All Quotes

"But king Solomon loved many strange women."

"My little finger shall be thicker than my father’s loins."

"My father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions."

"To your tents, O Israel: now see to thine own house, David."

"He went and dwelt by the brook Cherith, that is before Jordan.And the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening; and he drank of the brook."

"An handful of meal in a barrel, and a little oil in a cruse."

"How long halt ye between two opinions?"

"He is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked."

"There is a sound of abundance of rain."

"There ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand."

"He girded up his loins, and ran before Ahab."

"He himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree."

"But the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake:And after the earthquake a fire: but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice."

"Elijah passed by him, and cast his mantle upon him."

"Let not him that girdeth on his harness boast himself as he that putteth it off."

"Naboth the Jezreelite had a vineyard, which was in Jezreel, hard by the palace of Ahab King of Samaria.And Ahab spake unto Naboth, saying, Give me thy vineyard, that I may have it for a garden of herbs, because it is near unto my house."

"Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?"

"But there was none like unto Ahab, which did sell himself to work wickedness in the sight of the , whom Jezebel his wife stirred up."

"I saw all Israel scattered upon the hills, as sheep that have not a shepherd."

"Feed him with bread of affliction and with water of affliction, until I come in peace.And Micaiah said, If thou return at all in peace, the Lord hath not spoken by me."

"And a certain man drew a bow at a venture, and smote the king of Israel between the joints of the harness."

"Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.And Elisha saw it, and he cried, My father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof."

"The spirit of Elijah doth rest on Elisha."

"And as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the . And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them."

"Is it well with the child? And she answered, It is well."

"The fact that much of the uniquely Spartan political vocabulary can be plausibly derived from Late Egyptian is linked to the tradition that the Spartan lawgiver Lykourgos visited the East and Egypt to study their institutions. Moreover, the notion of Egyptian cultural influence there in the 9th and 8th centuries is strengthened by the strikingly Egyptian appearance of early Spartan art. All these link up with the Spartan kings’ belief in their Heraklid—hence Egyptian or Hyksos—ancestry; and would thus explain such anomalies in the Aryan Model as the building of a pyramid at the Menelaion, the Spartan ‘national’ shrine, and the letter one of the last Spartan kings wrote to the High Priest in Jerusalem, claiming kinship with him."

"The natural confusion between the rams and goats seems to have been compounded by the fact that the oracular cult at the Delta city—known to the Greeks as Mendēs—was associated with a well-endowed species of ram that—rather embarrassingly for a symbol of fertility—became extinct. In later centuries this was represented in a way that led Herodotos, at least, to describe it alternately as a goat and a ram."

"I hope to demonstrate that Herodotos’ views on the Egyptian and Phoenician settlements, though treated with condescension and scorn by most modern Classicists and ancient historians, were conventional not only in his own times but also throughout Archaic, Classical and later Antiquity."

"There have been...persistent attempts to diminish the Egyptian aspects of the play [the Suppliants of Aischylos], which in later times became so important a prop for the Ancient Model. For instance, while Io is seen as coming from Argos, most sources agree that she was only the distant ancestor of Aigyptos and Danaos. Thus the brothers and their children were Egyptianized, if not purely Egyptian, and the Danaids are explicitly described as ‘black’. The mainstream of German scholarship, however, has preferred the one scholiast who can dubiously be construed to say that the twins were the children of Io herself. The same scholiast also maintains that the whole action of the trilogy took place in Argos. This version has been preferred to all the other sources, some of which held that all the events were situated in Egypt, and all of which...had the Danaids arriving from Egypt."

"It seems to have been...the belief expressed by Herodotos that the ancestry of the Spartan kings went up to the Hyksos colonists – that, sometime around 300 BC, Areios King of Sparta wrote to Jerusalem beginning: "To Onias High Priest, greeting. A document has come to light which shows that the Spartans and Jews are kinsmen descended alike from Abraham.""

"This view of Egyptian religion played a central role in the two major ‘novels’ of the 2nd century AD, Heliodoros’ Aithiopika and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass. In his morally elevating and romantic story with a beautiful and virtuous Ethiopian – but not black – heroine, Heliodoros expressed great admiration for the Ethiopians and their gymnosophists (naked philosophers or gurus), but Aithiopika is focused on Egypt and the moral superiority of its religion. It also stresses the passionate interest taken in it by Greek priests, who saw it as the key to their own cults. When talking about the priests of Delphi bombarding a visiting Egyptian with questions, the author wrote: "In short, they forgot none of the interesting features of Egypt, for there is no country in the world which Greeks prefer to hear about.""

"In 390 AD the temple of Serapis and the adjacent great library of Alexandria were destroyed by a Christian mob; twenty-five years later, the brilliant and beautiful philosopher and mathematician Hypatia was gruesomely murdered in the same city by a gang of monks instigated by St Cyril. These two acts of violence mark the end of Egypto-Paganism and the beginning of the Christian Dark Ages."

"It is hardly surprising that scholars working within the Aryan Model prefer to neglect the Christian factor and see these events as representing a resurgence of Egyptian Oriental fanaticism against Hellenistic rationalism. But, if one disregards the absurd implication that Europeans cannot be fanatical, these two explanations – that the fanatical mob was both Christian and Egyptian – are not mutually exclusive. By the 4th century AD, Egypt was a passionately – if not the most passionately – Christian province in the Roman Empire."

"As...Giorgio de Santillana has pointed out, it is not accidental that Dupuis is so little known today. His beliefs continue to form a coherent challenge to both Christianity and the myth of Greece as a cultural beginning; thus he and his work had to be buried. Dupuis was a brilliant scientist and the inventor of semaphore, and was also active in politics during the French Revolution. His great reputation as a scholar and his dedication to moderate revolutionary principles made him a natural choice for director of cultural events during the Directory from 1795 to 1799, and he became president of the legislative body during the Consulate under Napoleon that followed."

"The Classical writer most often appealed to to justify slavery was Aristotle, who had argued at length in its favour. The appeal was linked to the fact that his work was shot through with the belief that Greeks were inherently superior to other peoples."

"Winckelmann] loved every aspect of his image of Greece, seeing its two dominant essences as liberty and youth. According to him Greece epitomized freedom, while Egyptian culture had been stunted by its monarchism and conservatism and was the symbol of rigid authority and stagnation — which also happened to be non-European. In his mind, the Greek city-states contained the liberty without which it was impossible to create great art. Winckelmann, and his followers, loved this liberty and youth for their freshness and vitality. Yet he insisted upon the soft gentleness of Greek art, and the ‘noble simplicity’ and ‘serene greatness’ of Greek culture as a whole, which he saw as the result of the equable Greek climate. Moreover, central to his love of Greece was his appreciation of Greek homosexuality. Winckelmann himself was homosexual, and the major homosexual strand which has persisted in modern Hellenism has continued to be associated with him."

"By the 1830s [European fascination with Sanskrit] had led to a general perception of the Indo-European language family which, in the racist atmosphere of the time, developed quite quickly into the notion of an Indo-European or ‘Aryan race’. The passion for India also meant that it replaced Egypt as the exotic ancestor of Europe. This time, however, the ancestry was not seen in terms of the transmission of philosophy and reason but as a Romantic one of ‘blood’ and kinship."

"After the 1780s, the intensification of racism and the new belief in the central importance of ‘ethnicity’ as a principle of historical explanation became critical for perceptions of Ancient Egypt. The Egyptians were increasingly detached from the noble Caucasians, and their ‘black’ and African nature was more and more emphasized. Thus the idea that they were the cultural ancestors of the Greeks – the epitome and pure childhood of Europe – became unbearable. There was also a new crisis between Egyptian mythology and Christianity with the works of Dupuis, which represented the ideological or theological counterpart of the French Revolution’s attack on European social order. It is only with this background that one can make sense of the tormented career of Champollion during the years of reaction between 1815 and 1830. Although Champollion was an avowed revolutionary and an enthusiastic Bonapartist, one of his earliest discoveries discredited some of the theories of Dupuis’s supporters, and he and his decipherment were therefore welcomed by the Church and the Restoration nobility. On the other hand, his championing of Egypt over Greece combined with his political beliefs to infuriate Hellenist and Indianist scholars, who continued to do all they could to block his academic career."

"At the core of Altertumswissenschaft was the image of the divine Greek, both artistic and philosophical. Greeks also had – like the idealized image of the Germans themselves – to be integrated with their native soil, and pure. Thus the Ancient Model, with its multiple invasions and frequent cultural borrowings and the implicit consequences of racial and linguistic mixture, became increasingly intolerable. It is only within this political and social context that one can understand the attack by one of the first products of the new system, Karl Otfried Müller, on the overwhelming ancient authority of the Ancient Model."

"Most later historians, and some of his contemporaries, have regarded Müller as essentially Romantic in maintaining a categorical distinction between Greek and other cultures. In Orchomenos he denied the charge and, after apologizing for having treated Greek mythology as if it were all mythology, he claimed that Greece was part of the world, and that therefore Greek mythology had the same basis as that of the rest of mankind. What he objected to was the belief in colonial bonds and the wholesale borrowing of Greek religion and mythology from the East. He was convinced that he had shown these to be unhistorical, though illusions about them had led all previous research astray.In Prolegomena, Müller made an eloquent appeal for scholars to do what he had failed to do, and investigate all mythologies for insights into the Greek one. The ‘anthropological’ school of the Cambridge Classicists James Frazer and Jane Harrison, which flourished at the beginning of the 20th century, in no way overstepped these bounds. What Müller outlawed was any special relationship between Greek and Eastern myth. Indeed, as he put it, ‘the entire book is opposed to the theory which would make the majority of myths importations from the East.’"

"After Müller’s demolition of the Ancient Model, it was relatively easy to fill the vacuum with the model of Indo-European conquest from the north. In this case, unlike the destruction of the Ancient Model, there was a good internalist explanation for the change: the need to explain the Indo-European basis of Greek. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that German and English scholars were particularly attracted to ideas of northern invasion, which fitted so well with the prevailing racism and with Niebuhr’s scheme of ethnic history."

""Representing the two countries is a symbolism for me, to showcase that women of today are more than just one thing. So I am Filipino at heart, I know that I’m also German. And I wanna portray both of them, because I grew up with this loving environment in Germany from my parents.”"

"Despite his enthusiasm for the character and institutions of the Aryan Hellenes, Gobineau was convinced that Ancient Greece as a whole had been thoroughly ‘blackened’ and ‘Semitized’. He was among those who maintained that the modern Greeks were so mongrelized that they could no longer be considered as descendants of the Ancients. Indeed, his belief in the Phoenician influence on Greece was part of his general belief that Southern Europe had been irredeemably ‘Semitized’ and that only the Germanic peoples of the north had retained their ‘white’ purity. In this, however, he was clearly in the minority. While they were coming to share his views on Aryan superiority, most Northern Europeans were not prepared to give up Greece and Rome."

"To use a military analogy of the type favoured by Reinach himself, the demotion of China, Egypt and the Turks had been achieved by an Indo-European-Semitic alliance. In the 1820s only K. O. Müller, whom Reinach described as 'always in advance of his times', had had the courage to discard Europe's allies.By 1885 Europe’s conquest of the world was so complete that this courage had become commonplace and could now cast the Indians and the Semites aside."

"It seems...that the Aryan Model is being maintained very largely by its own tradition and academic inertia. Neither of these forces should be underestimated; nevertheless, they have been considerably weakened by a number of startling internal developments – all of which show that the Bronze Age civilizations were much more advanced and cosmopolitan than had been thought, and that in general the ancient records are more reliable than more recent reconstructions. Given these externalist and internalist contexts, I am convinced that even the Broad Aryan Model is untenable and that the Ancient Model will be restored at some point in the early 21st century."

"Why was Astour’s work considered so...offensive? First, it offended at a formal level, because it challenged the academic hierarchy; this was a reflection of the relative power of the two disciplines. Although Classicists had previously discussed Eastern parallels to Hellenic mythology, it was entirely different and unacceptable for Orientalists to pronounce on Greece.There were also fundamental objections to the content of Astour’s work. Scholars like Fontenrose and Walcot had made broad sweeps of world mythology – including India, Iran and so on – and they gave preference, if possible, to the less offensive sources. By contrast, Astour’s derivation of Greek names from Semitic not only poached on the sacred ground of language, but also made the connections between West Semites and Greeks disturbingly close and specific. Furthermore, two of the myth cycles he treated – those of Kadmos and Danaos – were concerned with Near Eastern colonization in Greece, and he made a plausible case for their having a historical kernel of truth. The fourth section of Hellenosemitica was even more provocative in that it went into the sociology of knowledge, and its sketch of the history and ideology of Classics and Classical archaeology has been the basis of all later writings on this subject, this volume included. In doing this Astour injected relativism into subjects that had previously been impervious to the forces of probabilism and uncertainty that have transformed other disciplines since the 1890s."

"It is absurd to try to summarize this book in a dozen paragraphs, when even the previous hundreds of pages in which I have attempted to set out some of the complications of this vast and extraordinarily ramified theme can best be described by the Chinese expression ‘looking at flowers from horseback’."

"The Greek War of Independence...united all Europeans against the traditional Islamic enemies from Asia and Africa.This War – and the philhellenic movement, which supported the struggle for independence – completed the already powerful image of Greece as the epitome of Europe. The Ancient Greeks were now seen as perfect, and as having transcended the laws of history and language. Thus it was now thought profane to study any aspect of their culture as one would the culture of other peoples. Moreover, with the rise of a passionate and systematic racism in the early 19th century, the ancient notion that Greece was a mixed culture that had been civilized by Africans and Semites became not only abominable but unscientific. Just as one had to discount the ‘credulous’ Greeks’ stories about sirens and centaurs, so one had to reject legends of their having been colonized by inferior races. Paradoxically, the more the 19th century admired the Greeks, the less it respected their writing of their own history."

"The same social and intellectual forces that had brought down the Ancient Model in the 1820s were even more intense in the 1840s and 50s, and they clearly played a role in the increasingly ‘northern’ picture of Ancient Greece that developed in the late 19th century. At the same time, the sense that only 19th-century men knew how to think ‘scientifically’ gave the – mainly German – scholars the confidence both to dismiss ancient descriptions of early Greek history and to invent new ones of their own without any regard to the Ancients."

"We are on the threshold of an era of science and technology. In our encounter with the new age it is the responsibility of the teachers, standing at the confrontation of past with the present, to help evolve a perspective for the future."