. Service and Bradbery, Op. cit., pages 22–23.
53. Marija Gimbutas, The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe: 6500 to 3500 BC, London: Thames & Hudson, 1982, page 236.
54. Ibid., page 237.
55. Ibid., page 177.
56. Ibid., page 24. This is confirmed by Hodder, Op. cit., at page 61, where he also explores female symbolism on pottery.
57. In her book The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe: 6500 to 3500 BC, Op. cit., Marija Gimbutas also explores links between these original ideas and the ideas of the Greeks in regard to their gods. In particular, she finds that the Great Goddess survives as Artemis: the rituals surrounding her worship recall the ceremonies hinted at in the ancient statues of Old Europe (for example, Artemis Eileithyia – ‘child-bearing’), pages 198–199.
58. Matson, Op. cit., page 141.
59. Ibid., page 143.
60. Leslie Aitchison, A History of Metals, London: Macdonald, 1960, page 37.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., page 38.
63. Ibid., page 39. See Clark, Op. cit., page 92, for a discussion of Susa pottery and the adoption of metallurgy.
64. Aitchison, Op. cit., page 40.
65. Ibid., pages 40–41.
66. Ibid., page 41.
67. One explanation for this rapid dispersal of technological knowledge has been put down by James Muhly to the invention of writing, which we will come to in Chapter 4. See Theodore Wertime et al. (editors), The Coming of the Age of Iron, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980, page 26. But there are other possibilities. The earliest true bronzes – tin bronzes – that occur in any quantity are found at Ur, in Mesopotamia, just before the middle of the second millennium BC, though the suggestion has been made that, since the Sumerians were immigrants from further east, and since the same metallurgical advances were also found at Mohenjo-Daro, on the Indus, perhaps the Sumerians first appreciated the principle of bronze-making in their original homeland, and the knowledge then spread in both directions, but needed the discovery of substantial tin deposits before it could find proper expression: Aitchison, Op. cit., page 62. This theory is further supported by the fact that Sumer’s bronze period lasted for only 300 years, then dropped off, as local tin deposits became exhausted: Wertime, Op. cit., page 32.
68. Aitchison, Op. cit., page 78.
69. Ibid., page 82.
70. Ibid., page 93. See Clark, Op. cit., pages 179 and 186 for illustrations showing daggers lengthening into swords.
71. Aitchison, Op. cit., page 98.
72. Wertime, Op. cit., pages 69–70 and 99.
73. Ibid., page 100.
74. Ibid., page 101.
75. Ibid., page 17.
76. Ibid., page 102. See Clark, Op. cit., pages 185f for a wider discussion of the impact of iron technology and for an illustration of a Greek iron-smith taken from a black-figured vase.
77. Wertime, Op. cit., page 103.
78. Ibid., page 82.
79. Ibid., page 116. Clark, Op. cit., page 186 discusses the cheapness of later iron.
80. Wertime, Op. cit., page 121.
81. Ibid., page 194.
82. Ibid., page 105.
83. Ibid., page 82.
84. Ibid., pages 197 and 215. Clark, Op. cit., page 170, discusses the role of gold as embellishment in armour.
85. Wertime, Op. cit., page 198.
86. Jack Weatherford, A History of Money, New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997, page 21.
87. Ibid., page 27.
88. Ibid., page 31. See Clark, Op. cit., page 194 for illustrations of early Greek coins.
89. Mithen, After the Ice, Op. cit., pages 67–68.
90. Weatherford, Op. cit., page 32.
91. Ibid., page 37.
92. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1978, page 152.
CHAPTER 4: CITIES OF WISDOM
1. H. W. F. Saggs, Before Greece and Rome, London: B. T. Batsford, 1989, page 62. Petr Charvát, Mesopotamia Before History, London: Routledge, 2002, page 100. (First published as: Ancient Mesopotamia – Humankind’s Long Journey into Civilization by the Oriental Institute, Prague, 1993)
2. Renfrew, Before Civilisation, Op. cit., page 212, and Rudgley, Op. cit., page 48.
3. Gwendolyn Leick, Mesopotamia, London: Penguin, 2002, page xviii. For Tell Brak and Tell Hamoukar, see: Graham Lawton, ‘Urban legends’, New Scientist, 18 September 2004, pages 32–35.
4. Hans J. Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988, pages 5 and 71. Charvát, Op. cit., page 134.
5. Nissen, Op. cit., page 56. Scientists from the Universities of Georgia and of Maine reported in Science in 2002 that there was a sudden drop in temperature across the world 5,000 years ago, and that this may have encouraged the development of complex civilisations in both hemispheres. A study of ancient fish bones indicates that the temperature fall brought about the first El Niño, the periodic warming of the Pacific, which brings unusual weather patterns every two-to-seven years. Off South America, the fish population rocketed, which may have triggered people to build large temples (to maintain the catch through communal worship). But the change in weather and temperature would have dried out many areas, forcing people in the Old World in particular to congregate in river valleys. Daily Telegraph (London), 2 November 2002, page 10.
6. Nissen, Op. cit., page 67.
7. Ibid., page 56.
8. Ibid., page 69.
9. Leick, Op. cit., page 2.
10. Ibid., page 3.
11. Charvát, Op. cit., page 93.
12. Mason Hammond, The City in the Ancient World, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972, page 38.
13. Nissen, Op. cit., 72.
14. Ibid., pages 130–131.
15. Ibid., pages 132–133. Charvát, Op. cit., page 134.
16. Hammond, Op. cit., pages 37–38. Charvát, Op. cit., page 134.
17. Ibid.
18. Hans Nissen cautions us that we know so little about the ‘temples’ and ‘palaces’ of Mesopotamian cities that we are not really justified in referring to them other than as ‘public buildings’. Nissen, Op. cit., page 98.
19. The use of this particular word has provoked the idea among some modern scholars that the ziggurats were an attempt to reproduce similar shrines that had been built on natural hills in the original homeland of the Sumerians. This would imply that they had moved down into the Mesopotamian delta from the highlands of Elam to the north and east. Hammond, Op. cit., page 39.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., page 45.
22. D. Schmandt-Besserat, Before Writing, volume 1: From Counting to Cuneiform, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992.
23. Rudgley, Op. cit., page 50.
24. Ibid., page 53.
25. Ibid., page 54. The French scholar who has cast doubt on this reconstruction is: Jean-Jacques Glassner, in The Invention of the Cuneiform: Writing in Sumer, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
26. S. M. M. Winn, Pre-writing in South Eastern Europe: The Sign System of the Vinca Culture, circa 4000 BC, Calgary: Western Publishers, 1981.
27. Le Figaro (Paris), 3 June 1999, page 16.
28. Saggs, Op. cit. page 6.
29. Ibid., page 7.
30. Nissen, Op. cit., page 74.
31. Ibid., page 76.
32. Ibid., pages 78–79.
33. Saggs, Op. cit., page 83.
34. Rudgley, Op. cit., page 70.
35. Nissen, Op. cit., page 84.
36. Saggs, Op. cit., page 62.
37. Ibid., page 65.
38. Ibid., pages 66–68.
39. Ibid., pages 68–69.
40. G. Contenau, Everyday Life in Babylon and Assyria, London: Edward Arnold, 1954, page 158.
41. Ibid., page 160.
42. Ibid., pages 162–163.
43. Leick, Op. cit., page 66.
44. Nissen, Op. cit., page 138.
45. Leick, Op. cit., page 73.
46. Nissen, Op. cit., page 139.
47. Leick, Op. cit., page 75.
48. David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, page 12.
49. Nissen, Op. cit., page 140. Charvát, Op. cit., page 127.
50. Saggs, Op. cit., pages 78–84.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., page 81.
53. Nissen, Op. cit., page 136.
54. Saggs, Op. cit., page 98.
55. Ibid., page 104. Most scribes were men but by no means all. The daughter of Sargon of Agade, who was high-priestess of the Moon-god in Ur, became famous as a poet. When scribes signed documents, they often added the names and positions of their fathers, which confirms that they were usually the sons of city governors, temple administrators, army officers or priests. Literacy was confined to scribes and administrators.
56. Saggs, Op. cit., page 105.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., page 107.
59. Ibid., page 110.
60. Ibid., page 111.
61. Ibid., page 112.
62. Ibid., page 103.
63. Leick, Op. cit., page 214.
64. Ibid., page 82.
65. Contenau, Op. cit., page 196.
66. William B. F. Ryan et al., ‘An abrupt drowning of the Black Sea shelf’, Marine Geology, volume 38, 1997, pages 119–126. In October 2002 Marine Geology dedicated an entire issue to the Black Sea hypothesis. Most writers were negative.
67. George Roux, Ancient Iraq, London: Penguin, 1966, page 109.
68. Nissen, Op. cit., page 95.
69. Ibid.
70. H. and H. A. Frankfort et al., Before Philosophy, London: Penguin, 1949, page 224. Andrew R. George, The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts (2 vols), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
71. Contenau, Op. cit., page 204.
72. Frankfort et al., Op. cit., page 225.
73. Ibid., page 226.
74. Contenau, Op. cit., page 205.
75. Frankfort et al., Op. cit., page 226.
76. Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001, page 4.
77. Ibid., page 7.
78. Ibid., page 13.
79. Charvát, Op. cit., page 101.
80. Ibid., page 210.
81. Ibid.
82. Leick, Op. cit., page 90.
83. Stuart Piggott, Wagon, Chariot and Carriage, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1992, page 16.
84. Ibid., page 21, map.
85. Ibid., page 41.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid., page 44.
88. Yuri Rassamakin, ‘The Eneolithic of the Black Sea steppe: dynamics of cultural and economic development 4500–2300 BC’, in Marsha Levine et al., Late Prehistoric Exploitation of the Eurasian Steppe, Cambridge, England: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research Monographs, 1999, pages 136–137.
89. Ibid., pages 5–58.
90. Ibid., page 9.
91. Quoted in Saggs, Op. cit., page 176.
92. Arthur Ferrill, The Origins of War, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1985, page 15.
93. Ibid., pages 18–19.
94. Ibid., page 21.
95. Ibid., page 26. In Sumer, writing provides evidence that they had no compunction in raiding mountain peoples to kill, loot and enslave. The ideogram for ‘slave-girl’ is a combination of ‘woman’ and ‘mountain’. Saggs, Op. cit., page 176.
96. Ferrill, Op. cit., page 46.
97. Ibid., pages 66–67.
98. Ibid., page 72. The Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin has used Assyrian sculptural reliefs to study the development of siege techniques in warfare. Sieges became necessary after the rise of armies in the second and first millennia BC had stimulated the building everywhere of fortified sites. Assyrian generals developed a variety of specialised equipment. There was the battering ram and the mobile tower, both on wheels. The discovery of carburised iron encouraged the development of special poles and pikes to scrape away at weak point in city walls. Sieges were never easy: most cities kept enough food and water to live on for more than a year, by which time anything could have happened (when the Assyrians were besieging Jerusalem in 722 BC, they were decimated by plague). Assault was always preferred to a waiting game. See Ferrill, Op. cit., pages 76–77.
99. Saggs, Op. cit., page 156.
100. Roux, Op. cit., page 185.
101. W. G. De Burgh, The Legacy of the Ancient World, London: Penguin, 1953/1961, page 25.
102. Saggs, Op. cit., pages 156–158.
103. Roux, Op. cit., page 187.
104. Ibid., page 171.
105. Ibid., page 173.
106. Saggs, Op. cit., page 160.
107. Ibid., page 161.
108. Ibid., page 162.
109. Ibid.
110. Ibid., page 165.
111. Charvát, Op. cit., page 155.
112. Ibid., page 230.
113. Ibid., page 236.
CHAPTER 5: SACRIFICE, SOUL, SAVIOUR: THE ‘SPIRITUAL BREAKTHROUGH’
1. Brian Fagan, From Black Land to Fifth Sun: The Science of Sacred Sites, Reading, Massachusetts: Helix/Perseus Books, 1998, pages 244–245.
2. The Khonds, a Dravidian tribe of Bengal, offered sacrifices to the earth goddess. The victim, known as Meriah, was either bought from his parents, or born of parents who were themselves victims. The Meriahs lived happily for years, and were regarded as consecrated beings; they married other ‘victims’ and were given a piece of land as a dowry. About two weeks before the sacrifice, the victim’s hair was cut off in a ceremony where everyone assisted. This was followed by an orgy and the Meriah was brought to a part of the nearby forest ‘as yet not defiled by the axe’. He was anointed in melted butter and other oils, and flowers, and then drugged with opium. He was killed by being either crushed, strangled, or roasted slowly over a brazier. Then he was cut into pieces. These remains were taken back to nearby villages where they were buried to ensure a good harvest. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, London: Sheed & Ward, 1958, pages 344–345.
3. If tears are shed to beg the god to send rain, that is regarded by anthropologists, such as J. G. Frazer, as sheer religion. If tears are shed to imitate the falling of rain, that is sympathetic magic and religion combined: humans act out what they magically induce the gods to do. See also: Eliade, Patterns, Op. cit., page 345. Miranda Aldhouse Green, Dying for the Gods: Human Sacrifice in Iron Age and Roman Europe, London: Tempus, 2001.
4. B. Washburn Hopkins, Origin and Evolution of Religion, New Haven and New York: Yale University Press, 1924, page 116. Royden Keith Kerkes, Sacrifice in Greek and Roman Religions and Early Judaism, London: Adam and Charles Black, 1953, page 31.
5. Hopkins, Op. cit., page 50.
6. Eliade, Patterns, Op. cit., page 86.
7. Ibid., page 88.
8. Ibid., page 90.
9. Ibid., page 91.
10. Ibid., page 217. For the history of the Dravidians, see A. C. Bouquet, Comparative Religion, London: Cassell, 1961, pages 116ff.
11. Eliade, Patterns, Op. cit., page 219. Kerkes, Op. cit., page 92.
12. Eliade, Patterns, Op. cit., page 332.
13. Ibid., page 334.
14. See: Michael Jordan, Gods of the Earth, London: Bantam, 1992, page 106, for ceremonies of allegorical fertilisation in Egypt.
15. Eliade, Patterns, Op. cit., page 342.
16. Ibid., page 343.
17. For the history of maize in Mesoamerica see Barry Cunliffe, Wendy Davies and Colin Renfrew (editors), Archaeology: The Widening Debate, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. And for the maize-mother see Frank B. Jevons, An Introduction to the History of Religions, London: Methuen, 1896/1904, pages 257–258.
18. C. Jouco Bleeker and Geo Widengren (editors), Historia Religionum, volume 1, Religions of the Past, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969/1988, page 116.
19. Eliade, Patterns, Op. cit., page 75.
20. Ibid., page 102.
21. Ibid., page 104.
22. The oldest Indo-Aryan root connected with heavenly bodies is the one that means ‘moon’ (me) and in Sanskrit it is transformed into a word that means ‘I measure’. Words with the same root and the same meaning exist in Old Prussian, Gothic, Greek (mene) and Latin (mensis). Consider the English words ‘commensurate’ and ‘menstruation’. Eliade, Patterns, Op. cit., page 154.
23. Ibid., page 165. See too Jevons, Op. cit., pages 228–229, and Zehren, Op. cit., pages 94–95 and 240–241 for the moon-bull.
24. Hopkins, Op. cit., page 109. E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Development of Mythology, Religion, Art, Astronomy etc., London: John Murray, 1871.
25. Ibid., pages 124–126.
26. Ibid., page 130.
27. S. G. Brandon, Religion in Ancient History, London: Allen & Unwin, 1973, pages 147ff.
28. Ibid., page 69.
29. Ibid., page 70.
30. Bleeker and Widengren (editors), Op. cit., pages 96–99.
31. Brandon, Op. cit., page 71.
32. Ibid., page 7.
33. Ibid., page 72. See Zehren, Op. cit., pages 283–284 for discussion of the crescent moon as a ‘sun ship’ sailing before daybreak to the sun and the afterlife (the aureole of the sun).
34. Brandon, Op. cit., page 72.
35. Ibid., page 73.
36. Edwin Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, pages 298–299; George Cordana and Dhanesh Jain (editors), The Indo-Aryan Languages, London: Routledge, 2003; Asko Parpola, ‘Tongues that tie a billion souls’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 8 October 2004, pages 26–27.
37. Bryant, Op. Cit., page 165.
38. Ibid., page 166.
39. Ibid.
40. Brandon, Op. cit., page 87.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., page 86.
43. Jan N. Bremmer, The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife, London and New York: Routledge, 2002, page 1.
44. Ibid., page 2.
45. Brandon, Op. cit., page 74.
46. Ibid., page 75.
47. Ibid., pages 31–32.
48. Ibid., page 76.
49. Bremmer, Op. cit., page 4.
50. Ibid., page 5 and ref. See Jevons, Op. cit., chapter 21, ‘The next life’, for a discussion of Hades.
51. Needing a guide on the way to Hades has suggested to some scholars that there was a growing anxiety about one’s fate after death, perhaps because of recent wars. The grandest mention of the Elysian Fields is in the Aeneid, when Aeneas visits the fields to see his father, Anchises.
52. Bremmer, Op. cit., page 7.
53. Brandon, Op. cit., page 79.
54. Nephesh never means the soul of the dead and is not contrasted with the body. The Israelites had a word, ruach, usually translated as ‘spirit’, but it could as easily mean ‘charisma’. It denoted the physical and psychical energy of remarkable people, like Elijah. Bremmer, Op. cit., page 8.
55. Ibid., pages 8–9.
56. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, London: Routledge, 1953, page 2. For a more sociological version of this theory, see Robert Bellah’s article, ‘Religious evolution’, reprinted in his Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1970/1991.
57. Grant Allen, The Evolution of the Idea of God, London: Grant Richards, 1904, page 180.
58. Cyrus H. Gordon and Gary A. Rendsburg, The Bible in the Ancient Near East, New York: Norton, 1997, pages 109–113.
59. Allen, Op. cit., page 181.
60. Ibid., page 182.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., page 184.
63. Ibid., pages 185–186. See John Murphy, The Origins and History of Religions, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1949, pages 176ff, for other early Hebrew traditions.
64. Menhirs and dolmens, though perhaps not as impressive as in western Europe, are still found all across ancient Phoenicia, Canaan, modern-day Galilee and Syria (Herodotus described a stela he saw in Syria that was decorated with female pudenda). Allen, Op. cit., pages 186–187.
65. Ibid., page 190.
66. Ibid., page 192.
67. ‘If Israel obeys Yahweh,’ says the Deuteronomist, ‘Yahweh will make thee plenteous for good in the fruit of thy belly, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy ground,’ but if Israel ‘ignores the jealous god, then “cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep”.’ Allen, Op. cit., page 194. Finally, in this context of Yahweh as a god of fertility, there is his demand that the first-born be offered as a sacrifice. In the pagan world the first child was often understood to be the offspring of a god ‘who had impregnated the mother in an act of droit de seigneur’. Karen Armstrong, A History of God, London: Vintage, 1999, page 26.
68. Allen, Op. cit., page 212.
69. Ibid., page 213.
70. Ibid., page 215.
71. Ibid., pages 216–217.
72. Ibid., page 219. See Bouquet, Op. cit., chapter 6, ‘The golden age of religious creativity’, pages 95–111. Kerkes, Op. cit., page 32.
73. Allen, Op. cit., page 22 for the forgery of Deuteronomy.
74. Bruce Vawter, The Conscience of Israel, London: Sheed & Ward, 1961, page 15.
75. Ibid., page 18.
76. Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987, page 38. See also Norman Podhoretz, The Prophets, New York: The Free Press, 2002, page 92.
77. The phenomenon broke out at the time of the Philistine wars, and this links the prophets with the Nazirites, who indulged in ecstatic dances and other physical movements repeated so often that they finally succumbed to a kind of hypnotic suggestion, under the influence of which they would remain unconscious for hours. Vawter, Op. cit., pages 22–23. Ecstaticism had burned itself out by the time that the great moral prophets of the eighth century made their appearance. The Israelites had shared with neighbouring tribes the practice of divination, such as auguring with animal livers, but that too had fallen into disuse. Ibid., pages 24 and 31.
78. Ibid., pages 39–40.
79. Johnson, Op. cit., pages 36–38. The prophets, incidentally, opposed images of God, because this deprived the king of the day of appropriating such images to himself – and the ‘divinity’ and power that went with it – and because an ‘invisible’, interior god, helped their vision, driving men and women back on themselves as moral agents. Ibid., page 124.
80. Vawter, Op. cit., page 66. See also: Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, New York: The Free Press, 2001, pages 172–173.
81. Vawter, Op. cit., page 82.
82. Ibid., page 95; Podhoretz, Op. cit., pages 119f.
83. Vawter, Op. cit., page 111.
84. Ibid., page 72.
85. Micah, the next of the prophets, took as his main target what historian Bruce Vawter calls ‘Judahite capitalism’, the growth of large estates (confirmed by archaeology), the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, relegating the rest of the population to the status of ‘helpless dependants’, though priests were attacked for the personal gain they put before all else, and because, in collaboration with the Assyrians, they turned away from Yahweh-worship to other gods. Micah was active between 750 and 686 BC, and so as late as this Yahweh-worship was not settled in Israel. Vawter, Op. cit., page 154.
86. Podhoretz, Op. cit., page 183; Vawter, Op. cit., pages 165–166.
87. Thomas L. Thompson, The Bible in History, London: Cape, 1999, page 56. Vawter, Op. cit., page 170.
88. Vawter, Op. cit., page 175.
89. Ibid., page 75.
90. Podhoretz, Op. cit., page 187 and 191; Gordon and Rendsburg, Op. cit., page 253. Vawter, Op. cit., page 75.
91. Podhoretz, Op. cit., pages 219ff. Finkelstein and Silberman, Op. cit., page 297.
92. Paul Kriwaczek, In Search of Zarathustra, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002, page 206.
93. Ibid., page 222.
94. Ibid., page 119.
95. Ibid., page 120.
96. Ibid., page 49. See also: A Nietzsche Reader, selected and translated, and with an introduction by R. J. Hollingdale, London: Penguin, 1977, especially pages 71–124, on morality.
97. Brandon, Op. cit., page 96.
98. Kriwaczek, Op. cit., page 210.
99. Eliade, Op. cit., page 309.
100. Since the primitive daevas all at some time or another practise deceit, Zarathustra demands that his disciples no longer worship them. In envisaging the ‘way of righteousness’, Zoroastrianism prefigures both Plato (in his concern with Good), Buddhism and Confucianism. In demanding that his disciples no longer worship the daevas, his ideas may have helped the Jews move from henotheism (the belief that only one god out of many is worthy of worship) to true monotheism (the belief that there is only one god). Kriwaczek, Op. cit., page 183.
101. Ibid., page 210.
102. Ibid.
103. Eliade, Op. cit., page 308.
104. Ibid., page 312.
105. Kriwaczek, Op. cit., page 195.
106. Eliade, Op. cit., page 330.
107. Pat Alexander (editor), The World’s Religions, Oxford: Lion Publishing, 1994, page 170.
108. Ibid., page 173.
109. Ibid., page 174.
110. Karen Armstrong, Buddha, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000, page 15.
111. Ibid., page 19.
112. Ibid., page 23.
113. S. G. F. Brandon (editor), The Saviour God, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1963, page 218.
114. Ibid., page 86.
115. Ibid., page 89.
116. Ibid., page 90.
117. Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., page 41.
118. Ibid., page 42.
119. Ibid.
120. R. M. Cook, The Greeks Till Alexander, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1962, page 86. See also: Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., page 45.
121. Armstrong, Op. cit., page 46. See Cook, Op. cit., page 41 for the way Plato modified his theories.
122. Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., page 48.
123. Ibid., page 49.
124. D. Howard Smith, Confucius, London: Temple Smith, 1973. John D. Fairbanks, China, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992, pages 50–51.
125. Fairbanks, Op. cit., page 25.
126. Ibid., pages 33–34.
127. Brandon, Op. cit., page 98.
128. Armstrong, A History of God, Op. cit., page 43.
129. Ibid., page 45.
130. Fairbanks, Op. cit., page 63.
131. Ibid., page 66. See also Bouquet, Op. cit., page 180.
132. Benjamin I. Schwarz, The World of Thought in Ancient China, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985, page 193. Brandon (editor), Op. cit., page 179.
133. D. C. Lau, Introduction to Lao Tzu, Tao te ching, London: Penguin, 1963, pages xv–xix.
134. Schwarz, Op. cit., page 202. Brandon (editor), Op. cit., page 180.
CHAPTER 6: THE ORIGINS OF SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY AND THE HUMANITIES
1. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, London: Penguin, 1987, page 369.
2. H. D. F. Kitto, The Greeks, London: Penguin, 1961.
3. Peter Hall, Cities in Civilisation, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998, pages 24.
4. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Seekers: The Story of Man’s Continuing Quest to Understand His World, New York and London: Vintage, 1999, Part II.
5. A. R. Burn, The Penguin History of Greece, London: Penguin, 1966, page 28.
6. Ibid., pages 64–67.
7. Ibid., page 68. See here.
8. Robert B. Downs, Books That Changed the World, New York: Mentor, 1983, pages 41. See also Burn, Op. cit., page 73.
9. John Roberts, A Short Illustrated History of the World, London: Helicon, 1993, page 108.
10. Burn, Op. cit., 119.
11. Ibid., pages 119–121. Tyrant became a pejorative term under the later, democratic Greeks. See also: Peter Jones, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Classics, London: Gerald Duckworth, 1999/2002, page 70.
12. Kitto, Op. cit., pages 75 and 78. For the population of Athens, see Jones, Op. cit., page 65.
13. Roberts, Op. cit., page 109.
14. Kitto, Op. cit., page 126.
15. Ibid., page 129.
16. Erwin Schrödinger, Nature and the Greeks and Science and Humanism, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1954/1996, pages 55–58.
17. Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin, The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece, New Haven, Connecticut, and London: Yale University Press, 2002, pages 242–248.
18. Geoffrey Lloyd, The Revolution in Wisdom: Studies in the Claims and Practices of Ancient Greek Science, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1987, page 85.
19. Ibid., pages 56, 62, 109 and 131.
20. Ibid., page 353.
21. Schrödinger, Op. cit., page 58.
22. Michael Grant, The Classical Greeks, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989, page 46.
23. Kitto, Op. cit., page 177.
24. Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind, Op. cit., page 9.
25. Kitto, Op. cit., page 179.
26. Ibid., page 181.
27. Burn, Op. cit., page 131; see also: Cook, Op. cit., page 86.
28. Burn, Op. cit., page 138.
29. E. G. Richards, Mapping Time: The Calendar and Its History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, page 36.
30. David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, page 29.
31. Ibid., page 34.
32. Burn, Op. cit., page 247. See Cook, Op. cit., page 147 for a discussion of Anaxagoras’ understanding of perspective.
33. Burn, Op. cit., page 248.
34. Schrödinger, Op. cit., page 78.
35. Lindberg, Op. cit., page 31.
36. Ibid., page 113.
37. Burn, Op. cit., page 271; also Cook, Op. cit., page 144.
38. Lindberg, Op. cit., page 116.
39. Burn, Op. cit., page 272.
40. Geoffrey Lloyd, Magic, Reason and Experience, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1979, chapter 4.
41. Lloyd and Sivin, Op. cit., page 241.
42. Grant, Op. cit., page 47.
43. Ibid., page 70. Cook, Op. cit., page 138, says that sophists often became the butt of jokes.
44. Grant, Op. cit., page 72.
45. Freeman, Op. cit., page 24.
46. Burn, Op. cit., page 307.
47. Grant, Op. cit., pages 209–212.
48. Lindberg, Op. cit., pages 40–41.
49. Pierre Leveque, The Greek Adventure, translated by Miriam Kochan, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968, page 358. The notion (we have to be careful here when using the word ‘idea’), that there is another world, beyond the immediate realm of the senses, Plato also applied to the soul. ‘The soul was an independent substance which did not have an organic relationship to the body; it could reflect and conceive ideas.’ Ibid. But the body was always getting in the way, and defiling the experience of the Forms. Morality, the good life in Socrates’ sense, consisted in trying to escape from the corrupting influence of the body. ‘While we live we shall be nearest to knowledge when we avoid, so far as possible, intercourse and communion with the body . . . but keep ourselves pure from it.’ The soul – and the Ideas – could occasionally be glimpsed in the here and now: this is what contemplation, scholarship, poetry and love were for. For Plato death spelled the end for the body but the soul remained incorruptible ‘because of its participation in the ideas’. The soul was drawn in a chariot by two horses, the horse of noble passions and the horse of base passions, driven by reason.
50. Leveque, Op. cit., page 359.
51. Ibid. See Cook, Op. cit., page 146 for Plato’s writing style.
52. Leveque, Op. cit., page 361.
53. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 57.
54. Ibid., page 58.
55. Ibid., page 59.
56. Ibid., page 61.
57. Ibid., page 62. In politics he had an assistant survey 150 different city-states around the Mediterranean. Cook, Op. cit., page 143. The story of that survival is itself a web of Byzantine complexity. The books were inherited several times, buried in an underground cellar, taken to Rome, where they were catalogued by one Andronicus of Rhodes.
58. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 64.
59. Ibid., page 65.
60. Lereque, Op. cit., page 365.
61. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 69.
62. Ibid. But see Cook, Op. cit., pages 142–143 for Aristotle’s theory that virtue was a mean between two vices.
63. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 71.
64. Leveque, Op. cit., page 363.
65. Ibid., page 364.
66. Ibid.
67. Grant, Op. cit., page 252.
68. Burn, Op. cit., page 204.
69. Grant, Op. cit., page 39.
70. Burn, Op. cit., page 124.
71. Ibid.
72. Grant, Op. cit., page 39.
73. Ibid., page 40. See also Cook, Op. cit., page 145.
74. Burn, Op. cit., page 205.
75. Grant, Op. cit., page 110.
76. Ibid., pages 129–130. Cook, Op. cit., page 145.
77. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 79.
78. Grant, Op. cit., page 158.
79. Ibid., page 159. Cook, Op. cit., page 118.
80. John Boardman, Greek Art, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1996, page 145.
81. Cook, Op. cit., page 157. Grant, Op. cit., pages 95–96.
82. Grant, Op. cit., page 81.
83. What many people consider to be the climax of classical Greek sculpture was discovered in 1972 in the sea off Riace in Calabria, southern Italy. These are the so-called Riace bronzes, two male figures about six feet tall. Both are bearded, were originally helmeted and may have carried shields, though these have been lost, possibly looted. The figures have luxuriant hair, with lips and nipples (and possibly eyelashes) made of copper. Technically, and realistically, the statues are second to none and although, in truth, we do not know who fashioned them, the two main candidates are, first, Pythagoras, a sculptor described by Pliny as the ‘first to represent such anatomical details as sinews and veins and hair’ and whose native town was Rhegium (the modern Reggio Calabria), near where the bronzes were brought up; and second, Polyclitus. This attribution is based on the fact that he worked a lot in bronze, in Argos, and because the statues have various Argive features. His work, too, is known only through copies, one the ‘Youth Holding a Spear’ (Doryphorus), in Naples, and the other, ‘Youth Binding a Fillet Round His Head’ (Diadumenus) of which there are various copies. But Polyclitus also wrote a Canon, embodying his view of what the ideal proportions for a human being should be. This shows that Polyclitus had a mathematical view of beauty – it was a philosophical matter of proportions, the human body ‘a supreme demonstration of mathematical principle’. Pliny said that many people were influenced by the Canon. Polyclitus beat Phidias in a competition for the statue of an Amazon for the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. But none of this proves that the Riace bronzes are by him and the possibility is real that the climax of classical Greek sculpture was produced by an unknown hand. Grant, Op. cit., pages 81ff.
84. Ibid., page 59.
85. John Boardman, Athenian Red Figure Vases: The Classical Period, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 1989, page 8. Richard Neer, Style and Politics in Athenian Vase-Painting: The Craft of Democracy, Circa 530–470 BCE, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
86. Ibid., pages 263–264.
87. Hall, Op. cit., pages 32–33. But many sculptures were painted: see Cook, Op. cit., 151 for a discussion.
88. Hall, Op. cit., page 30.
89. Grant, Op. cit., page 279.
90. Ibid., page 280.
91. Ibid., page 224.
92. Ibid., page 281.
93. Walter Burkhart, The Orientalizing Revolution, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992 (1984 in German), passim.
94. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation, London: Free Association Books, 1987/Vintage paperback 1991, page 51.
95. M. L. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. West says that Egyptian literary influences on Greece are ‘vanishingly small’ but Peter Jones, Op. cit., page 225, says that though many details in Bernal’s account are absurdly exaggerated, much of his general argument is sound.
96. Isaiah Berlin, Liberty (edited by Henry Hardy), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pages 302–303.
97. Ibid., page 294 and ref.
98. Ibid., page 304.
99. Ibid., page 308.
100. See Peter Jones (editor/director), The World of Rome, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997, page 289, for Zeno’s paradox.
101. Berlin, Op. cit., page 310.
102. Leveque, Op. cit., pages 328ff.
103. Berlin, Op. cit., page 312.
104. Ibid., page 314.
105. Grant, Op. cit., page 263.
106. Translated by Erwin Schrödinger in his Nature and the Greeks and Science and Humanism, Op. cit., page 19.
CHAPTER 7: THE IDEAS OF ISRAEL, THE IDEA OF JESUS
1. Johnson, History of the Jews, Op. cit., page 78.
2. Ibid., page 82.
3. Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorised Version, New York: Knopf, 1991, page 71–72. See Finkelstein and Silberman, Op. cit., pages 120–121, for the Israelites’ uneasy relationship with YHWH.
4. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 70. Gordon and Rendsburg, Op. cit., page 323.
5. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 56.
6. Johnson, Op. cit., page 83.
7. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 275.
8. Johnson, Op. cit., pages 84–85.
9. Ibid., page 85.
10. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 85.
11. Ibid., page 107. Richard Friedman argues that it was Ezra who gave the final shape to the Law of Moses; see Finkelstein and Silberman, Op. cit., page 310.
12. Philip R. Davies, Scribes and Schools, London: SPCK, 1998, page 24.
13. Ibid., page 7.
14. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 109.
15. Ibid., page 10.
16. Ibid., page 116.
17. Philip Davies argues against this. He maintains that the final form of Hebrew scriptures tells us nothing about their evolution. Davies, Op. cit., pages 89–90. In fact, these three divisions of Old Testament writings describe four phases of Israelite history: the ancient history of the world and the election of the ancestors of Israel (in Genesis); the creation of the nation, from the descendants of Jacob in Egypt and the Lord’s gift of a constitution (law) and land; a period of decline, from the leadership of Moses, through Joshua and Saul to David and Solomon, and then through the less than ideal monarchies of Israel and Judah, culminating in exile in Babylon (Exodus to Kings and Chronicles); the restoration of Judah, the rebuilding of the Temple, and the reconstitution of Judah/Israel as a religious entity ‘devoted to the convenant with Yahweh and to worship in his temple’. At this point canonised history ends, though of course Jewish history does not end. For Christians, Judaism comes to an end theologically, with the birth of the Messiah. Ibid., page 55.
The word ‘Jew’ comes from the Hebrew yehudi, Judahite or Judaean, a descendant of Judah, Jacob’s fourth son and heir, ‘the historical carrier of the Blessing of Yahweh, first given to Abram (Abraham)’. Allen Bloom, Closing, Op. cit., page 4.
It is worth remembering that the Christian Old Testament is arranged differently from the Hebrew Bible. The first five books are in the same order but have different titles. The Christian Genesis is the Hebrew Bereshith, ‘In the beginning’; the Christian Numbers is the Hebrew Bemidbar, ‘In the wilderness’. Hebrew practice, like the files of Microsoft Word, means they often take their titles from the first words of the chapter. After the Torah, or Pentateuch, there is little in common in the order of the books between the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible. The Christian Old Testament ends with Malachi proclaiming a new Elijah, a new prophet, whereas the Hebrew Bible ends with the second book of Chronicles, the return to Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the Temple.
18. Allen Bloom, Op. cit., pages 4–5.
19. Finkelstein and Silberman, Op. cit., pages 246ff
20. Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel, London: Routledge, 1996, pages 128–129.
21. Finkelstein and Silberman, Op. cit., pages 81ff.
22. Israel Finkelstein, personal interview, Tel Aviv, 22 November 1996. But see also: Finkelstein and Silberman, Op. cit., pages 72ff.
23. Amihai Mazar, personal interview, Tel Aviv, 22 November 1996.
24. Raz Kletter, personal interview, Tel Aviv, 25 November 1996. Ephraim Stern, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, volume 2, New York: Doubleday, 2001, pages 200–209. Finkelstein and Silberman, Op. cit., pages 246ff, also argue that the move to worship YHWH exclusively began only in the late eighth century BC.
25. Finkelstein and Silberman, Op. cit., page 129.
26. Anne Punton, The World Jesus Knew, London: Olive Press/Monarch Books, 1996, page 182.
27. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 197.
28. Ibid., page 16. Gordon and Rendsburg, Op. cit., pages 36ff.
29. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 19.
30. Ibid., page 21.
31. Ibid., pages 58–59. See Finkelstein and Silberman, Op. cit., pages 44–45, for the role of Abraham, the rise of Jerusalem and other consequences of the E and J versions. See also Thompson, Op. cit., pages 105ff for the world of Genesis.
32. Harold Bloom, the American scholar, has argued that in fact J is the earliest element of the Old Testament, the origin of the scriptures, and, moreover, that its author was a woman. Commenting on a new translation of the J elements, he argues that this tenth-century woman conceived Yahweh more as a Greek or Sumerian god – highly anthropomorphic: exuberant, mischievous, capricious, ‘an outrageous personality’. Bloom conceives the Old Testament as an amalgam analogous to a mixture of Homer and Hesiod. This all adds to the concept of the evolution of God, discussed in the previous chapter. David Rosenberg and Harold Bloom, The Book Of J, New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990, page 294.
33. Johnson, Op. cit., page 91.
34. Punton, Op. cit., page 83.
35. Ibid., page 209.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Jean-Yves Empereur, Alexandria, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2001/2002, page 38.
39. Punton, Op. cit., page 102.
40. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 123. See also: R H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913.
41. Punton, Op. cit., page 217.
42. A final element in the scriptures was the Oral Torah. This arose because, for all its authority, the written Torah did not – could not – account for all situations. For example, it allowed for divorce but did not specify what form divorce should take, nor how it should be arranged. Interpretation and explanation of the law thus proliferated and with it developed an oral tradition. In time, this oral tradition became as canonical as the written Torah and scholars with phenomenal memories devoted their lives to memorising and passing on this tradition (these men were called Tannaʾim). Eventually, however, this body of tradition became so unwieldy that it, too, had to be written down. It was a move also provoked by two disasters that had befallen the Jews – the destruction of the second Temple in AD 70, and the failed revolt against Rome in AD 131–135. After the failed revolt, the Jews were so shattered, and so dispersed, that it seemed the oral tradition might be lost. In these circumstances Judah the Prince, a rabbi, decided to make it his life’s work to record and organise all the important oral traditions. He and his colleagues completed the work by AD 200 and this work is called the Mishnah. It covers the food laws, ritual purity, festivals and Temple practice, marriage and divorce, adultery and civil rights. Punton, Op. cit., page 20.
43. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 167ff.
44. Davies, Op. cit., page 176; Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 200. See also: F. M. Cornford, Principium Sapientiae: The Origins of Greek Philosophical Thought, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1952.
45. Johnson, Op. cit., page 93.
46. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 402.
47. Ibid., page 410.
48. Ibid., page 412. See Gordon and Rendsburg, Op. cit., page 78, for another way Job is special – its division into prose and poetry, and the significance of this.
49. Punton, Op. cit., page 192.
50. Johnson, Op. cit., page 99.
51. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation, London: BBC, 1969, page 19.
52. Johnson, Op. cit., page 102.
53. Ibid., page 106.
54. Paula Fredericksen, From Jesus to Christ, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988, page 87.
55. Colleen McDannell and Barnhard Lang, Heaven: A History, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988, pages 12–13.
56. Frederiksen, Op. cit., pages 88–89.
57. Christopher Rowland, Christian Origins, London: SPCK, 1985/1997, pages 72–73.
58. Rowland, Op. cit., page 73; Frederiksen, Op. cit., page 89.
59. Rowland, Op. cit., page 88.
60. Frederiksen, Op. cit., page 82.
61. Ibid., page 93.
62. Gordon and Rendsburg, Op. cit., page 265.
63. Rowland, Op. cit., page 94.
64. Frederiksen, Op. cit., page 77. The Apocryphal Testaments of Levi and Reuben speak of a priestly as well as a Davidic Messiah, and this is confirmed in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
65. Frederiksen, Op. cit., page 78.
66. Johnson, Op. cit., page 111.
67. Ibid. But see Finkelstein and Silberman, Op. cit., page 316 for the power of the Bible in unifying the disparate Israelites.
68. The incense for the perpetual altar flame was made from a secret recipe by the Avtina family, whose women never wore perfume, so they could never be accused of corruption.
69. Johnson, Op. cit., page 116.
70. Some idea of the size of the sacrifices may be had from the fact that there were thirty-four cisterns below the Temple to receive the water used to wash away the blood. Alongside these cisterns were vaults where was kept the money received as Temple fees from pilgrims from all over the world. Johnson, Op. cit., pages 116–117.
71. G. A. Wells, The Jesus of the Early Christians, London: Pemberton Books, 1971, page 131.
72. Ibid., page 4.
73. Eliade, Patterns, Op. cit., page 426.
74. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 202.
75. Ibid., pages 147–148.
76. Ibid., page 151. See Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Early Christianity, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971, pages 80ff, for a discussion of the world that gave rise to non-canonical gospels.
77. Lane Fox, Op. cit., pages 123–124. See also: Bauer, Op. cit., pages 184ff, for a discussion of the early manuscripts of the gospels.
78. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 126.
79. Ibid., page 114. Bauer, Op. cit., pages 128–129, for the role of Marcion.
80. In 1966 the United Bible Societies issued a new Greek text of the Bible, for students and translators. According to the UBS, ‘There were two thousand places where alternative readings of any significance survived in good manuscripts.’ Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 156.
81. Frederiksen Op. cit., page 51.
82. Rowland, Op. cit., page 127.
83. Around AD 200 there were Christians who argued that Christ had been born on 3 November (this was based on a misunderstanding about Herod’s death), while others argued for the spring. Christmas has been celebrated on 25 December only since the fourth century and even then Christians in the eastern half of the empire preferred 6 January. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 36. See here of this book.
84. Geźa Vermes, The Religion of Jesus the Jew, London: SCM Press, 1993, page 214.
85. Ibid.
86. Russell Shorto, Gospel Truth, New York: Riverhead/ Puttnam, 1997, page 33.
87. Wells, Op. cit., page 12.
88. Ibid., page 13.
89. Ibid.
90. Vermes, Op. cit., page 217.
91. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 29.
92. Ibid., page 30.
93. Ibid.
94. Ibid., page 32. Bauer, Op. cit., page 45, quotes a report that Philo was in touch with Peter in Rome.
95. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 33. Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1890/1994, page 358.
96. Vermes, Op. cit., pages 46–47.
97. Johnson, Op. cit., page 139.
98. Lane Fox, Op. cit., page 21.
99. But Galilee is important in another way too. In the late 1990s, Dr Elhanen Reiner, of Tel Aviv University, came across some midrash – ancient commentaries on the Old Testament – dating back to 200 BC. These early documents contain several references to a Galilean figure of that date called Joshua who sounds very familiar. In Galilee, ‘Jesus’ was a common corruption of ‘Joshua’ and the narrative of Joshua has many parallels with that of Jesus, namely: (1) The first phase of Joshua’s leadership took place in Transjordan; Jesus’ first appearance in the Bible as an adult occurs with him bathing in the Jordan. (2) Joshua appointed twelve elders to apportion the land of Israel, just as Jesus appointed twelve disciples. (3) Joshua’s death ‘agitated the world’, an angel came down and there was an earthquake to mark the fact that God thought Joshua’s death a terrible thing, which few others did. Much the same happens with Jesus: the earth trembles and an angel descends. (4) The closest people to Joshua are called Joseph and Miriam (Mary). (5) Joshua’s death took place on 18 Iyyar, three days before Passover, the same day as the Crucifixion. (6) There is a Hebrew tradition, in an Aramaic book, that Jesus’ Crucifixion took place not in Jerusalem but in Tiberias – i.e., Galilee. (7) The stories of Joshua and Jesus both contain a Judah or Judas who plays a crucial, negative role. (8) At some point in the story, Joshua flees to Egypt, just as the family of the infant Jesus flees to Egypt. This is not the end of the parallels between the two traditions but even these few are enough to raise doubts about Jesus’ true identity. Personal interview, Tel Aviv, 26 November 1996.
100. Wells, Op. cit., page 93.
101. Ibid., page 94.
102. Ibid., page 95.
103. Ibid., page 99. See also: Brian Moynahan, The Faith, London: Aurum, 2002, pages 11–13.
104. Frederiksen, Op. cit., pages 120–121.
105. Wells, Op. cit., page 245.
106. Ibid.
107. Ibid., page 103.
108. Ibid., page 40. See Moynahan, Op. cit., page 16, for a clear account of the deposition.
109. Rowland, Op. cit., page 189.
110. Ibid.
111. Ibid., pages 191–192. See Moynahan, Op. cit., page 19, on the role of women.
112. Shorto, Op. cit., page 147.
113. Ibid., pages 160–161.
114. In October 2002 a limestone ossuary was found, allegedly south of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. The box had actually been looted but the Geological Survey of Israel confirmed that the limestone did come from the Jerusalem area. What was notable about the box was that it was inscribed, in Aramaic, with the words ‘James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus’. According to Professor André Lemaire, of the Sorbonne in Paris, the style of writing dated the ossuary to between AD 10 and AD 70. The names James, Joseph and Jesus were not uncommon at the time: 233 first-century ossuaries have been found and nineteen mention Joseph, ten Jesus and five James (Yaʾaqov in Aramaic). Given a male population of Jerusalem of about 40,000, and assuming that each man had two brothers, Professor Lemaire has calculated that there would have been about twenty men at the time who were ‘James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus’. But, given that James (mentioned as Jesus’ brother in both Matthew and Mark), was the leader of the Jerusalem church until AD 62, when he was stoned to death as a heretic, and that Jesus would also have been well known, Professor Lemaire argues that the odds on the ossuary really referring to Jesus Christ would be shorter than twenty to one. It was very rare for brothers to be mentioned in ossuaries and, of the 233 known, only one other case mentions brothers. In fact, doubts have since emerged about the authenticity of the box, which is now regarded as a fake. Daily Mail (London), 24 October 2002, page 13.
115. Vermes, Op. cit., page 140.
116. Ibid., pages 154ff.
117. Ibid., page 26.
118. Frederiksen, Op. cit., page 39.
119. Ibid., page 135.
CHAPTER 8: ALEXANDRIA, OCCIDENT AND ORIENT IN THE YEAR 0
1. G. J. Whitrow, Time in History, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, page 70.
2. E. G. Richards, Mapping Time, Op. cit., page 7.
3. Whitrow, Op. cit., page 32.
4. Richards, Op. cit., pages 82–83. For the doubts on Babylonian influence in China, see: Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual (revised and enlarged edition), Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London Harvard University Asia Center, for the Harvard-Yenching Institute, distributed by Harvard University Press, 2000, page 177.
5. Whitrow, Op. cit., page 95. Wilkinson, Op. cit., page 171.
6. Whitrow, Op. cit., page 32.
7. Ibid., page 271. Moon lore is treated in twenty-three cuneiform tablets in the library of Ashurbanipal. See: A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964, page 225.
8. Whitrow, Op. cit., page 26.
9. Ibid., page 39.
10. Richards, Op. cit., 95.
11. Ibid., page 106.
12. Ibid., page 222.
13. Whitrow, Op. cit., page 57.
14. Richards, Op. cit., page 207.
15. Whitrow, Op. cit., page 66.
16. Richards, Op. cit., page 215.
17. Whitrow, Op. cit., page 66.
18. Though it was also said that he wanted to commemorate Cleopatra, who had committed suicide in that month. Richards, Op. cit., page 215.
19. Whitrow, Op. cit., page 68.
20. Richards, Op. cit., pages 218–219.
21. Empereur, Op. cit., page 15. Peter Green, ‘Alexander’s Alexandria’, Kenneth Hamma (editor), Alexandria and Alexandrianism, Malibu, California: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996, page 11.
22. Roy Macleod (editor), The Library of Alexandria, London: I. B. Tauris, 2000, page 36. Günter Grimm, ‘City planning?’, in Hamma (editor), Op. cit., page 66.
23. Empereur, Op. cit., page 3.
24. Ibid., page 4.
25. Theodore Vrettos, Alexandria: City of the Western Mind, New York and London: Free Press, 2001, pages 34–35. Lilly Kahil, ‘Cults in Hellenistic Alexandria’ in Hamma (editor), Op. cit., page 77.
26. Empereur, Op. cit., page 6.
27. Ibid., page 7. A brief overview of Alexandrian scholarship is given in E. M. Forster, Alexandria: A History and a Guide (editor, Miriam Allott), London: André Deutsch, 2004, pages 34–35.
28. Vrettos, Op. cit., pages 52–53.
29. Ibid., page 55.
30. Ibid., page 42.
31. Empereur, Op. cit. pages 6–7.
32. Carl Boyer, revised by Uta C. Merzbach, A History of Mathematics (second edition), New York: John Wiley, 1968/1991, pages 104f.
33. Vrettos, Op. cit., page 43. The originals of many of Euclid’s works have been lost and they survive only in Arabic translations, later rendered into Latin and modern languages. Among those completely lost is one which may consist of his most original idea, Porisms. It is not quite clear what a porism was to Euclid but from later commentators it appears to have been a conception intermediate between a theorem and a problem. Boyer, Op. cit., page 101.
34. Lindberg, Op. cit., page 87.
35. Vrettos, Op. cit., page 50.
36. Ettore Carruccio, Mathematics and Logic in History and Contemporary Thought, London: Faber, 1964, pages 80–83.
37. Lindberg, Op. cit., page 88. Archimedes also developed ‘the method’. This, which explained his way of working, came to light in the most colourful of fashions. It was recovered almost by accident in 1906 by the Danish historian of science, J. L. Heiberg. He had read that at Constantinople there was a palimpsest ‘of mathematical content’. Boyer, Op. cit., page 139. A palimpsest is a parchment from which the original writing has been washed away and written over with a new text. Heiberg found that on this occasion the original writing had been imperfectly removed and, with the aid of photographs, he could read the original. This turned out to be a letter written by Archimedes to Eratosthenes, mathematician and librarian at Alexandria, containing fifteen propositions outlining his way of working which included, in some cases, hanging threads as one balances weights in mechanisms, to test his calculations. In other words, The Method explains how Archimedes went from levers to more advanced maths using the same principles. Ibid., page 137.
38. Lindberg, Op. cit., page 89.
39. Vrettos, Op. cit., page 58.
40. Ibid., pages 60ff.
41. Boyer, Op. cit., pages 140ff.
42. Lindberg, Op. cit., page 97.
43. Vrettos, Op. cit., pages 163–168.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., page 177.
47. Ibid., page 185.
48. Ibid., page 195.
49. Lindberg, Op. cit., page 97.
50. Heinrich von Staden, ‘Body and machine: interactions between medicine, mechanics and philosophy in early Alexandria’, in: Hamma (editor), Op. cit., pages 85ff.
51. Von Staden, Op. cit., page 87.
52. Ibid., page 89.
53. Ibid., page 92.
54. Ibid., page 95.
55. Lindberg, Op. cit., page 105. In Alexandria, doctors could be divided into those using folklore remedies, practitioners who could not read and write, and literate doctors, who sought to gain experience by reading texts, and translations of texts, from all over the world, studying theories and practices that other doctors used, or said that they used, seeking authority in the past.
56. Ibid.
57. Empereur, Op. cit., page 7.
58. Ibid., page 8.
59. Richards, Op. cit., page 173.
60. Ibid., page 27.
61. John Keay, India: A History, London: HarperCollins, 2000, pages 130–133.
62. Jean S. Sedlar, India and the Greek World, Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980, page 65.
63. Sedlar, Op. cit., page 82.
64. Ibid., page 84.
65. Ibid., page 92–93.
66. Radhakamal Mukerjee, The Culture and Art of India, London: Allen & Unwin, 1959, page 99.
67. Ibid., page 107.
68. Sedlar, Op. cit., page 109.
69. Ibid., page 111.
70. Ibid., page 112.
71. Ibid., page 122. H. G. Keene Cie, History of India, London: W. H. Allen, 1893, pages 28–29, dismisses this, arguing that Buddha emerged out of Brahmanism, which may also have given elements to early Judaism and thence to Christianity.
72. Sedlar, Op. cit., page 180.
73. Ibid., page 176.
74. Ibid., page 180.
75. Ibid., page 187.
76. Keay, Op. cit., page 78.
77. Ibid., page 85. Chandragupta was a Jain and retired to Karnataka, at Stravana Belgola, west of Bangalore. There, in a cave in a hill, the emperor is said to have starved himself to death, ‘the ultimate act of Jain self-denial’. Apparently, the emperor, so successful in many ways, abdicated after learning of an imminent famine from a famous monk, Bhadrabahu, said to be the last Jain monk to have known the founder of the faith, Mahavira Nataputta. Ibid., page 86.
78. A. L. Basham (editor), A Cultural History of India, Oxford and New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1975, page 42.
79. Ibid., page 88. For the Pali/Prakrit scripts, see Richard Lannoy, The Speaking Tree: A Study of Indian Culture and Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, page 328.
80. Keay, Op. cit., page 89.
81. Ibid., page 97. See Keene Cie, Op. cit., pages 34–35 for some of the alliances formed by Ashoka, and for the spread of Brahmanism.
82. Keay, Op. cit., page 80.
83. Mukerjee, Op. cit., page 91.
84. Keay, Op. cit., page 81.
85. Ralph Turner, The Great Cultural Traditions, volume II, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1941, pages 758–759.
86. Ibid., page 760.
87. Ibid., page 762.
88. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 171.
89. Ibid., pages 170–171.
90. Keay, Op. cit., pages 44–47.
91. Ibid., page 101.
92. Ibid., page 103. See Keene Cie, Op. cit., pages 29ff, for the India known to the Greeks.
93. Basham (editor), Op. cit., page 116.
94. Ibid., page 122.
95. Keay, Op. cit., page 104.
96. D. P. Singhal, India and World Civilisation, volume 1, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1972, page 272. Indian traders and missionaries extended their influence in south-east Asia. Excavations in the Mekong delta, in what is now Vietnam, have uncovered stone statues of Vishnu and other Hindu deities dating to the second century AD. Other finds support the idea that writing was introduced into south-east Asia from India.
97. Fairbanks, Op. cit., pages 72ff.
98. Richards, Op. cit., page 170. Wilkinson, Op. cit., pages 388ff, for the origins of Chinese script and the discovery of oracle bones; page 175 for the ganzhi system; pages 181 for the various words for year; page 202 for the 100 units; page 225 for approximate and authoritative numbers; page 241 for anti-falsification devices.
99. Richards, Op. cit., page 166. Wilkinson, Op. cit., page 206 for the meal drum and curfew.
100. Fairbanks, Op. cit., page 62.
101. Ibid., page 63.
102. Ibid., page 64.
103. Ibid., page 65. Charles O. Hucker, China’s Imperial Past, London: Duckworth, 1975, pages 194ff, says it was still being written in the second century BC.
104. Fairbanks, Op. cit., page 65.
105. Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilisation (second edition), Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1982, page 163. (French edition: Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1972; translated by J. R. Foster and Charles Hartman.)
106. Fairbanks, Op. cit., page 70. See also: Wilkinson, Op. cit., page 476, for the derivation of the word for ‘classic’.
107. Gernet, Op. cit., pages 163–164.
108. Ibid., page 167.
109. Fairbank, Op. cit., page 67 and Gernet, Op. cit., page 159. By the mid-second century AD, some 30,000 students were reported at the academy, though presumably not all were resident at the same time. (China then had a population of about 60 million.)
110. Fairbank, Op. cit., page 68.
111. Hucker, Op. cit., page 56.
112. Gernet, Op. cit., page 160.
113. Turner, Op. cit., page 776.
114. Ibid., page 777.
115. Ibid., page 778.
116. Ibid.
117. Hucker, Op. cit., page 213.
118. Gernet, Op. cit., page 124.
119. Fairbanks, Op. cit., page 63.
120. Gernet, Op. cit., page 140.
121. Ibid., pages 131–132.
122. Ibid., pages 134–135. See Werner Eichhorn, Chinese Civilisation, London: Faber & Faber, 1969, page 155, for a discussion of the economics of silk and the etymology of the words. (The Chinese word for silk is ssu.)
123. Gernet, Op. cit., page 141.
124. Eichhorn, Op. cit., page 114 for an example of his poetry. Gernet, Op. cit., page 162.
125. Hucker, Op. cit., page 200.
126. Jonathan Bloom, Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001, page 32.
127. Ibid., page 33.
128. Ibid., page 34.
129. Ibid., page 36.
130. Gernet, Op. cit., pages 168–169.
CHAPTER 9: LAW, LATIN, LITERACY AND THE LIBERAL ARTS
1. Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001, pages 26–28.
2. Ibid., page 68.
3. Ibid.
4. Joseph Farrell, Latin Language and Latin Culture, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001, page 32.
5. Jones et al., The World of Rome, Op. cit., page 7.
6. Ibid., page 7.
7. Ibid., page 9.
8. Michael Grant, The World of Rome, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960, page 26.
9. Jones et al., Op. cit., page 84.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., page 96.
12. Grant, Op. cit., page 13.
13. Jones et al., Op. cit., page 116.
14. Ibid., page 118.
15. Grant, Op. cit., page 27.
16. Jones et al., Op. cit., page 121.
17. J. D. Bernal, Science in History, volume 1, London: Penguin, 1954, page 230, gives a general perspective on Roman law.
18. Jones et al., Op. cit., page 275. For the jurists, see: O. F. Robinson, The Sources of Roman Law, London and New York: Routledge, 1997, pages 42ff.
19. Jones et al., Op. cit., page 257.
20. Beryl Rawson (editor), The Family in Ancient Rome, London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1986, pages 5ff and the references mentioned.
21. Ibid., pages 16–17; and chapter 5, passim.
22. Bernal, Op. cit., page 230.
23. Jones et al., Op. cit., page 214.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., page 238.
26. C. W. Valentine, Latin: Its Place and Value in Education, London: University of London Press, 1935; see chapter headings, pages 41, 54 and 73.
27. Farrell, Op. cit., passim.
28. Mason Hammond, Latin: A Historical and Linguistic Handbook, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976, pages 21–23.
29. Ibid., page 25.
30. Ibid., page 39.
31. Ibid., page 51.
32. J. Wight Duff, A Literary History of Rome, London: Ernest Benn, 1963, page 16.
33. Jones et al., Op. cit., page 200.
34. Ibid.
35. Oscar Weise, Language and Character of the Roman People, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1909, translated by H. Strong and A. Y. Campbell, page 4.
36. Ibid., page 8.
37. Farrell, Op. cit., page 40.
38. Duff, Op. cit., page 19.
39. Farrell, Op. cit., pages 54–55.
40. Jones et al., Op. cit., page 214.
41. Ibid., page 218.
42. For the authority of classical Latin, and its metres in poetry, see: Philip Hardie, ‘Questions of authority: the invention of tradition in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 15’, in Thomas Habinek and Alessandro Schiesaro (editors), The Roman Cultural Revolution, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997, page 186.
43. Jones et al., Op. cit., page 232.
44. Ibid., page 234. Moynahan, The Faith, Op. cit., page 28.
45. Moynahan, Op. cit., pages 241–242.
46. Jones et al., Op. cit., page 234.
47. Colish, Op. cit., page 24.
48. Jones et al., Op. cit., page 239.
49. Ibid., page 240.
50. Grant, Op. cit., page 71.
51. Ibid., page 262.
52. William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989, page 19.
53. Ibid., page 328.
54. Ibid., page 32.
55. Ibid., page 35. Some modern scholars have argued that literacy – writing – made it possible for the Greeks to organise city-states and, no less fundamental, that writing kick-started philosophy and science by stimulating a critical attitude by allowing rival arguments to be set out side-by-side. Ibid., page 40. Another argument is that writing enabled laws to be displayed in public, aiding the spread of democracy. In turn, these arguments have been dismissed as ‘woolly’. Ibid., page 41. Even so, it seems clear that the vast Roman empire could not have been built without the help of writing, or literacy. How else could one man send out orders over thousands of miles and expect his authority to be obeyed?
56. L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (third edition), Oxford: The Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1968/1991, page 25.
57. Jones et al., Op. cit., page 266.
58. Harris, Op. cit., page 202.
59. Ibid., pages 204–205.
60. Ibid., page 214.
61. Reynolds and Wilson, Op. cit., page 5.
62. Ibid., page 22.
63. Ibid., page 25.
64. Ibid., page 22.
65. Jones et al., Op. cit., page 263.
66. Ibid., page 217.
67. Boorstin, The Seekers, Op. cit., page 146.
68. Jones et al., Op. cit., pages 259–261.
69. As for the ‘literary’ graffiti, most had spelling errors after the first three or four words, implying that the phrases had been memorised and copied by hands unfamiliar with the orthographical rules of Latin.
70. See Jones et al., Op. cit., page 264.
71. Ibid., page 269.
72. For some of the ‘urbane’ values in Rome see: Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Mutatio morum: the idea of a cultural revolution’, in Habinek and Schiesaro (editors), Op. cit., pages 3–22.
73. Jones et al., Op. cit., page 272.
74. Reynolds and Wilson, Op. cit., page 3. For papyrus, see also: Bernhard Bischoff (translated by Dáibhi Ó Cróinin and David Ganz), Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991/2003, page 7.
75. Reynolds and Wilson, Op. cit., page 4.
76. Ibid., page 8.
77. Ibid., page 11.
78. Ibid., pages 31ff.
79. Lindberg, Op. cit., page 138.
80. Reynolds and Wilson, Op. cit., page 33.
81. William H. C. Frend, The Archaeology of Early Christianity, London: Geoffrey Chapman/Cassell, 1996, pages 34–36, which discusses early codices.
82. Reynolds and Wilson, Op. cit., page 35.
83. J. M. Ross, introduction to: Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, London: Penguin Books, 1972, page 7.
84. Ibid., page 59.
85. R. H. Barrow, The Romans, London: Penguin Books, 1949/61, page 156.
86. Ibid., page 165.
87. Cicero, Selected Works, London: Penguin Books, 1960/71, Introduction by J. M. Ross, page 11.
88. Ibid., page 12.
89. Ibid., page 25.
90. Virgil, The Aeneid, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986/98, introduction by Jasper Griffin, page xvii. Boorstin, Op. cit., pages 145f, says it took Virgil eleven years to compose the Aeneid.
91. Lindberg, Op. cit., page 125.
92. Ibid., page 126.
93. Ibid.
94. Ibid., page 129. See Bernal, Op. cit., pages 222–223 for a brief overview and the fact that Galen was translated fully into English only in 1952.
95. Lindberg, Op. cit., page 130.
96. Jones et al., Op. cit., page 295.
97. Ibid., page 292.
98. Boorstin, Op. cit., page 63.
99. Jones et al., Op. cit., page 245.
100. Ibid., page 288.
101. W. G. De Burgh, The Legacy of the Ancient World, Op. cit., page 256.
102. Jones et al., Op. cit., page 290. Pasiteles and his workshop, for example, specialised in pastiches – statues which, for instance, combined the head from one Greek original with the posture of another.
103. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, London, 1788, chapter 3. I have used the Dell version, published in New York in 1963.
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
Бот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)
Поиск книг
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
О психологии, саморазвитии и личностном росте
Саморазвитие
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
Детективы
Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки
Фантастика
Отборные классические книги
Классика
ВКОНТАКТЕБиблиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории
Любовные романы
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
Самые популярные книги в формате фб2
Топ фб2
книги