#Classical Manuscripts Ancient Literary Collections

[nickyfrancis24]

World’s oldest libraries

The World’s Oldest Libraries Article Title: World’s oldest libraries Author: Nicky Sinha Francis Genres: Article A heaven of books When your world revolves around books, all you can think of a cozy beautiful place only for your books and you. For others, it’s point to laugh, but for you it’s your passion and your own personal space where you can escape from your stress and pain that you go…

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#Ancient Archives Library Origins #Ancient Knowledge Centers Heritage Libraries #Ancient Libraries #Antiquarian Libraries Oldest Manuscripts #Classical Libraries #Classical Manuscripts Ancient Literary Collections #Cultural Heritage Libraries Ancient Text Repositories #Early Library Collections #Historical Libraries #Legacy Libraries #Library History #Library Preservation #Medieval Libraries #Pre-modern Libraries

[v4mptrait]

🍅🦇 @birdietrait did someone say vampire ?

Josiah, formerly known as Jafaar, carries the weight of centuries on his shoulders, a vampire born in the desolate landscapes of Somalia, forever bound to the shadows after a fateful encounter in the mid-1720s. Captured and turned by a Syrian vampire, he was whisked away to the unfamiliar terrain of Syria, where he was reluctantly introduced to a royal vampire family.

In his formative years, Josiah immersed himself in the pursuit of knowledge, studying languages and literature, and clandestinely devising intricate plans for the royal family that held him captive. However, the flame of his ambition was extinguished when the longing to find his birth parents, a desire he had harbored since adolescence, was abruptly silenced.

Growing up as an oppressed and envious teenager, Josiah transformed into a bitter young adult, seeking refuge in the intellectual haven of Europe—specifically England—during the mid-1840s. University life exposed him to capitalist and economist ideologies, molding his worldview as he delved into the intricacies of societal structures.

His journey into the nocturnal realm began with a sinister twist, as his first taste of blood was drawn from one of his professors. A predator in the shadows, he continued his nocturnal pursuits without ever being exposed. As the decades unfolded, he evolved with the changing times, returning to Somalia in the 1970s with a desperate quest to reunite with his birth parents, only to be met with the harsh reality of their long-departed lives.

Returning to the United States, Josiah adapted to the ever-evolving social landscape of the 21st century, attempting to blend in with the trends and norms of the time while clinging to his deep-seated beliefs. His younger sister, a relentless force of change, compelled him to undergo a transformation – tattoos, piercings, a new hairdo, and a wardrobe overhaul – all in an attempt to assimilate into contemporary society. Yet, beneath the superficial alterations, Josiah longs for the simplicity of his original attire, appearing almost robotic in his detachment from the ever-changing fashions.

In the present day of 2023, Josiah finds himself in the forgotten hollow, a place that holds a singular purpose for him. With an enigmatic goal set firmly in his immortal mind, he navigates the delicate balance between adapting to the current era and preserving the essence of his timeless existence, forever haunted by the echoes of his past and the insatiable thirst for the unknown.

TRIVIA:

Fashionable Anachronism: Despite his sister's attempts to modernize his appearance, Josiah secretly hoards a collection of clothing from various eras, finding comfort in the timeless elegance of garments that reflect the epochs he has traversed.

Literary Pursuits: Josiah's love for languages and literature extends beyond his mortal life. He has amassed a private library filled with rare manuscripts, preserving the stories that have shaped his understanding of the world. One of his prized possessions is an ancient tome written in a language long forgotten by mortals.

Musical Tastes: While he outwardly adapts to the music of the modern era, Josiah secretly cherishes classical compositions from his youth. He has been known to haunt hidden concert halls, drawn to the haunting melodies that echo the melancholy of his immortal existence.

Hidden Talents: Josiah possesses a keen talent for calligraphy, a skill he developed during his youth while studying languages. He often spends the quiet hours of the night crafting intricate scripts and inscriptions, each stroke a testament to his centuries-long pursuit of perfection.

Artistic Reflections: In a concealed chamber of his dwelling, Josiah maintains a gallery of portraits capturing moments from his past. Each painting tells a silent tale of the people he has encountered and the cities he has watched evolve, providing a haunting backdrop to his eternal existence.

Nocturnal Philanthropy: Unbeknownst to the mortal world, Josiah channels his capitalist inclinations into philanthropic endeavors during the night. He discreetly funds projects that align with his vision of societal improvement, drawing from the wealth accumulated over centuries.

Unquenchable Thirst for Knowledge: Josiah is a perpetual student of the world, and he continually enrolls in university courses under various aliases. His insatiable thirst for knowledge spans disciplines, from cutting-edge technology to ancient philosophies, allowing him to seamlessly blend into different intellectual circles over the years.

Classical Arabic: Being born in Somalia and later taken to Syria, Josiah mastered Classical Arabic, delving into its rich literature and linguistic nuances.

Syriac: A language with historical significance in the region, Josiah became fluent in Syriac during his time in Syria, connecting with the ancient roots of the supernatural world.

Latin: As a young adult in Europe during the mid-1840s, Josiah immersed himself in the study of Latin, a language that granted him access to the scholarly and philosophical works of the time.

English: Moving to England for university, Josiah not only learned English but excelled in it. His linguistic proficiency allowed him to navigate the rapidly evolving social and intellectual landscape of 19th-century England.

French: Embracing the cultural diversity of Europe, Josiah added French to his repertoire, finding himself captivated by the elegance of the language and its literary treasures.

Somali: Despite his nomadic existence, Josiah retained a deep connection to his roots, maintaining fluency in Somali to honor his heritage and communicate with those from his homeland.

Italian: In his pursuit of art and culture, Josiah picked up Italian during the Renaissance, allowing him to appreciate the masterpieces of the era and connect with the intellectual elite.

Spanish: Venturing into the exploration of the New World, Josiah acquired fluency in Spanish, enabling him to engage with the diverse cultures and civilizations flourishing in the Americas.

German: With a keen interest in the economic and philosophical discourse of the time, Josiah became fluent in German, immersing himself in the works of influential thinkers from the German-speaking world.

Mandarin Chinese: Embracing the advancements of the 20th century, Josiah learned Mandarin Chinese, recognizing its growing importance on the global stage and adapting to the changing geopolitical landscape.

#ts4 #ts4 cas #ts4 screenshots #ts4 screenies #kristen's.sims #s: josiah #*coven of simblrs #he's dark academia coded.. very game of thrones #but his sister 😶 is like “get a fucking iphone we live in a society now” #he aspires to be a psychologist but who knows if he's set for that.. #he has a love-hate relationship with his “family”

[rockislandadultreads]

National Library Lovers Month: Nonfiction

The Library: A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree

Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes, or filled with bean bags and children's drawings--the history of the library is rich, varied, and stuffed full of incident. In The Library, historians Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen introduce us to the antiquarians and philanthropists who shaped the world's great collections, trace the rise and fall of literary tastes, and reveal the high crimes and misdemeanors committed in pursuit of rare manuscripts. In doing so, they reveal that while collections themselves are fragile, often falling into ruin within a few decades, the idea of the library has been remarkably resilient as each generation makes - and remakes - the institution anew. Beautifully written and deeply researched, The Library is essential reading for booklovers, collectors, and anyone who has ever gotten blissfully lost in the stacks.

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu by Joshua Hammer

In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that had fallen into obscurity. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the incredible story of how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist and historian from the legendary city of Timbuktu, later became one of the world’s greatest and most brazen smugglers.

In 2012, thousands of Al Qaeda militants from northwest Africa seized control of most of Mali, including Timbuktu. They imposed Sharia law, chopped off the hands of accused thieves, stoned to death unmarried couples, and threatened to destroy the great manuscripts. As the militants tightened their control over Timbuktu, Haidara organized a dangerous operation to sneak all 350,000 volumes out of the city to the safety of southern Mali.

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

On the morning of April 29, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. As the moments passed, the patrons and staff who had been cleared out of the building realized this was not the usual fire alarm. As one fireman recounted, “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’” The fire was disastrous: it reached 2000 degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library - and if so, who?

Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a mesmerizing and uniquely compelling book that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before.

Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles

Through the ages, libraries have not only accumulated and preserved but also shaped, inspired, and obliterated knowledge. Now they are in crisis. Former rare books librarian and Harvard metaLAB visionary Matthew Battles takes us from Boston to Baghdad, from classical scriptoria to medieval monasteries and on to the Information Age, to explore how libraries are built and how they are destroyed: from the scroll burnings in ancient China to the burning of libraries in Europe and Bosnia to the latest revolutionary upheavals of the digital age. A new afterword elucidates how knowledge is preserved amid the creative destruction of twenty-first-century technology.

#national library lovers month #libraries #books & libraries #nonfiction #nonfiction reads #nonfiction books #book recommendations #reading recommendations #book recs #reading recs #TBR pile #tbr #to read #booklr #book tumblr #library blog #book blog

[pittrarebooks]

“I started to wonder about the history of Latin”

This post was written by Natasha Skorupski, a Department of Classics Intern in Archives & Special Collections for the Spring of 2022.

During my internship with the Hillman library and the Classics Department of the University of Pittsburgh I worked in the Archives & Special Collections, looking over Latin manuscripts.  While looking through these I started to wonder about the history of Latin and how the spoken language fell yet the written word continued.  

 (Above)  Evangeliorum quattuor Codex Durmachensis or The Book of Durrow, Olten: Urs Graf; sole distributors in the United States: P.C. Duschnes, New York by  Arturus Aston Luce, 1960 facsimile.  Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System.

Due to that I have found out the following information.  Latin is thought to be derived from ancient Greek and Italic languages.  Italy used to be made up of many different tribes that spoke many different languages, and these languages are called Italic languages today.  The first evidence of Latin is an inscription on a cloak pin that was found from the sixth century BCE.  On the pin it says, “Manius me fhefhaked Numasioi” which translates to “Manius made me [this] for Numerius”.  The first literary records of Latin have been dated back to 250-100 BCE.  The popularity of Latin increased with the rise of Roman political power.  This spread was initially in Italy and then continued to most of Western Europe and parts of coastal Africa.

Latin has been classified into three groups. There is the written Latin, oratorical Latin (public speaking), and colloquial Latin (common speaking) (When Did Latin Die? and Why).  The later Latin saw the greatest variation in its use and continuous divergence from it eventually evolved into Vulgar Latin.  From Vulgar Latin we get the Romance Languages we know today, which include Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian.  

The beginning of the end of the western Roman empire occurred in 395 CE.  It fell for multiple reasons, some of them being military invasions, economic troubles, overreliance on enslaved labor, overexpansion and overspending of the military, political instability and corruption, among others (Andrews).  With this fall came the decline of colloquial and Vulgar Latin.  

There was a small period of resurrection for Latin under the “Roman Emperor” Charlemagne during 768-814AD. At this point in time, Latin was spoken, written, and read predominantly in religious settings as Italian, French and Spanish were rapidly evolving, allowing for a great decline of Latin (When Did Latin Die? and Why). During the mid-14th century, the Black Death Plague occurred.  It killed millions of people, including numerous scholars and professors, creating a negative ripple effect on the entire education system (When Did Latin Die? and Why).

During the 15th and 16th centuries, there was another slight resurgence as people started to read Latin literature from classical authors.  This was the time of the renaissance that spread mostly through Italy, France and later Britain.  With the greater developments in science, Latin terminology was put into place as a way to regulate findings and encourage international research (When Did Latin Die? and Why).

 (Above) Cosmographia Petri Apiani. Antwerp: Veneunt Antuerpiæ Gregorio Bontio sub Scuto Basiliensi .. by  P. & Gemma Apian, 1553. Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System.

Latin was seen as a status symbol at this point—you were seen as educated if you could read and write it.  Though it was no longer spoken, it was used predominantly in literature and religion. Until the 19th century, Latin was a requirement for all that attended college.  College was usually attended by white males of a privileged background (When Did Latin Die? and Why). However, this changed around the mid 1960s when the younger generation decided they also shared the right to higher education.  

Today very few people can read Latin, even fewer can write it, and almost no one speaks it.  However, it is one of the official languages of Vatican City and plays a vital role in Catholicism.  Latin words are all over Catholic scripture and there are many recited terms that come from it (Is Latin a Dead Language? Let's Explore Why?).  

(Above) Inni sacri, per tutto l’anno : à quattro voci pieni, da cantarsi con l’organo e senza ... : opera quarta by G. A Silvani, 1705.  Archives & Special Collections, University of Pittsburgh Library System.  

A fun fact, Pope Francis is the most influential Latin speaker today with about 40 million followers between his multiple accounts that vary in languages.  One of these accounts posts solely in Latin! With his bio stating “Tuus adventus in paginam publicam Papae Francisci breviloquentis optatissimus est” which roughly translates to “Your arrival to the public page of the Tweeting Pope Francis is most welcome” (Pope Francis).  

Latin words also dominate in modern science as names of medicine, drugs, diseases, body parts, and it is especially used in binomial nomenclature (the system for naming plants and animals). It is also greatly prevalent in the legal field.  Amicus curiae, habeas corpus, and ex post facto being just a few of the more common ones.  A fun fact is the jury comes from the Latin word “jurare” meaning “to swear” (Is Latin a Dead Language? Let's Explore Why?).

Latin is a dead language as it is no longer spoken. However it is not extinct, and still can be encountered more than most people in the world today would expect.

Works Cited 

Andrews, Evan. “8 Reasons Why Rome Fell.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 14 Jan. 2014, https://www.history.com/news/8-reasons-why-rome-fell.

“Is Latin a Dead Language? Let's Explore Why?” The Language Doctors, 14 Mar. 2022, https://thelanguagedoctors.org/is-latin-a-dead-language/.

Pope Francis. “Pope Francis Tweeter Account.” Twitter, Twitter, 23 Apr. 2022, https://twitter.com/pontifex_ln?lang=en.

“When Did Latin Die? and Why?” Global Language Services, Global Language Services Ltd, 3 Feb. 2022, https://www.globallanguageservices.co.uk/did-latin-die/.

#classics #latin #language #printedword #specialcollections

[hussanisoyat]

Exploring the Boundless Realm of Books: Navigating the World of Literature and Learning

In a world saturated with digital media and technological distractions, the timeless allure of books continues to captivate and inspire readers of all ages. From ancient manuscripts to contemporary bestsellers, literature offers a gateway to knowledge, imagination, and personal growth. In this article, we embark on a journey through the boundless realm of books, exploring the transformative power of literature and the profound impact it has on individuals and societies.

The Magic of Reading:

Unlocking Doors to Imagination and Empathy: At its core, reading is an act of discovery and exploration, transporting readers to distant lands, introducing them to intriguing characters, and immersing them in captivating narratives. Whether delving into the pages of a classic novel, exploring the realms of fantasy and science fiction, or uncovering the depths of historical accounts, readers embark on a journey of imagination and empathy. Through literature, readers gain insights into diverse cultures, perspectives, and lived experiences, fostering empathy, understanding, and compassion for others.

The Power of Knowledge:

Empowering Minds and Enriching Lives: Books serve as repositories of knowledge, wisdom, and human achievement, offering readers access to a wealth of information and ideas. From academic textbooks to literary classics, books cover a vast array of subjects and disciplines, empowering readers to expand their intellectual horizons and deepen their understanding of the world. Whether seeking to master a new skill, explore a scientific theory, or ponder life's existential questions, books provide the tools and resources for personal and professional growth.

Lifelong Learning:

A Journey of Intellectual Exploration and Self-Discovery: The pursuit of knowledge through reading is a journey that transcends the boundaries of formal education. It is a lifelong endeavour marked by intellectual exploration and self-discovery. Lifelong learners recognize books as invaluable companions in their quest for personal growth and enrichment. With each page turned individuals embark on a voyage of discovery, encountering new ideas, perspectives, and worlds. Engagement with books cultivates a thirst for learning that extends far beyond the confines of classrooms and lecture halls. Lifelong learners approach reading with curiosity and an insatiable appetite for knowledge. They embrace books as portals to new realms of understanding, where they can delve into diverse topics, challenge their assumptions, and expand their intellectual horizons. Moreover, reading fosters critical thinking skills essential for navigating the complexities of the world. Lifelong learners analyze and evaluate the information presented in books, discerning between fact and fiction, truth and opinion. Through this process, they develop a nuanced understanding of the world and cultivate the ability to think critically and independently.

Ultimately, lifelong learning through reading is a journey of self-discovery. As individuals engage with books that resonate with their interests and passions, they uncover new facets of themselves and their place in the world. Reading provides moments of introspection and reflection, allowing individuals to explore their values, beliefs, and aspirations. In this way, books become not only sources of knowledge but also companions on the journey of self-discovery and personal growth.

The Role of Literature in Society:

Shaping Culture, Identity, and Progress: Literature occupies a central place in society, serving as a mirror that reflects the collective experiences, values, and aspirations of humanity. It plays a vital role in shaping culture, identity, and societal progress, capturing the essence of the human condition and preserving cultural heritage for future generations. Through literature, societies transmit shared values and traditions, fostering a sense of continuity and belonging. Classic works of literature serve as touchstones of cultural identity, providing insight into the beliefs, customs, and struggles of past generations. By revisiting these timeless texts, individuals gain a deeper appreciation for their cultural heritage and the values that bind communities together. Moreover, literature has the power to challenge prevailing norms and conventions, sparking conversations and inspiring social change. Authors use their creative voices to shine a light on injustice, inequality, and oppression, giving voice to marginalized perspectives and fostering empathy and understanding. Books become catalysts for empathy and social transformation, encouraging readers to confront difficult truths and envision a more just and equitable society.

In today's rapidly changing world, literature continues to play a vital role in shaping the cultural landscape and driving progress. Contemporary authors explore pressing issues facing society, from climate change and globalization to social justice and human rights. Their works provoke thought, stimulate dialogue, and inspire action, contributing to the ongoing evolution of society and the quest for a better future for all.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, the boundless realm of books offers a gateway to knowledge, imagination, and personal growth. Through the magic of reading, individuals embark on journeys of discovery, empathy, and self-discovery, enriching their lives and expanding their horizons. By embracing literature as a lifelong pursuit, individuals and societies can harness the transformative power of books to navigate the complexities of the world, foster empathy and understanding, and inspire positive change for generations to come.

In the vibrant community of Uptown, schools play a pivotal role in fostering a love for literature and lifelong learning. With a commitment to excellence in education and a focus on holistic development, school in uptown provide students with the tools and resources needed to explore the world of literature and embark on their intellectual journeys. Through engaging curricula, passionate educators, and a supportive learning environment, these schools empower students to develop a deep appreciation for literature and its role in shaping culture, identity, and progress.

Moreover, school in uptown recognize the importance of instilling a lifelong love of reading in students from a young age. By integrating literature into various aspects of the curriculum and providing access to a diverse range of books and resources, these schools nurture a culture of literacy and intellectual curiosity. Through reading, students not only expand their knowledge and understanding of the world but also develop critical thinking skills, empathy, and a sense of empathy and understanding. As students graduate from school in uptown and embark on their journeys beyond the classroom, they carry with them a lifelong appreciation for literature and a commitment to intellectual exploration and self-discovery. Whether they pursue further education, enter the workforce, or become active members of their communities, they continue to draw inspiration from the world of books and literature, driving positive change and shaping the world around them for the better.

#school in uptown

[edisonblog]

Cao Zhi Composing Poetry - China - second half of the 17th century

The link: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/77025 - Due to rights restrictions, this image cannot be enlarged, viewed at full screen, or downloaded.

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Printed Image in China: From the 8th to the 21st Centuries," May 5–July 29, 2012.

This print depicts Cao Zhi (192–232), a renowned poet with a tragic life, as a fragile youth standing on the foreground stairs. Resented for his literary talent by his powerful elder brother, the large figure sitting at the table, he was ordered to compose a poem within the time span of seven steps or suffer capital punishment. The monumental landscape screen transforms the finely detailed terrace into a stagelike space in which the human drama plays out.

Bequeathed to British Library by Sir Hans Sloane (1660 - 1753), part of Sloane manuscript 5293. Transferred from the Library to the British Museum in 1906.

About - Cao Zhi (192-232 AD) was a Chinese poet of the Han Dynasty.

He was the third son of the famous military commander Cao Cao, a prominent figure in Chinese history and one of the main characters in the epic novel "The Romance of the Three Kingdoms". Cao Zhi is known for his literary skills, especially in composing poems.

Cao Zhi is recognized for his poetic skill, and his poems often express intense emotions, philosophical reflections, and observations of nature. His works are considered an important part of classical Chinese literature.

One of his most famous works is “Ode to the Splendid Peacock”. This poem is an expression of his emotions and feelings regarding the decline of the Han dynasty, and he compares the beauty of the peacock to the lost splendor of the dynasty.

Cao Zhi is known for his participation in the famous "Dispute for the Throne" (Xuanjuan zhi zheng), a legendary event in which the brothers Cao Zhi and Cao Pi, Cao Cao's eldest son, fought for the right to inherit the throne of their father. Cao Zhi is said to have presented a poem called "The Splendid Peacock" as part of his argument.

After his defeat in the Throne Contest, Cao Zhi was not executed by his brother, but his later life is less documented. He continued to write poetry and, after his death, his literary work was preserved and appreciated throughout the centuries.

Cao Zhi is remembered as one of the great poets of ancient China, and his contributions to classical Chinese poetry are still studied and appreciated. source: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/77025

#edisonmariotti @edisonblog

.br

Cao Zhi Compondo Poesia - China - segunda metade do século XVII

O link: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/77025 - Devido a restrições de direitos, esta imagem não pode ser ampliada, visualizada em tela inteira ou baixada.

Nova Iorque. O Museu Metropolitano de Arte. "A imagem impressa na China: do século 8 ao 21", 5 de maio a 29 de julho de 2012.

Esta gravura retrata Cao Zhi (192–232), um poeta renomado com uma vida trágica, como um jovem frágil parado na escada em primeiro plano. Ressentido por seu talento literário por seu poderoso irmão mais velho, a grande figura sentada à mesa, ele foi condenado a compor um poema no intervalo de sete passos ou sofreria a pena capital. A monumental tela paisagística transforma o terraço minuciosamente detalhado em um espaço semelhante a um palco no qual o drama humano se desenrola.

Legado à Biblioteca Britânica por Sir Hans Sloane (1660 - 1753), parte do manuscrito Sloane 5293. Transferido da Biblioteca para o Museu Britânico em 1906.

Sobre - Cao Zhi (192-232 DC) foi um poeta chinês da Dinastia Han.

Ele era o terceiro filho do famoso comandante militar Cao Cao, figura proeminente na história chinesa e um dos personagens principais do romance épico "O Romance dos Três Reinos". Cao Zhi é conhecido por suas habilidades literárias, especialmente na composição de poemas.

Cao Zhi é reconhecido por sua habilidade poética, e seus poemas muitas vezes expressam emoções intensas, reflexões filosóficas e observações da natureza. Suas obras são consideradas uma parte importante da literatura clássica chinesa.

Uma de suas obras mais famosas é “Ode ao Esplêndido Pavão”. Este poema é uma expressão de suas emoções e sentimentos em relação ao declínio da dinastia Han, e ele compara a beleza do pavão ao esplendor perdido da dinastia.

Cao Zhi é conhecido por sua participação na famosa "Disputa pelo Trono" (Xuanjuan zhi zheng), evento lendário em que os irmãos Cao Zhi e Cao Pi, filho mais velho de Cao Cao, lutaram pelo direito de herdar o trono de seus pai. Diz-se que Cao Zhi apresentou um poema chamado "O Esplêndido Pavão" como parte de seu argumento.

Após sua derrota na Disputa do Trono, Cao Zhi não foi executado por seu irmão, mas sua vida posterior está menos documentada. Continuou a escrever poesia e, após a sua morte, a sua obra literária foi preservada e apreciada ao longo dos séculos.

Cao Zhi é lembrado como um dos grandes poetas da China antiga, e suas contribuições para a poesia clássica chinesa ainda são estudadas e apreciadas. fonte: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/77025 ​

[travelguides-world]

10 Exquisite Destinations to Explore in Yokohama, Japan

When the allure of Japan beckons, travelers often find themselves enticed by the captivating blend of traditional charm and modern innovation. While Tokyo casts its shimmering skyscrapers and neon glow, a hidden gem awaits just a stone's throw away – Yokohama. Renowned for its maritime heritage, stunning landscapes, and cultural marvels, Yokohama offers an experience that seamlessly fuses history and modernity. Embark on a journey as we unveil the ten finest destinations that Yokohama has to offer.

Sankeien Garden: Where Time Stands Still

Step into a realm of serenity at Sankeien Garden, an oasis of tranquility that transports visitors to the elegance of the Edo period. Adorned with meticulously preserved historic buildings, lush flora, and meandering pathways, this haven of beauty radiates the essence of Japanese aesthetics.

Yamashita Park: A Waterfront Marvel

Behold the majestic panorama of Yokohama Bay at Yamashita Park, a verdant waterfront expanse that offers a respite from the urban bustle. As sea breezes gently embrace you, the iconic Hikawa Maru ship and the vibrant Marine Tower stand as silent witnesses to maritime history.

Landmark Tower: Ascending Beyond Borders

Elevate your experience at the Landmark Tower, an architectural triumph that pierces Yokohama's skyline. Gaze in wonder at the metropolis from the observation deck, or indulge in retail therapy at the sprawling shopping complex – all beneath one soaring roof.

Red Brick Warehouse: Fusion of Commerce and Culture

Immerse yourself in the allure of history at the Red Brick Warehouse, a duo of 20th-century edifices that now house a treasure trove of boutiques, dining establishments, and cultural events. This beguiling blend of past and present serves as a testament to Yokohama's transformation over the ages.

Yokohama Chinatown: A Gastronomic Odyssey

Embark on a culinary expedition through the vibrant Yokohama Chinatown, a lively district that tantalizes taste buds with an array of delectable Chinese cuisines. From intricate dim sum to fiery Szechuan delicacies, this culinary haven beckons gastronomes from near and far.

Hakkeijima Sea Paradise: Subaquatic Symphony

Dive into a world of aquatic marvels at Hakkeijima Sea Paradise, a marine-themed amusement park that merges entertainment and education. Discover the enigmatic dance of dolphins, the grace of jellyfish, and the vibrant colors of coral reefs – a celebration of oceanic wonders.

Mitsuike Park: Nature's Resplendence

Nature enthusiasts find solace at Mitsuike Park, a lush sanctuary boasting three mesmerizing ponds surrounded by diverse flora and fauna. Stroll along serene trails, listen to the symphony of birds, and witness the ever-changing canvas of seasonal hues.

Nogeyama Zoo: A Biodiverse Haven

Delve into the animal kingdom at Nogeyama Zoo, a compact yet comprehensive establishment that houses an assortment of creatures from around the globe. Encounter exotic species, including red pandas, capybaras, and rare avian wonders, fostering an appreciation for Earth's biodiversity.

Yokohama Museum of Art: A Cultural Voyage

Satisfy your cultural yearnings at the Yokohama Museum of Art, an architectural masterpiece that showcases an eclectic collection of Japanese and Western artistic treasures. Engage with avant-garde exhibitions, classic compositions, and thought-provoking installations.

Kanazawa Bunko: Bibliophile's Haven

For the literary connoisseur, Kanazawa Bunko stands as a testament to knowledge and heritage. This repository of ancient texts and manuscripts beckons intellectuals and curious minds alike, offering a glimpse into Japan's intellectual evolution.

In the heart of Yokohama's multifaceted tapestry, these 10 best places to visit in Yokohama Japan weave an enchanting narrative that showcases the city's rich history, cultural diversity, and contemporary allure. As you traverse these remarkable locales, each step whispers tales of a bygone era and whispers of a promising future, a harmonious symphony that defines Yokohama's unique essence.

#yokohama #japan #japantravelguide

[ivy-kissobryos]

Charon, the Lord of Death

According to Britannica:

In Etruscan mythology [Charon] was known as Charun and appeared as a death demon, armed with a hammer. Eventually he came to be regarded as the image of death and of the world below. As such he survives in Charos, or Charontas, the angel of death in modern Greek folklore.

This is further explored in Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion: a study in survivals by John Cuthbert Lawson. According to Lawson:

There is no ancient deity whose name is so frequently on the lips of the modern peasant as that of Charon. About Charos the peasants will always, according to my experience, converse freely. Neither superstitious awe nor fear of ridicule imposes any restraint. They feel perhaps that the existence of Charos is one of the stern facts which men must face; and even the more educated classes retain sometimes, I think, an instinctive fear of making light of his name, lest he should assert his reality. For Charos is Death. He is not now, what classical literature would have him to be, merely the ferryman of the Styx. He is the god of death and of the lower world.

Lawson then goes on to describe how the importance of Charos has been elevated, for ‘Hades is no longer a person but a place, the realm over which Charos rules’. The author then goes into details surrounding Charos’ family.

On his physical depiction:

Sometimes he is depicted as an old man, tall and spare, white of hair and harsh of feature; but more often he is a lusty warrior, with locks of raven-black or gleaming gold [...] ‘his glance is as lightning and his face as fire, his shoulders are like twin mountains and his head like a tower’. His raiment is usually black as befits the lord of death, but anon it is depicted bright as his sunlit hair, for though he brings death he is a god and glorious.

On his functions, Lawson states:

His functions are clearly defined. He visits this upper world to carry off those whose allotted time has run, and guards them in the lower world as in a prison whose keys they vainly essay to steal and to escape therefrom. But the spirit in which he performs those duties varies according as he is conceived to be a free agent responsible to none or merely a minister of the supreme God. Which of these is the true conception is a question to which the common-folk as a whole have given no final answer; and the character of Charos consequently depends upon the view locally preferred.

The depiction of Charos has also been influenced by Christianity.

Those who regard him as simply the servant and messenger of God, find no difficulty in accommodating him to his Christian surroundings; for, as I have said, the peasant does not distinguish between the Christian and the pagan elements in his faith which together make his polytheism so luxuriant. We have already seen Charos' name with the prefix of ‘saint’; and though this Christian title is not often accorded him, yet his name appears commonly on tomb-stones in Christian churchyards. At Leonidi, on the east coast of the Peloponnese, I noted the couplet: 'Me too Charos pitied not but took, even me the fondly-cherished flower of my home.'

So too in popular story and song he is represented as working in concord with the Angels and Archangels, to whom sometimes falls the task of carrying children to his realm-. Indeed one of the archangels, Michael, who as we saw above has ousted Hermes, the escorter of souls, and assumed his functions, is charged with exactly the same duties as Charos in the conveyance of men's souls to the nether world, so that in popular parlance the phrases ‘he is wrestling with Charos’ and 'he is struggling with an angel' are both alike used of a man in his death-agony.

The author goes on to describe how the Christianized conception of Charon has made him appear kinder, as evidenced by many folk tales where it is shown that:

‘The duties imposed upon him by the will of God are sometimes repugnant to him, and he would willingly spare those whom he is sent to slay’

Some folk tales are then described. Also:

‘Sometimes then the doomed man will seek to tempt Charos with meat and drink, that he may grant a few hours' delay, but against offers of hospitality he is obdurate. Or again his victim refuses to yield to death 'without weakness or sickness' and challenges him to a trial of athletic skill, in wrestling or leaping, whereon each shall stake his own soul. And to this Charos sometimes gives consent, for he knows that he will.

In contrast...

The other and more pagan conception of Charos excludes all traits of kindness and mercy; and men do not stint the expression of their hatred of him. He is 'black,' 'bitter,' 'hateful’. He is the merciless potentate of the nether world, independent of the God of heaven, equally powerful in his own domain, but more terrible, more inexorable: for his work is death and his abode is Hades. Thence he issues forth at will, as a hunter to the chase. ‘Against the wounds that Charos deals herbs avail not, physicians give no cure, nor saints protection’ [...] But most commonly he is the warrior preeminent in all manner of prowess—archer, wrestler, horseman.

Charos is sometimes depicted to be collecting souls to adorn his kingdom. Examples being:

[...] he gathers children from the earth to be the flowers of it and young men to be its tall slim cypresses; more rarely he is a vintager, and tramples men in his vat that their blood may be his red wine, or again he carries a sickle and reaps a human harvest.

It became evident that ‘Charos of modern Greece would seem to have little in common with the Charon of ancient Greece’. Fauriel believes that ‘the usual tendencies of tradition have been reversed, in that it is the name that has survived, while the attributes have been changed’. However, Lawson disagrees. He states that:

I suspect that in ancient times the literary presentation of Charon was far more circumscribed than the popular, and that out of a profusion of imaginative portraitures as varied as those seen in the folk-songs of to-day one aspect of Charon became accepted among educated men as the correct and fashionable presentment. Hades was, in literature, the despot of the lower world, and for Charon no place could be found save that of ferryman. But this, I think, was only one out of the many guises in which the ancient Charon was figured by popular imagination; for at the present day the remnants of such a conception are small, in spite of the fact that there has remained a custom which should have kept it alive—the custom of putting a coin in the mouth of the dead.

In Alcestis, a play written by Euripides, Death seemed to have taken on the role of Charon, to the point where ‘the copyist of one of the extant manuscripts of the Alcestis was so impressed with the likeness of Death to Charon as he knew him, that he altered the name of the dramatis persona accordingly’. The conception of Charon as a Lord of Death occurs even further back than that though.

On the Etruscan Charun:

Hesychius states that the title [greek word] was shared by two gods, Charon and Uranus. Charon therefore, as son of Acmon and brother of Uranus, is earlier by two long generations of gods than Zeus himself, and belongs to the old Pelasgian order of deities. Was Charon then the god of death among the old Pelasgian population of Greece, before ever the name of Hades or Pluto had been invented or imported? Yes, if the corroboration from another Pelasgian source, the Etruscans, is to count for anything. On an Etruscan monument figures the god of death with the inscription 'Charun'; and the same person is frequently depicted on urns, sarcophagi, and vases [...] In appearance he is most often an old bearded man (though a more youthful type is also known) bearing an axe or mallet, and more rarely a sword as well, wherewith he pursues men and slays them. In effect the Etruscan Charun closely corresponds with the modern Greek Charos in functions as well as in name.

In classical times the primitive conception of Charon was in abeyance. Hades had assumed the reins of government in the nether world; and a literary legend, which confined Charon to the work of ferryman, had gained vogue and supplanted or rather temporarily suppressed the older conception. But this version, it appears, never gained complete mastery of the popular imagination, and to the common-folk of Greece from the Pelasgian era down to this day Charon has ever been more warrior than ferryman, and his equipment an axe or sword or bow rather than a pair of sculls. More is to be learnt of the real Charon of antiquity from modern folk-lore than from all the allusions of classical literature.

#charondeity #charon #charun #charos #hellenic community #etruscan

[mckyjsn]

DOMINANT THEMES AND STYLES LITERATURE

SOUTH EAST ASIA

This area, which embraces the region south of China and east of India, includes the modern nations of Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, The Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. The earliest historical influence came from India around the beginnings of the Christian era. At a later period, Buddhism reached mainland Southeast Asia. Its influence was a major source of traditional literature in the Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia. Vietnam, under Chinese rule, was influenced by Chinese and Indian literature. Indonesia and Malaysia were influenced by Islam and its literature. All of the countries, except for Thailand, underwent a colonial experience and each of the countries reflects in its literature and in other aspects of its culture the influence of the colonizing power, including the language of that power. Education in the foreign language was to bring with it an introduction to a foreign literature and this, in turn, was to have considerable impact upon their modern forms of literary expression. One finds, then, all the well-known literary genres of Western literature, the novel, the short story, the play, and the essay. Poetry had been the most popular form of the traditional literature over the centuries but was rigid in form. However, through increased acquaintance with Western poetry, the poets of Southeast Asia broke the bonds of tradition and began to imitate various poetic types. A reading list of books is included.

EAST ASIA

Thinkers of the East is a collection of anecdotes and ‘parables in action’ illustrating the eminently practical and lucid approach of Eastern Dervish teachers.

Distilled from the teachings of more than one hundred sages in three continents, this material stresses the experimental rather than the theoretical – and it is that characteristic of Sufi study which provides its impact and vitality.

The emphasis of Thinkers of the East contrasts sharply with the Western concept of the East as a place of theory without practice, or thought without action. The book’s author, Idries Shah, says ‘Without direct experience of such teaching, or at least a direct recording of it, I cannot see how Eastern thought can ever be understood’.

SOUTH AND WEST ASIA

Chicana/o literature is justly acclaimed for the ways it voices opposition to the dominant Anglo culture, speaking for communities ignored by mainstream American media. Yet the world depicted in these texts is not solely inhabited by Anglos and Chicanos; as this groundbreaking new book shows, Asian characters are cast in peripheral but nonetheless pivotal roles.  

Southwest Asia investigates why key Chicana/o writers, including Américo Paredes, Rolando Hinojosa, Oscar Acosta, Miguel Méndez, and Virginia Grise, from the 1950s to the present day, have persistently referenced Asian people and places in the course of articulating their political ideas. Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue takes our conception of Chicana/o literature as a transnational movement in a new direction, showing that it is not only interested in North-South migrations within the Americas, but is also deeply engaged with East-West interactions across the Pacific.  He also raises serious concerns about how these texts invariably marginalize their Asian characters, suggesting that darker legacies of imperialism and exclusion might lurk beneath their utopian visions of a Chicana/o nation. 

 Southwest Asia provides a fresh take on the Chicana/o literary canon, analyzing how these writers have depicted everything from interracial romances to the wars Americans fought in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.  As it examines novels, plays, poems, and short stories, the book makes a compelling case that Chicana/o writers have long been at the forefront of theorizing U.S.–Asian relations. 

ANGLO -AMERICA AND EUROPE

ANGLO - AMERICA

The Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections has considerable holdings in Anglo-American literature from the 17th century onward, with notable strengths in the 18th century, Romanticism, and the Victorian and modern periods. Among the seventeenth-century holdings is a complete set of the Shakespeare folios, and works by John Milton and his contemporaries. Eighteenth-century highlights include near comprehensive printed collections of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, and substantial holdings on John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele, William Cowper, Fanny Burney, and others. Related materials include complete runs of periodicals, such as the Spectator and the Tatler.

EUROPE

The history of European literature and of each of its standard periods can be illuminated by comparative consideration of the different literary languages within Europe and of the relationship of European literature to world literature. The global history of literature from the ancient Near East to the present can be divided into five main, overlapping stages. European literature emerges from world literature before the birth of Europe—during antiquity, whose classical languages are the heirs to the complex heritage of the Old World. That legacy is later transmitted by Latin to the various vernaculars. The distinctiveness of this process lies in the gradual displacement of Latin by a system of intravernacular leadership dominated by the Romance languages. An additional unique feature is the global expansion of Western Europe’s languages and characteristic literary forms, especially the novel, beginning in the Renaissance.This expansion ultimately issues in the reintegration of European literature into world literature, in the creation of today’s global literary system. It is in these interrelated trajectories that the specificity of European literature is to be found. The ongoing relationship of European literature to other parts of the world emerges most clearly at the level not of theme or mimesis but of form. One conclusion is that literary history possesses a certain systematicity. Another is that language and literature are not only the products of major historical change but also its agents. Such claims, finally, depend on rejecting the opposition between the general and the specific, between synthetic and local knowledge.

Africa

African literature has origins dating back thousands of years to Ancient Egypt and hieroglyphs, or writing which uses pictures to represent words. These Ancient Egyptian beginnings led to Arabic poetry, which spread during the Arab conquest of Egypt in the seventh century C.E. and through Western Africa in the ninth century C.E. These African and Arabic cultures continued to blend with the European culture and literature to form a unique literary form.

Africa experienced several hardships in its long history which left an impact on the themes of its literature. One hardship which led to many others is that of colonization. Colonization is when people leave their country and settle in another land, often one which is already inhabited. The problem with colonization is when the incoming people exploit the indigenous people and the resources of the inhabited land.

Colonization led to slavery. Millions of African people were enslaved and brought to Western countries around the world from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. This spreading of African people, largely against their will, is called the African Diaspora.

Sub-Saharan Africa developed a written literature during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This development came as a result of missionaries coming to the area. The missionaries came to Africa to build churches and language schools in order to translate religious texts. This led to Africans writing in both European and indigenous languages.

Though African literature's history is as long as it is rich, most of the popular works have come out since 1950, especially the noteworthy Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Looking beyond the most recent works is necessary to understand the complete development of this collection of literature

LATIN AMERICA

Latin American literature consists of the oral and written literature of Latin America in several languages, particularly in Spanish, Portuguese, and the indigenous language of America as well as literature of the United States written in the Spanish language. It rose to particular prominence globally during the second half of the 20th century, largely due to the international success of the style known as magical realism. As such, the region's literature is often associated solely with this style, with the 20th Century literary movement known as Latin American Boom, and with its most famous exponent, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Latin American literature has a rich and complex tradition of literary production that dates back many centuries

Bocar, Mark Jason P.

Stem 11- St. Alypius

[eruiet]

WORLD’S LITERATURE

Southeast Asia

  From the point of view of its “classical” literatures, Southeast Asia can be divided into three major regions: (1) the Sanskrit region of Cambodia and Indonesia; (2) the region of Burma where Pali, a dialect related to Sanskrit, was used as a literary and religious language; and (3) the Chinese region of Vietnam. There are no examples of Chinese literature written in Vietnam while it was under Chinese rule (111 BC–AD 939); there are only scattered examples of Sanskrit inscriptions written in Cambodia and Indonesia; yet most of the literary works produced at the court of Pagan in Burma (flourished c. 1049–1300) have survived because the texts were copied and recopied by monks and students. But in the 14th–15th centuries, vernacular literatures suddenly emerged in Burma and Java, and a “national” literature appeared in Vietnam. The reasons behind the development of each were the same: a feeling of nationalistic pride at the final defeat of Kublai Khan’s invasions, the desire of the people to find solace in literature amidst change and struggles for power, and the lack of wealth and patronage to channel artistic expression into building temples and tombs. In Vietnam and Java literary activity centred on the courts; but in Burma the first writers were the monks and, later, the laymen educated in their monasteries. In the new Burmese kingdom of Ava (flourished after 1364), the Shan kings were proud of their Burmese Buddhist culture, and they appointed the new writers into royal service, with the result that courtiers became writers also. The Tai kings of Laos and Siam led their courts in learning Pali from the Mon, whom they had conquered, and Sanskrit from the Khmer, whom they harassed; nevertheless, seized with national pride and influenced by the Burmese example, they developed their own vernacular literature. But Cambodia itself declined. Although the monks in the Theravada Buddhist (i.e., the Southeast Asian form of Buddhism) monasteries produced a few works in Pali, no vernacular literature emerged until finally Khmer-speaking people (those living in the area comprised approximately of modern Cambodia) were borrowing many words from the Tai.For its vernacular literatures, Southeast Asia can be divided into (1) Burma; (2) Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia; (3) Vietnam; (4) Malaysia and Indonesia; and (5) the Philippines (which produced a vernacular literature only in the 20th century, after the imposed Spanish and English languages and literatures had made their impact).  

East Asia

     East Asia is the eastern region of Asia, which is defined in both geographical and ethno-cultural terms.The modern states of East Asia include China, Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan. The East Asian states of China, North Korea, South Korea and Taiwan are all unrecognized by at least one other East Asian state due to severe ongoing political tensions in the region, specifically the division of Korea and the political status of Taiwan. Hong Kong and Macau, two small coastal quasi-dependent territories located in the south of China, are officially highly autonomous but are under de jure Chinese sovereignty. North Asia borders East Asia’s north, Southeast Asia the south, South Asia the southwest and Central Asia the west. To the east is the Pacific Ocean and to the southeast is Micronesia (a Pacific Ocean island group, classified as part of Oceania). Countries such as Singapore and Vietnam are also considered a part of the East Asian cultural sphere due to its cultural, religious, and ethnic similarities. East Asia was one of the cradles of world civilisation, with China developing its first civilizations at about the same time as Egypt, Babylonia and India. China stood out as a leading civilization for thousands of years, building great cities and developing various technologies which were to be unmatched in the West until centuries later. The Han and Tang dynasties in particular are regarded as the golden ages of Chinese civilization, during which China was not only strong militarily, but also saw the arts and sciences flourish in Chinese society. It was also during these periods that China exported much of its culture to its neighbors, and till this day, one can notice Chinese influences in the traditional cultures of Vietnam, Korea and Japan. Korea and Japan had historically been under the Chinese cultural sphere of influence, adopting the Chinese script, and incorporating Chinese religion and philosophy into their traditional culture. Nevertheless, both cultures retain many distinctive elements which make them unique in their own right. East Asian Writers

South and West Asia

In the Hellenistic period literature and culture flourished in Western Asia. Traditional literary forms such as lists continued to be produced by the native population and were adapted by the new rulers. While there is little evidence for the creation of new narrative literature, which may in part be due to the fragmentary nature of our sources, existing epics, wisdom texts, and folktales were retold, rewritten, and transmitted. Greeks living in Western Asia created historiographical, ethnographical, and geographical works about their surroundings, inspiring in turn the Babylonian priest Berossus to write a reference work on Babylonia in Greek. Much as during the Persian Empire, political instability and changes in power led to a diverse and independent culture of writing. Continuity in all genres, writing systems, and languages remains the most important characteristic of Western Asian literature at least to the beginning of the Christian era. Artists of western Asia are heirs to the first civilizations known to man, and their landscape is rich with examples of art, from the first human-form statues to Islamic and modern art. In the twentieth century, artists borrowed elements from their respective ancient patrimonies in an effort to create a national and regional cultural identity. Several artists’ groups formed between the 1930s and ’60s adopted European artistic modes of expression to produce works inspired by their heritage and by a rapidly disappearing landscape victim to urban migration and industrialization. This trend was most evident in Iraq, Jordan, and, to a limited extent, Israel and the Arabian Peninsula. Each country had its unique stages of development characterizing its artistic production, forging a synthesis of ancient western Asian cultures and Western styles. This unique synthesis is represented in the work of the Baghdad Modern Art Group in Iraq, and the Jewish Bezalel school of the early 1920s in Jerusalem. Jewish artists, traumatized by the Holocaust, rejected their European roots and turned to “Canaanite” myths and symbols in their quest for a national Hebrew identity. At the dawn of the twentieth century, life in many villages of western Asia had much in common with ancient life. Intrigued by this reflection of their heritage, artists depicted idyllic scenes of village life in areas such as the marshes of southern Iraq, a region ravaged in the 1980s when Saddam Hussein’s regime drained the wetlands and relocated the inhabitants.

Anglo-America and Europe

The Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections has considerable holdings in Anglo-American literature from the 17th century onward, with notable strengths in the 18th century, Romanticism, and the Victorian and modern periods. Among the seventeenth-century holdings is a complete set of the Shakespeare folios, and works by John Milton and his contemporaries. Eighteenth-century highlights include near comprehensive printed collections of Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, and substantial holdings on John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele, William Cowper, Fanny Burney, and others. Related materials include complete runs of periodicals, such as the Spectator and the Tatler. The history and literature of Continental Europe has been a specialty of the Newberry since its beginning, but like many other such broad fields, there are particular areas of great strength and others that are less well developed.In general, materials concerning Central and Western Europe from the fourteenth century to the end of the Napoleonic era are in scope for the library. Italy, France, and Germany are best represented. The Spanish and Portuguese collections tend to emphasize the imperial experiences of those countries but include major literary works, religious history, and pamphlets in abundance. There are significant but less extensive collections for Switzerland, Austria, the Low Countries, and some other areas. Literature and cultural history are strongest, including politics, theology, Romance and Germanic philology, education, and the classics. Philosophy, fine arts, architecture, law, and the natural sciences are more unevenly included, though the library owns many important individual works in these fields.In recent years, we have added only original sources in their original form, reference guides, bibliographies, textual editions, and a select number of monographs. The retrospective collections are also strong in monographs and scholarly periodicals. The Newberry does not systematically acquire new monographs or microform sets for European history and literature.

Africa

African literature, the body of traditional oral and written literatures in Afro-Asiatic and African languages together with works written by Africans in European languages. Traditional written literature, which is limited to a smaller geographic area than is oral literature, is most characteristic of those sub-Saharan cultures that have participated in the cultures of the Mediterranean. In particular, there are written literatures in both Hausa and Arabic, created by the scholars of what is now northern Nigeria, and the Somali people have produced a traditional written literature. There are also works written in Geʿez (Ethiopic) and Amharic, two of the languages of Ethiopia, which is the one part of Africa where Christianity has been practiced long enough to be considered traditional. Works written in European languages date primarily from the 20th century onward. The literature of South Africa in English and Afrikaans is also covered in a separate article, South African literature. See also African theatre. The relationship between oral and written traditions and in particular between oral and modern written literatures is one of great complexity and not a matter of simple evolution. Modern African literatures were born in the educational systems imposed by colonialism, with models drawn from Europe rather than existing African traditions. But the African oral traditions exerted their own influence on these literatures.

New books by African writers you should read

Latin America

Latin American literature consists of the oral and written literature of Latin America in several languages, particularly in Spanish, Portuguese, and the indigenous languages of the Americas as well as literature of the United States written in the Spanish language. It rose to particular prominence globally during the second half of the 20th century, largely due to the international success of the style known as magical realism. As such, the region's literature is often associated solely with this style, with the 20th Century literary movement known as Latin American Boom, and with its most famous exponent, Gabriel García Márquez. Latin American literature has a rich and complex tradition of literary production that dates back many centuries. The Latino community has always excelled in its contributions to different academic fields, including the arts! When it comes to literature, there’s no exception. Some Latin American authors, whether they be poets, novelists or essayists, have influenced the world of writing with their creativity and originality.Since 1940, when Latin American literature has become an important reference in universal literature. Nowadays it continues to grow thanks to its various movements such as realism, antinovel and magical realism.Literature is an important part of Hispanic culture. Therefore, it is important to remember great figures of literature who, thanks to their creativity and originality in their writings, have achieved worldwide recognition and admiration. Listed below are some of the big names that have revolutionized Latin American literature:

by: Dominic Christian P. Cariaga

[theladyinthegraveyard]

            THE TRUE ORIGIN OF COUNT DRACULA

 Dracula. The most famous vampire in history, created by the pen of Bram Stoker. Did he got inspired simply from Vlad Tepes, prince of Valachia, or are there any other figures who inspired him? The vampire figure has always been in the collective imagination and these creatures were born much earlier, and in some ancient civilizations there are already traces. In 1800, for example, there was a belief in Greece that all people with red hair could feed on blood.The cradle of vampires is Romania and it has always been believed that Dracula was modeled on the figure of Count Vlad, called "The Impaler", a member of the order of the Dragon, an order created to protect Christianity in Eastern Europe, in a time when the Turks was the most powerful empire in the world. he was ruthless and brutal and his reputation spread across Europe. Initially the novel was not titled "Dracula" but the original manuscript was simply titled "the undead" and the protagonist was called Count Vampyr.

This may mean that at first the writer had not directly connected him to Count Vlad. In 1998 Elizabeth Millard, a literary scholar, published an essay in which she supported the thesis that in reality Stoker did not have great knowledge on the figure of the notorious Romanian count, he certainly knew its history, but not so well. In 2010, Bob Carran, professor of Celtic history and mythology, publishes an interesting article that answers the question of who was inspired by Stoker for his vampire. Being the writer an Irishman, he may have been inspired by the legend of Abhartach, a fifth-century Irish chief known for his habits of feeding on the blood of his enemies and subjects.

In the 17th century, Geoffrey Keating translated a legend rooted in Celtic mythology. In his work "History of Ireland" he talks about a real historical figure: Abertach. He was a warlord, governor of a small kingdom. He was much feared by the local population as he was believed to have magical powers. Fear led the population to seek help from a chief of a nearby kingdom, Katayn, and that if he were able to kill him, the rival's kingdom would end up in his hands.

He succeeded, killed him and buried him in an upright position as was the custom. But during the night Abertach emerged from his grave, recovered his strength by feeding on the blood of one of his subjects and began the hunt for his assassin. Katayn killed him a second time, but Abertach continued to rise from his grave. Katayn asked for help from a shaman who told him that his rival was an "undead" and that to defeat him he had to bury him upside down and stick a wooden stake in his heart. Following the advice, Abertach was finally defeated.

The Celtic word "dreach - fhuola" means "corrupt blood" and it is believed that it is from this word that Stoker called Dracula its protagonist. When Bram Stoker was researching one of his biggest influences was a woman born in a healthy family in the Lanarkshire town of Airdrie, her name was Emily Gerard and she wrote books about Transylvanian folklore titled “ The land beyond the forest”. Those books introduced to Stoker the concept of the “nosferatu”, a vampire creature. She wrote the books after spending 2 years in Romania with her husband, who was there as an officer in the Austro – Hungarian army.

I agree that for sure Stoker has been inspired by several different sources since Ireland mythology is vast and has many tales and legends. I have always been really interested in the figure of the vampire. it’s something ancient, almost “ primordial”, and in my opinion, it’s the most famous horror creature in literature. The classic and the modern one. I read Dracula for the first time when I was 11 years old and it has been a life changing book. It was not just an horror novel but much more. It marked the beginning of my passion / obsession for Gothic and Horror Literature and it’s something that accompanies me to these days. I never get tired to study the book and the new literary discoveries about it.

Photo: a photo portrait of Bram Stoker. 

#bram stoker

[lostprofile]

KAISER MAXIMILIAN I

THE TWELFTH OF JANUARY 2019 was the 500th snniversary of the death of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilan I (1457/1519).

The son of Emperor Frederick III assumed the imperial throne in 1493, but never went to Rome to be crowned. He was married three times, all advantageously. His first wife, Mary of Burgundy, was the richest woman in Europe and her massive dowry included the manuscript collection of the Dukes of Burgundy. Maximilian never met his second wife, Anne de Bretagne, who was forced to repudiate him and marry his archenemy, Charles VIII (upon the death of Charles, Anne married Louis XII, making her the only woman to be Queen of France twice). Maximilian abandoned his third wife, the wealthy, yet vapid, Bianca Maria Sforza, through whom gained suzerainty over Milan. Upon her death, he renounced women as part of a program of religious austerity.

Throughout his reign, and despite the wealth of his wives, Maximilian lacked the financial means to fund his many wars and projects and resorted to loans from German bankers. Some of the loans were put to questionable use: one million gulden were borrowed from the Fugger bank for the purposes of bribing the German electors to secure the election of Maximilian’s grandson, Charles V, as the next emperor. At the time of his death, Maximilian owed German banks over 6 million gulden—the quivalent of 10 years of the annual revenues from the Hapsburg lands. These debts were not paid off until the end of the 16th century.

The notable areas of Maximilian’s artistic patronage were portraits, prints, and armor. Portraiture occupied a central role in the dissemination of official ideology in the early modern period. Maximilian’s court artist, Bernhard Strigel turned out dozens of portraits illustrating the various virtues and capacities of the emperor. Imperial patronage of Albrecht Dürer, Joos van Cleve and Giovanni Antonio di Predis reflected the artistic diversity of the far-flung Hapsburg dominions.

Throughout his early life, Maximilian closely identified with the culture of chivalry. This interest in knights in shining armor and tournements was probably greatly enriched by his 8-year sojourn in the Burgundian lands. Lucas Cranach the Elder portrayed Maximilian in the guise of Saint George, his hero as a youth, displaying his bravery and plumage, while rescuing the lady in distress. The emperor was also the author of Weißkunig (1506) and Theuerdank (1517), thinly-disguised autobiographical accounts of his early reign cast as chivalric romances. The printed books were illustrated with woodcuts by Hand Burgkmair and set in a stylish, blackletter typeface designed by Vinzenz Rockner. Maximilian circulated copies of these works to his allies and vassals as a means of controlling his public image.

The love of chivalry is most evident in the collection of suits of armor commissioned by Maximilian. Working closely with their patron throughout the design process, master armoirers turned out spectcular steel visions of knightly grace and strength. The style of armor favored by the emperor featured fluting, pleating, bird’s beak visors and other sculptural manipulations, with allusions to contemporary clothing. This stylem, which differed from the superficial engraving and gilding of the Milanese style, is known today as Maximilian armour.

As the nominal descendant of the western Roman emperors, Maximilian alluded to the ancient Romans in his arts patronage. The assertions of continuity with classical antiquity were often made using the most modern technologies available at the time. Die Triumphzug, an ambitious project depicting Maximilian celebrating a Roman triumph, was executed entirely in the new medium of print.

The artists including Hans Burgkmair, Dürer, and Dürer’s student, Albrecht Altdorfer, provided drawings of the various components of a Roman triumph, including a triumphal arch and chariot, which were transferred to woodblocks. The triumphal arch, by Dürer and his students, is composed of 195 woodcut images printed on 36 large sheets of paper. The triumpal procession, largely by Burgkmair, commemorates the expansion of Hapsburg territory under Maximilian. In all, 136 blocks were required to create an image 177 m long. Maximilian intended to send printed sets of these images to German princes, electors, and bishops, who were expcted to assemble and display the vast, composite images in palaces and public buildings. At the time of his death, the Triumphzug was unfinished. A truncated version was published in 1526. Several early copies were hand-colored.

Maximilian’s use of the new print technologies for his literary and artistic projects has often been described as a low budget choice forced by necessity on a financially-strapped ruler. While it is certain that Maximilian would have chosen more expensive and prestigious materials for some of his commissions (as evidenced by the Golden Roof in Innsbück), his choice of woodcut prints had an ideological value. By promoting a medium in which German artists excelled, he demonstrated the advanced cultural achievements of his Empire and the flourishing of the arts guided by his innovative patronage.

#holy roman empire #maximilian i #woodcut #albrecht dürer #german art - 16thc. #mary of burgundy #anne de bretagne #charles viii #charles v #hapsburg

[thelonguepuree]

Dickinson’s “items” have been successively and carefully framed to give the impression that something, or someone, is missing. While the recovery of Dickinson’s manuscripts may be supposed to have depended on the death of the subject, on the person who had, by accident or design, composed the scene, the repeated belated “discovery” that her work is yet in need of sorting (and of reading) may also depend upon the absence of the objects that composed it. These objects themselves mark not only the absence of the person who touched them but the presence of what touched that person: of the stationer that made the paper, of the manufacturer and printer and corporation that issued guarantees and advertisements and of the money that changed hands, of the butcher who wrapped the parcel, of the manuals and primers and copybooks that composed individual literacy, of the expanding postal service, of the modern railroad, of modern journalism, of the nineteenth-century taste for continental literary imports. All of these things are the sorts of things left out of a book, since the stories to be told about them open out away from [a] narrative of individual creation or individual reception … This is to say that what is so often said of the grammatical and rhetorical structure of Dickinson’s poems—that, as critics have variously put it, the poetry is “sceneless,” is “a set of riddles” revolving around an “omitted center,” is a poetry of “revoked . . . referentiality”—can more aptly be said of the representation of the poems as such. Once gathered as the previously ungathered, reclaimed as the abandoned, given the recognition they so long awaited, the poems in bound volumes appear both redeemed and revoked from their scenes or referents, from the history that the book, as book, omits. … The argument of Dickinson’s Misery is that the century and a half that spans the circulation of Dickinson’s work as poetry chronicles rather exactly the emergence of the lyric genre as a modern mode of literary interpretation. To put briefly what I will unfold at length in the pages that follow: from the mid-nineteenth through the beginning of the twenty-first century, to be lyric is to be read as lyric—and to be read as a lyric is to be printed and framed as a lyric. While it is beyond the scope of this book to trace the lyricization of poetry that began in the eighteenth century, the exemplary story of the composition, recovery, and publication of Dickinson’s writing begins one chapter, at least, in what is so far a largely unwritten history. As we have already begun to see, Dickinson’s enduring role in that history depends on the ephemeral quality of the texts she left behind. By a modern lyric logic that will become familiar in the pages that follow, the (only) apparently contextless or sceneless, even evanescent nature of Dickinson’s writing attracted an increasingly professionalized attempt to secure and contextualize it as a certain kind (or genre) of literature—as what we might call, after Charles Taylor, a lyric social imaginary. Think of the modern imaginary construction of the lyric as what allows the term to move from adjectival to nominal status and back again. Whereas other poetic genres (epic, poems on affairs of state, georgic, pastoral, verse epistle, epitaph, elegy, satire) may remain embedded in specific historical occasions or narratives, and thus depend upon some description of those occasions and narratives for their interpretation (it is hard to understand “The Dunciad,” for example, if one does not know the characters involved or have access to lots of handy footnotes), the poetry that comes to be understood as lyric after the eighteenth century is thought to require as its context only the occasion of its reading. This is not to say that there were not ancient Greek and Roman, Anglo-Saxon, medieval, Provençal, Renaissance, metaphysical, Colonial, Republican, Augustan—even romantic and modern!—lyrics. It is simply to propose that the riddles, papyrae, epigrams, songs, sonnets, blasons, Lieder, elegies, dialogues, conceits, ballads, hymns and odes considered lyrical in the Western tradition before the early nineteenth century were lyric in a very different sense than was or will be the poetry that the mediating hands of editors, reviewers, critics, teachers, and poets have rendered as lyric in the last century and a half. As my syntax indicates, that shift in genre definition is primarily a shift in temporality; as variously mimetic poetic subgenres collapsed into the expressive romantic lyric of the nineteenth century, the various modes of poetic circulation—scrolls, manuscript books, song cycles, miscellanies, broadsides, hornbooks, libretti, quartos, chapbooks, recitation manuals, annuals, gift books, newspapers, anthologies—tended to disappear behind an idealized scene of reading progressively identified with an idealized moment of expression. While other modes—dramatic genres, the essay, the novel—may have been seen to be historically contingent, the lyric emerged as the one genre indisputably literary and independent of social contingency, perhaps not intended for public reading at all. By the early nineteenth century, poetry had never before been so dependent on the mediating hands of the editors and reviewers who managed the print public sphere, yet in this period an idea of the lyric as ideally unmediated by those hands or those readers began to emerge and is still very much with us. Susan Stewart has dubbed the late eighteenth century’s highly mediated manufacture of the illusion of unmediated genres a case of “distressed genres,” or “new antiques.” Her terms allude to modern print culture’s attempts “to author a context as well as an artifact,” and thus to imitate older forms—such as the epic, the fable, the proverb, the ballad—while creating the impression that our access to those forms is as immediate as it was in the imaginary modern versions of oral and collective culture to which those forms originally belonged. Stewart does not include the lyric as a “distressed genre,” but her suggestion that old genres were made in new ways could be extended to include the idea that the lyric is— or was—a genre in the first place. As Gérard Genette has argued, “the relatively recent theory of the ‘three major genres’ not only lays claim to ancientness, and thus to an appearance or presumption of being eternal and therefore self-evident,” but is itself the effect of “projecting onto the founding text of classical poetics a fundamental tenet of ‘modern’ poetics (which actually . . . means romantic poetics).” Yet even if the lyric (especially in its broadly defined difference from narrative and drama) is a larger version of the new antique, a retroprojection of modernity, a new concept artificially treated to appear old, the fact that it is a figment of modern poetics does not prevent it from becoming a creature of modern poetry. The interesting part of the story lies in the twists and turns of the plot through which the lyric imaginary takes historical form. But what plot is that? My argument here is that the lyric takes form through the development of reading practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that become the practice of literary criticism. As Mark Jeffreys eloquently describes the process I am calling lyricization, “lyric did not conquer poetry: poetry was reduced to lyric. Lyric became the dominant form of poetry only as poetry’s authority was reduced to the cramped margins of culture.” This is to say that the notion of lyric enlarged in direct proportion to the diminution of the varieties of poetry—or at least that became the ratio as the idea of the lyric was itself produced by a critical culture that imagined itself on the definitive margins of culture. Thus by the early twenty-first century it became possible for Mary Poovey to describe “the lyricization of literary criticism” as the dependence of all postromantic professional literary reading on “the genre of the romantic lyric.” The conceptual problem is that if the lyric is the creation of print and critical mediation, and if that creation then produces the very versions of interpretive mediation that in turn produce it, any attempt to trace the historical situation of the lyric will end in tautology. Or that might be the critical predicament if the retrospective definition and inflation of the lyric were either as historically linear or as hermeneutically circular as much recent criticism, whether historicist or formalist, would lead us to believe. What has been left out of most thinking about the process of lyricization is that it is an uneven series of negotiations of many different forms of circulation and address. To take one prominent example, the preface to Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) describes the “ancient foliums in the Editor’s possession,” claims to have subjected the excerpts from these manuscripts to the judgment of “several learned and ingenious friends” as well as to the approval of “the author of The Rambler and the late Mr. Shenstone,” and concludes that “the names of so many men of learning and character the Editor hopes will serve as amulet, to guard him from every unfavourable censure for having bestowed any attention on a parcel of Old Ballads.” Not only does Percy not claim that historical genres of verse are directly addressed to contemporary readers (and each of his “relics” is prefaced by a historical sketch and description of its manuscript context in order to emphasize the excerpt’s distance from the reader), but he also acknowledges the role of the critical climate to which the poems in his edition were addressed. Yet by 1833, John Stuart Mill, in what has become the most influentially misread essay in the history of Anglo-American poetics, could write that “the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself, in moments of solitude.” As Anne Janowitz has written, “in Mill’s theory . . . the social setting is benignly severed from poetic intentions.” What happened between 1765 and 1833 was not that editors and printers and critics lost influence over how poetry was presented to the public; on the contrary, as Matthew Rowlinson has remarked, in the nineteenth century “lyric appears as a genre newly totalized in print.” And it is also not true that the social setting of the lyric is less important in the nineteenth than it was in the eighteenth century. On the contrary, because of the explosion of popular print, by the early nineteenth century in England, as Stuart Curran has put it, “the most eccentric feature of [the] entire culture [was] that it was simply mad for poetry”—and as Janowitz has trenchantly argued, such madness extended from the public poetry of the eighteenth century through an enormously popular range of individualist, socialist, and variously political and personal poems. In nineteenth-century U.S. culture, the circulation of many poetic genres in newspapers and the popular press and the crucial significance of political and public poetry to the culture as a whole is yet to be appreciated in later criticism (or, if it is, it is likely to be given as the reason that so little enduring poetry was produced in the United States in the nineteenth century, with the routine exception of Whitman and Dickinson, who are also routinely mischaracterized as unrecognized by their own century). At the risk of making a long story short, it is fair to say that the progressive idealization of what was a much livelier, more explicitly mediated, historically contingent and public context for many varieties of poetry had culminated by the middle of the twentieth century (around the time Dickinson began to be published in “complete” editions) in an idea of the lyric as temporally self-present or unmediated. This is the idea aptly expressed in the first edition of Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry in 1938: “classifications such as ‘lyrics of meditation,’ and ‘religious lyrics,’ and ‘poems of patriotism,’ or ‘the sonnet,’ ‘the Ode,’ ‘the song,’ etc.” are, according to the editors, “arbitrary and irrational classifications” that should give way to a present-tense presentation of “poetry as a thing in itself worthy of study.” Not accidentally, as we shall see, the shift in definition accompanied the migration of lyric from the popular press to the classroom—but for now we should note that by the time that Emily Dickinson’s poetry became available in scholarly editions and university anthologies, the history of various genres of poetry was read as simply lyric, and lyrics were read as poems one could understand without reference to that history or those genres.

Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005)

#virginia jackson #dickinson's misery #emily dickinson #lyric poetry #lyric theory #literary history #literary genre #literary criticism

[majingojira]

Monsters of the 20th Century

I had this odd notion.  A (brief) analysis of the origin of various supernatural creatures, as I wondered what ‘new’ monsters/supernatural beings had been created in the 20th century (roughly).   I’ve completed some of the research, and I’d like to share it with you all.  I’m also gonna tag @tyrantisterror because he is one of the more knowledgable people about monsters I know about on tumblr and I’m sure he can correct me a bunch in this!

1. Frankenstein - 1817 - The oldest literary monster and outgrowth of the concept of the Homunculus and Golem as an artificial being.  So pervasive is its reach, western ideas of Tulpa are tainted by it (every time you read about a tulpa ‘going out of control’, that is the influence of Frankenstein). 

2. Dinosaurs - The Dragons of the age of science entered pop culture in 1854 at the latest with the opening of the Crystal Palace Park.  Other prehistoric animals had captured people’s imagination before, and they didn’t start to enter fiction until 1864 (”Journey to the Center of the Earth”) and a short story by C. J. Cutliffe Hyne had an ancient crocodilian in his story “The Lizard” (1898).  Ann early Lost World style adventure, “A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder” by James De Mille in 1888 has the first true dinosaurs in them.  There, Antarctica has a warm spot where prehistoric monsters and a death cult lurk.  In 1901, Frank Mackenzie Savile’s “Beyond the Great South Wall” had a Carnivorous Brontosaurs worshiped by Mayan remnants.  “Panic in Paris” by Jules Lermina had dinosaurs attack a city, but it was published first in France so few saw it.  Finally, we have Conan Doyle in 1912 with “The Lost World” which solidified dinosaurs as a thing in fiction. 

3. The Evolved Man/Mutants - After “The Origin of Species” is published, it wasn’t long until Evolved Men or Mutants started showing up in fiction. “The Coming Race” and (1871), “The Great Romance” (1881).   They are generally big-headed and often have ESP of some sort.  In “Media: A Tale of the Future” (1891), they can control electricity too. It wasn’t until 1928 (”The Metal Man” by Jack Williamson) that Radiation was thrown in as a cause for Mutation.  Cosmic Rays would follow in “The Man Who Evolved” by Edmond Hamilton (1931).  After that, we have “Gladiator” by Philip Gordon Wylie (1930) where we have an engineered “Evolved Man”, and “Odd John” by Olaf Stapeldon which grants us the term “Homo superior” followed by “Slan” by A.E. van Vogt which has Evolved Humans as a persecuted minority.   And with that, everything that makes the X-Men what they are is collected.

3. Man-Eating Tree - First reported in 1874, the idea of man-eating plants grew since then to encompase many monsters, but started as Folklore about ‘Darkest Africa” (Madagascar) in the New York World.  They’d print anything back then.

4. Hyde - While it is tempting to link him to Freudian Psychology, Freud did not publish his work regarding things like the Id until much later (he didn’t even coin “Psychoanalysis” until 1896).  What is springs from, I currently cannot say without more research. 

4. Robot - Though there were automata since the days of the Greeks (Talos), the first Robot in modern fiction is from “The Future Eve” by Auguste Villiers de I’lsle Adam (1886).  THough the term Robot is not invented until 1920 with “Rossum’s Universal Robots.”  They definitely offshoot from Frankenstein, but with a more mechanical bent.  

5. The Grey Alien - The modern idea of an Alien has it’s first antecedents in the 1800s.  Specifically with the essay “Man of the Year 1,000,000″ by H. G. Wells (1892-1893). He speculates what humans will evolve into, and basically invites the Gray by accident.  It wouldn’t achieve it’s alien attachments until much later.

6. Morlocks - With the Evolved Man, there is also the ‘Devolved Man’.  That is what the Morlocks are. They are, as the name implies, tied to Well’s “The Time Machine” (1895), and the word has become a catch-all for subterranean monster-men, be they Mole People, CHUDs, or straight up Demons (’GvsE’). 

7. The Martians & Their War Machines - The First Alien Invader, and the first Mecha can be traced to “War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells, 1897.  Not much more to say as far as I’m aware.

8. The Mummy - The 1800s saw an Egyptian craze in England, leading to some really nasty habits (google “Mummy Powder” if you need ipecac).  1827 saw “The Mummy!: Or, a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century” which is more a bit of futurism with an ancient protagonist.  Though “Lost in the Pyramid” (1868) by Louisa May Alcott predates it, it is overshadowed by Conan Doyle’s horror story “Lot No. 249″ (1892) which has the classically animated mummy going out and killing people under control of another.  The former is a “Curse” story rather than a monster.

9. Cordyceps - Everyone these days knows the Cordyceps fungus as a great source for making zombies, and I’m lumping that fungus in with these other monsters because, well, fungus’ that take over humans is a monster of the 20th century.  Best known for Toho’s film adaptation “Matango” (1963), it is inspired by a short story from 1907 by William Hope Hodgson called “The Voice in the Night”.  There, the poor victim doesn’t realize they’ve completely become a fungus monster, acting as a warning for those near the island.    

10. Aerofauna - Conan Doyle strikes again with “The Horror of the Heights” (1912).  A pretty tight little horror story of a whole ecosystem high above our heads in the clouds.  Many a sky tentacle owes its existence to this one.

11. Lich - Possibly derived from Kosechi the Deathless of Russian folklore, the idea of undead sorcerers became a staple of the works of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and Clark Ashton Smyth, dating back to 1929.  Though Gary Gigax coined the idea together for D&D and based it on Gardner Fox’s “The Sword of the Sorcerer (1969)

12. Bigfoot and The Loch Ness Monster - I lump these cryptids together, because (thanks to a ton of research by Daren Naish, Daniel Loxton,  Donald R. Prothero, and others) we can trace them back to the same source: King Kong (1933).  The idea of prehistoric animals being out in the world in hidden places goes back to Conan Doyle’s “Lost World” (1912), but Kong made it widely popular.  And between the giant ape and the Brontosaurus attack (and the timing of sightings picking up), we can blame Kong for this.

13. The Great Old Ones - Lovecraft’s primary contribution to fiction first appear in “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) and expand upon from here.  As near as I can tell, he made a LOT of monsters.  These include “Ancient Aliens” & Shoggoths (1936 - “At the Mountains of Madness”), Gillmen (1931 - ”The Shadow over Innsmouth”), & The Colour Out of Space (1927).  14. The Thing - The Ultimate Shapeshifter.  It first appears in 1938′s “Who Goes There” by John W. Campbell, Jr.  Though Campbell's square-jawed heroes literally tear the Thing to bits, it reached its zenith of horror in adaptation.  I can think of no earlier shapeshifting humanoids of such variety at an earlier time, or of such fecundity. 

15. The Amazons - The Amazons do indeed come from Ancient Greece, but it was a way for the Greeks to rag on Women.  It wasn’t until later that women co-opted the image of the Amazons as a source of empowerment, and that was codified in 1942 with one character: Wonder Woman. She helped spark the Amazons further into the culture, or at least, Amazon women who have superpowers (as they did in those early stories).  From there, we get a more recent direct descendant that was part of the reason I started this list: Slayers from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

16. The Hobbit - Though ideas of ‘Wee Folk” are part of worldwide Folklore, Tolkien took them out of the realm of Faerie, and made them... idyllic middle-class Englishmen with his 1937 book of the same name.  With the Lord of the Rings following in 1954-1955.  His works also gave us other monsters and supernatural beings: Orcs, Ents, & Balrogs. 

17. Gremlins - An Evolution of the wee folk once again, this time adapted for the mechanical era and of a more malicious bent. It became slang in the 1920s, with the earliest print source being from 1929.   They were popularized by Roald Dahl in”The Gremlins” (1942).  Later they were used to vex Bugs Bunny (1943′s “Falling Hare”), and then they got their own movies in the 1980s.  The rest is history.  

18. Triffids - There are a LOT of fictional plants out there, and a lot of carnivorous ones, but the Triffids were the first to be extremely active in their pursuit of prey.  From 1952′s “Day of the Triffids” by John Wyndham, the story is a keen example of the ‘Cozy Apocalypse’ common in British Fiction, sort of like the whole ‘schoolboys on a desert island make well of it’ thing that “Lord of the Flies” railed against. This paved the way for everything from Audrey II to Biollante.

19. Kaiju - 1954.  You know what this is.  Between Primordial Gods and Modern Technology, the Kaiju are born.  The difference between a Kaiju and a Giant Monster is a complex nuanced one, sort of like what makes film noir. But, in general, if the story has Anti-War, Anti-Nationalist, and/or Anti-Corporate Greed leanings, it’s probably a Kaiju movie.  If not, then it probably isn’t.

20. The Body Snatchers - Another horror of 1954 from the novel “The Body Snatchers” (1955), which includes aspects that the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” did not.  Like that the Duplicates only last 5 years and basically exist to wipe out sentient beings with each planet they infest.  Clearly drawing from the idea of the Doppelganger, these Pod People have evolved into a new form.

21. The Blob - That 1958 movie has one catchy theme song.  The whole thing was inspired by an instance of “Star Jelly” in Pennsylvania, circa 1950.  It was tempting to shift this under the Shoggoth, but I think they are distinct enough.

22. Gargoyles - Longtime architectural embellishments, they did not become their own “Being” until 1971 with “The Living Gargoyle” published in Nightmare #6.  The TV Movie “Gargoyles” came soon after in 1972, firmly establishing the monster.  Though it was likely perfected in the TV Series “Gargoyles” (1994). 

23. D&D - From 1973 Through 1977, D&D was formulated and many of its key monsters were invented.  Partly as mechanics ways to screw with players and keep things lively.  This brought us Rust Monsters (1973), Mindflayer (1974), Beholder (1975), and the Gelatinous Cube (1977). 

24. The Xenomorph - Parasitoid breeding is applied to humans to wonderfully horrible effect in the 1979 film “Alien”.  It became iconic as soon as it appeared. 

25. Slasher - The first slasher film is often considered to be ‘Psycho’ (though the Universal Mummy films beyond the first prototype the formula).  The idea of an undead revenant coming back to kill rather randomly started in the film “The Fog” (1980), but was codified by Jason Voorhees in either 1984 or 1986.   I am no expert on this one, though, so I am not fully certain.

26. The Dream Killer - Freddy Krueger first appeared as a killer in dreams in 1981, but there were other dream killers before him.  They could only kill with extreme fear, though.  Freddy got physical!  I think.  Again, more research is needed.

27. Chupacabras - This is another cryptid inspired by a movie.  In this case, “Species” (1995). No, really.  This is what it comes from.   I know a lot of these are really short down the line, but the research for this one is thorough and concise! 

28. Slender Man - The Boogieman for the Internet Age.  An icon of Creepypastas and emblem of them.

Needs More Research: The Crow/Heroic Longer-Term Revenants, Immortals as a “Group” (might go to Gulliver's Travels, but I’m trying to track Highlander here) are also on the list, but they are proving extremely difficult to research, so I thought I’d post what I have at the moment.  Shinigami might also be on the list since they are syncretic adoption of the Grim Reaper into something more.

#Monsters #Folklore #Fiction #Frankenstein #Mr. Hyde #Mummy #Aliens #Morlock #Alien #Martian #War of the Worlds #matangeshwara temple #Dinosaurs #Aerofauna #Robot #Gremlin #Old Ones #Cthulhu #Tolkein #Lovecraft #Lich #Gargoyles #Loch Ness #Bigfoot #king kong #Kaiju #Amazon #Buffy the Vampire Slayer #D&D #Slasher

[budapestbug]

The famous Corvina Library A lot of splendid corvinas and other decorative codices have arrived in National Széchényi Library from various parts of the world, from New York, Paris, the Vatican City, as well as from Hungarian collections. Out of the manuscripts, several precious items, representing an important part of the history of culture, are on display for the first time in Hungary. Corvina Library or Bibliotheca Corviniana was one of the most renowned libraries of the Renaissance world, established by Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, in Buda Castle between 1458 and 1490. North of the Alps, Matthias' library was the largest in Europe, and its vast contents was only second to the Vatican Library in the whole of Europe, according to contemporary accounts. It was the greatest collection of science writings in its time. In 1489, Bartolomeo della Fonte of Florence wrote that Lorenzo de Medici founded his own Greek-Latin library encouraged by the example of the Hungarian king. Matthias, one of the most powerful rulers of the age, started to collect the books from about 1460. At the king's death in 1490, the library consisted of about 3,000 codices or "Corvinae" which included about four to five thousand various works, many of classical Greek and Latin authors. It represented the literary production and reflected the state of knowledge and arts of the Renaissance and included works of philosophy, theology, history, law, literature, geography, natural sciences, medicine, architecture, and many others. Nearly two thirds of the surviving volumes had not been printed before the king's death. Some of them contained the sole copy of the works in them, like the book of Constantine Porphyrogennetos on the habits in the court of the Byzantine emperor, or the church history of Nikephoros Kallistos. Some lost Corvinae works are also known, with which the only copy of ancient books perished, including the full works of Hypereides, and writings by Flavius Cresconius Corippus, Cuspinianus and Procopius. Items from the Bibliotheca Corviniana were inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2005 in recognition of their historical significance.

[aboutanancientenquiry]

A publication of texts of ancient Egyptian literature containing the Egyptian original of a story recorded by Herodotus

The Petese Stories II (Carsten Niebuhr Institute Publications)

by Kim Ryholt

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Museum Tusculanum Press (September 29, 2006)

Language ‏ : ‎ English

“This volume contains the edition of a new manuscript with Petese Stories from the Tebtunis temple library, dating to the period around 100 AD. The Petese Stories is a compilation of seventy stories about the virtues and vices of women. The numerous stories were compiled on the orders of the prophet Petese of Heliopolis that they may serve as a literary testament by which he would be remembered. Petese was, according to literary tradition, Plato’s Egyptian instructor in astrology. The composition seems to have been modeled on the fundamental Myth of the Sun’s Eye. The overall structural pattern of the text is very similar to the Arabian Nights; a frame story forms the introduction as well as the fabric into which the long series of shorter tales are woven. Among the stories preserved in the new manuscript one is particularly remarkable in that it is known from a translation by Herodotus, the so-called Pheros Story (Book II, chap. 111).”

Source: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/P/bo14317155.html

Kim Ryholt, Professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen.

The tradition about Petese as instructor of Plato in astrology is obviously spurious.

The Petese stories are part of the collection known as Carlsberg Papyri (https://www.carlsbergfondet.dk/en/Forskningsaktiviteter/Research-Projects/Other-Research-Projects/Kim-Ryholt_The-Papyrus-Carlsberg-Collection-and-Project ). Although the manuscripts of this collection date from about 100 AD, they contain often works from much earlier periods of the Egyptian history.

The Pheros story of Herodotus is a part of the narrative of Book II about the remote past of Egypt, in which Herodotus says that he just records what he has heard from the Egyptian priests, although he expresses doubts about the reliability of these stories and he states that only for the period after the ascent of Psammitichos I (664-610 BCE), the founder of the Saite dynasty, and the opening of Egypt to foreigners there is a possibility of reliable knowledge of the Egyptian history by the Greeks. 

The Pheros story as told in Herodotus’ Histories is as follows (ancient Greek text and translation to English from the Loeb Classical Library edition of Histories, available on https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Herodotus/2b*.html ): 

Σεσώστριος δὲ τελευτήσαντος ἐκδέξασθαι ἔλεγον τὴν βασιληίην τὸν παῖδα αὐτοῦ Φερῶν, τὸν ἀποδέξασθαι μὲν οὐδεμίαν στρατηίην, συνενειχθῆναι δέ οἱ τυφλὸν γενέσθαι διὰ τοιόνδε πρῆγμα. τοῦ ποταμοῦ κατελθόντος μέγιστα δὴ τότε ἐπ’ ὀκτωκαίδεκα πήχεας, ὡς ὑπερέβαλε τὰς ἀρούρας, πνεύματος ἐμπεσόντος κυματίης ὁ ποταμὸς ἐγένετο· τὸν δὲ βασιλέα λέγουσι τοῦτον ἀτασθαλίῃ χρησάμενον, λαβόντα αἰχμὴν βαλεῖν ἐς μέσας τὰς δίνας τοῦ ποταμοῦ, μετὰ δὲ αὐτίκα καμόντα αὐτὸν τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς τυφλωθῆναι. δέκα μὲν δὴ p400 ἔτεα εἶναί μιν τυφλόν, ἑνδεκάτῳ δὲ ἔτεϊ ἀπικέσθαι οἱ μαντήιον ἐκ Βουτοῦς πόλιος ὡς ἐξήκει τέ οἱ ὁ χρόνος τῆς ζημίης καὶ ἀναβλέψει γυναικὸς οὔρῳ νιψάμενος τοὺς ὀφθαλμούς, ἥτις παρὰ τὸν ἑωυτῆς ἄνδρα μοῦνον πεφοίτηκε, ἄλλων ἀνδρῶν ἐοῦσα ἄπειρος. καὶ τὸν πρώτης τῆς ἑωυτοῦ γυναικὸς πειρᾶσθαι, μετὰ δέ, ὡς οὐκ ἀνέβλεπε, ἐπεξῆς πασέων πειρᾶσθαι· ἀναβλέψαντα δὲ συναγαγεῖν τὰς γυναῖκας τῶν ἐπειρήθη, πλὴν ἢ τῆς τῷ οὔρῳ νιψάμενος ἀνέβλεψε, ἐς μίαν πόλιν, ἢ νῦν καλέεται Ἐρυθρὴ βῶλος· ἐς ταύτην συναλίσαντα ὑποπρῆσαι πάσας σὺν αὐτῇ τῇ πόλι· τῆς δὲ νιψάμενος τῷ οὔρῳ ἀνέβλεψε, ταύτην δὲ ἔσχε αὐτὸς γυναῖκα. ἀναθήματα δὲ ἀποφυγὼν τὴν πάθην τῶν ὀφθαλμῶν ἄλλα τε ἀνὰ τὰ ἱρὰ πάντα τὰ λόγιμα ἀνέθηκε καὶ τοῦ γε λόγον μάλιστα ἄξιον ἐστὶ ἔχειν, ἐς τοῦ Ἡλίου τὸ ἱρὸν ἀξιοθέητα ἀνέθηκε ἔργα, ὀβελοὺς δύο λιθίνους, ἐξ ἑνὸς ἐόντα ἑκάτερον λίθου, μῆκος μὲν ἑκάτερον πηχέων ἑκατόν, εὖρος δὲ ὀκτὼ πηχέων.

When Sesostris died, he was succeeded in the kingship (so said the priests) by his son Pheros.​5 This king made no wars; and it happened that he became blind, for the following reason: the Nile came down in a flood such as never was before, rising to a height of eighteen cubits, and the water which overflowed the fields was roughened by a strong wind; then, it is said, the king was so infatuated that he took a spear and hurled it into the midst of the river eddies. Straightway after this he suffered from a disease of the eyes, and became blind. When he had been blind for ten years, an oracle from the city of Buto declared to him that the time of his punishment was drawing to an end, and that he should regain his sight by washing his eyes with the issue of a woman who had never had intercourse with any man but her own husband. Pheros made trial with his own wife first, and as he still remained blind, with all women, one after another. When he at last recovered sight, he took all the women of whom he had made trial, save only her who had made him to see again, and gathered them into one town, that which is now called "Red Clay"; where having collected them together he burnt them and the town; but the woman by whose means he had recovered sight he took to wife. Among the many offerings which he dedicated in all the noteworthy temples for his deliverance from blindness, most worthy of mention are the two marvellous stone obelisks which he set up in the temple of the Sun. Each of these is made of a single block, and is an hundred cubits high and eight cubits thick.

The Carlsberg Papyri and the Petese stories come from a priestly milieu, the library of the Tebtunis temple, and it seems that these stories were popular among the Egyptian priests. These facts corroborate Herodotus’ report that Egyptian priests were the source of the material he recorded about the pre-Saite period of the Egyptian history. 

There is of course the question why the Egyptian priests responded to Herodotus’ enquiry about the very ancient Egyptian history with such literary tales. Did Herodotus have access to really educated Egyptian priests or his interlocutors were just members of the clergy of low rank not representative of the historical knowledge of the Egyptian priesthood? Were the Egyptian priests of the 5th century BCE confused about the history of their own country and were they taking the tale for historical reality, or perhaps were they following some other intellectual strategy in what they told to a foreigner like Herodotus?

Each one of these possibilities has its supporters among Egyptologists and classicists, so I will not treat these intriguing questions here and I will make a separate post on what I have found about the historical knowledge of the Egyptians of the Late Period.

But I think that it is clear now that some of the most extravagant stories of Herodotus about the Egyptian past before the Saite Dynasty are not his own inventions, but they have an Egyptian origin (it is another question that his scepticism toward their historical veracity was more than justified).

Papyrus Carlsberg 165, detail. This is the papyrus with the Petese stories. Source: https://www.carlsbergfondet.dk/en/Forskningsaktiviteter/Research-Projects/Other-Research-Projects/Kim-Ryholt_The-Papyrus-Carlsberg-Collection-and-Project

#herodotus #ancient greek classics #ancient egypt #egyptology #carlsberg papyri #petese stories #kim ryholt