philologists

"When I went to my first interview for an academic position, oddly enough in Thatcher's heyday. I bought myself a pair of blue stockings especially for the occasion. Although it was not my usual style, the logic seemed satisfactory: "If you, interviewers, are going to think that I am a real bluestocking, I will show you that I know what you are thinking and that I thought about it first."

"Roman society incorporated those who were mostly excluded in the ancient world, most obviously, women... They didn't have any formal political rights in Rome"

"Rome was the only place in the ancient world where the state took responsibility for ensuring its citizens had enough to eat. [They knew] how you make a human community work."

"Greek men didn't all look like this. And indeed, this guy, his musculature is actually physically impossible. What these are are images of a kind of perfect version of Greek masculinity."

"As for the deep cultural structures that legitimize the exclusion of women, it is very likely that these gradual changes will last too long, at least for me. We need to reflect on what power is, what it is for and how it is calibrated, or in other words, if we do not perceive that women are totally within power structures, then what we need to redefine is power, not women."

"It’s a "high-end" power in the traditional sense and linked to the image of the "glass ceiling", which not only places women out of power, but imagines pioneers as successful superwomen who only a few vestiges of male prejudice prevented them from reaching the top."

"It’s not easy to make women fit into a structure that is initially encoded as masculine: what needs to be done is to change the structure."

"In the song of the muses the truth of everything resonates as a being filled with the gods, which shines from the depths, revealing the eternal magnificence and blessed intangibility of the divine even in the darkest darkness and suffering greater. This is how the message of the divine reached the Greeks: not as a categorical request or as salvation in this and the other world, but rather as that which is eternal and blessed, which consoles and makes us happy not through promises , but since it is. The spirit of song announces to them the nature of the gods. In fact, singing is essentially their voice. By participating in singing, man can therefore participate in the divine, albeit in his own way, with humility. That which the song elevates into his sacred kingdom belongs to the eternal, that is to say: to that which is timeless and is connected to God."

"The gods then console even more when they come to meet man, they, who no pain touches. However, they do not console so much with what they give or promise, but rather with what they are. This is a miracle - and we can call it such - which we do not find only among the ancient Greeks , and yet among them it is among the fundamental characteristics of Hellenic religiosity and allows us to understand their entire spiritual attitude. For the high sensitivity of this type of man there is nothing more satisfying than the awareness that the eternally Blessed are, a knowledge that is already participation - human participation - in the bliss of the gods."

"There is nothing [...] that can be said with greater certainty about these gods than the fact that they, indifferent to any happiness or pain in the world, live in the fullest bliss. Precisely this character brings us closest to the divinity of the Olympians. And precisely this spirit of celestial intangibility and silent bliss is what still breathes so happily and freely from the figures of the Greek gods today."

"The world of Charites however completely reveals its nature only when it is understood that "grace", which is here a divine figure, does not limit itself to signifying that which fascinates with gracefulness, that which spreads happiness, but also the joy and gratitude of being blessed with gift and happiness. As is easy to understand thanks to the well-known linguistic phrases, it is the wonderful kingdom in which giving and thanking are one, lovable giving and lovable taking, where right and justice, claim and reparation, have no access: the kingdom of full grace. A world in which subject and object are truly one, included in the divine splendor of a superior being."

"Apollo depicted in the Western pediment of the Temple of Zeus in Olympia The artist of the temple of Zeus at Olympia depicted his simultaneously powerful and spiritual superiority in the most grandiose and realistic way. In the midst of the wildest tumult, the god suddenly appears, and his outstretched arm imposes calm. It is impossible to bring to expression in a more compelling way the entrance of the divine with all its illuminating clarity and his omniscient gaze."

"На відміну від Петра І, який «прорубав» Російській імперії «вікно» в Європу, Україні цього не потрібно було робити, бо вона вже була Європою. Проте в якийсь момент цей зв'язок був забутий."

"... I have still never seen a ghost for myself, even in the shadier vaults of the British Museum, where the ancient dead can lie peacefully, and many of the living have witnessed strange things. Sometimes I have crouched immobile in the evening darkness at the top level of our Victorian Arched Room library, like a wildlife photographer at a waterhole, waiting in silence for a spectral figure who has, they say, more than once been observed. For me, though, no shady visitor."

"Within the field of Assyriology the royal cuneiform libraries of , the Assyrian capital city, have no parallel for size, breadth, or document quality. ... The bulk of the library material had been put together at royal bequest with the specific intention of housing, editing, and recopying the traditional written expressions of Mesopotamian culture in, as far as possible, a complete state. Assurbanipal's long reign (668–c.627 ) in character was one of stability and affluence and there was ample opportunity for the pursuit and accumulation of manuscripts in abundance. Thus it fell to and those who came after him to uncover what was in essence a 'state of the art' royal library, whose underlying conception constitutes the only rival to the lost resources of Alexandria that the ancient world can provide."

"The is one of the world's best-known cuneiform inscriptions and at the same time one of the most famous archaeological objects in the British Museum in London."

"... I think the ultimate issue about ghosts is human arrogance. The ultimate, ultimate point is that I am me — the greatest hunter in the world — nineteen wives and four hundred and thirty-two children — and the best spear thrower in the world. I'm going to die? And it's all going to be over? No way!"

"In contrast to mourning and burial, it is the deep-seated conception that some part of a person does not vanish forever that separates us absolutely from the whole animal kingdom. No gorilla or bald-headed eagle ever had an inkling of their inner self finishing up somewhere once the proud body had collapsed into chemicals. It is only the early human mind that grew to strive against the prospect of the final annihilation of self, a hallmark rebellion that became hard-wired into, and always an essential element of, human nature. It is the incalculable antiquity of the first stirrings towards post-mortem existence that explains the enduring and universal belief in ghosts. Ghosts have waited in the wings from the beginning and have fluttered persistently as part of human cultural, religious or philosophical baggage ever since. Practically speaking, as a result, they are inexpungible."

"'s discoveries led to unease in more than one quarter. It was simply bizarre that a close relative of Holy Writ should emanate from such a primitive, barbaric world through so improbable a medium, to thrust itself uncompromisingly into public consciousness. How could Noah and his Ark possibly been known and important to the Assyrians of noble and the Babylonians of mad, dread ? Worried people over garden fences and in church pews clamoured to have important questions answered."

"! The world's oldest and hardest writing, older by far than any alphabet, written by long-dead Sumerians and Babylonians over more than three thousand years, and as extinct by the time of the Romans as any dinosaur. What a challenge! What an adventure!"

"In the years around the turn of the present century, relying on the contacts and expertise of , (1835–1909), put together what came to be one of the most wide-ranging and important collections of cuneiform tablets to have been assembled in private hands in this country. Since the publication of Volume 1 of The Amherst Tablets in 1908 by Pinches, followed much later by 's The Pinches Manuscript, the Amherst Collection has been familiar enough among Assyriologists, but perhaps less has been known of the collector, and of his other collections. The Museum at the family estate of Didlington Hall, Northwold, Norfolk, contained in its heyday a much broader range of material than cuneiform inscriptions. From the Near Eastern world there were very extensive collections of Egyptian papyri and antiquities, but the Hall also housed remarkable accumulations of incunabula and printed books, porcelain, tapestries, sculpture and other works of art."

"The strength of a nation was not based on the number of individuals belonging to it, but on their activity and intelligence. I therefore consider the Finns in Finland to be in the same position in relation to the Swedes as the Welsh are in relation to the English, with the possible consequence of the Swedes becoming Swedes."

"The Finns could not be reconciled to the right of self-determination of the peoples, because the conditions of the majority were not sufficient. Here it could not be thought that the Finns, as the lower educated, could suppress the Swedish minority."

"Those nations which, like the tribes of the Chudo-Finnish, have never proved intelligent enough to become the advocates of freedom or civilisation, may, without the spirit of humanity shedding a tear on their graves, disappear from the earth, or they may, as peaceful peasants and countrymen, content themselves with the idyllic patriarchal life best suited to their loyal and slow nature."

"The Finns, who had not proved themselves intelligent enough to become the advocates of civilization, could safely remain peasants, while the most sacred pursuits of mankind [the promotion of culture] were to be left to the more powerful nations; such had been and still were the nations of the Indo-Germanic race."

"The words of the Russian ruler Alexander I at the Diet of Porvoo in 1809 on the elevation of the Finnish people to the rank of nations were the most insidious words ever committed to memory by the Finnish people."

"Our task is to fight against the Fennoman hordes and to defend our Swedish mother tongue, our Swedish law, our Swedish social order, in a word, our culture in all its forms against any enemy."

"The nickname suomalaistollot is commonly used (among Finnish Swedes), and asking "are you Finnish" has the same meaning as: are you completely devoid of intelligence?"

"Many mocking stories about the Finns' kinship with the devil, the creation of the Finns and how it happened, and many others are commonplace, and are always received (by Finnish Swedes) with great joy."

""A lot of scholars maintain that no belief in transmigration had existed before the Upaniṣads. However, Killingley presented evidence that shows that the topics of the pañcāgnividyā and deva-/pitṛyāna [two concepts in the Upaniṣads] have their antecedents in the earlier Brahminic texts. He claims that theories of karma and rebirth are made up of several ideas already present in Vedic thought. Also Tull shows that the conceptual framework of the Upaniṣadic idea of transmigration had been established already in the Brāhmaṇas with their idea of sacrifice during which the sacrificer symbolically experiences death and rebirth during his journey to heaven. Oberlies goes even further back and tries to reconstruct a possible Rgvedic belief according to which the dead came back to earth to be reborn in their progeny. We can put this belief into broader conceptual frames as it is very close to the beliefs characteristic of 'small scale' or 'tribal' societies. Obeyesekere maintains that the belief in rebirth after death is quite widespread and varies in different cultures. Contrary to the mature Upanisadic form of the rebirth eschatology, the rebirth eschatologies characteristic of small scale societies are not linked to ethical causation. Obeyesekere believes that the kṣatriyas in the Upaniṣads who expound their views about transmigration implicitly are in discussion with traditions that 'seem to believe that after death one can be reborn in the human world or in a subhuman one'" (p.183-84)."

"Like many other scholars, Obeyesekere maintains that we lack evidence for such a belief before the Upaniṣads but he thinks that the preserved texts do not necessarily represent the whole religious situation in ancient India. 'It is true' - he says - 'that there is no way to trace the history of the theory of rebirth backward, but there is a methodological way out by examining how it might have originated' Then Obeyesekere creates - what he calls 'a theoretical possible model' to explain the problem. My paper will support this model with textual evidence. I would like to show that there are at least three stanzas in the Ṛgveda (RV) from which the belief in rebirth can be reconstructed. The argument is based not only on the philological data. but also on the consistency of the whole reconstruction and its power to explain many unclear issues, concerning both the interpretation of some Ṛgvedic Stanzas and the development of the concept of rebirth. I may add that I had managed to find the evidence supporting my argument before I became acquainted with Obeyesekere's book."

"To point to the list of words common to the Avesta and viii [of the Rigveda] with its group, and say that here is proof positive that there is closer relationship with the Avesta, and that, therefore, viii after all is older than the books which have not preserved these words, some of which are of great significance, would be a first thought. But this explanation is barred out by the fact that most of these Avestan words preserved in viii, withal those of the most importance, are common words in the literature posterior to the Rik. Hence to make the above claim would be tantamount to saying that these words have held their own through the period to which viii (assuming it to be older than ii-vii) is assigned, have thereupon disappeared, and then come into vogue again after the interval to which the maker of this assumption would assign ii-vii. This, despite all deprecation of negative evidence, is not credible. Take, for instance, udara or uṣṭra or meṣa, the first is found only in viii., i., x.; the second in viii., i.; the last in viii., i., ix., x. Is it probable that words so common both early and late should have passed through an assumedly intermediate period (of ii.-vii.) without leaving a trace? Or, again: is a like assumption credible in the case of kṣīra, which appears in the Iranian khshīra; in RV. viii., i., ix., x.; disappears in the assumedly later group ii.-vii.; and reappears in the AV. and later literature as a common word? Evidently, the facts are not explained on the hypothesis that the Avesta and RV. viii. are older than RV. ii.-vii."

"We must, I think, suppose that the Avesta and RV. viii. are younger than RV. ii.-vii.; or else that the poets of viii. were geographically nearer to the Avestan people, and so took from them certain words, which may or may not have been old with their Iranian users, but were not received into the body of Vedic literature until a time posterior to the composition of ii.-vii."

"viii with the General Books and post-Rik literature agrees with Avestan as against the early family books."

"viii joins the later Avesta to post-Rik literature and the other General Books."

"the intermediate character of v, between viii and the other family books."

"Neo-Platonism and Christian Gnosticism owe much to India. The Gnostic ideas in regard to a plurality of heavens and spiritual worlds go back directly to Hindu sources. Soul and light are one in the Sankhyan system, before they became so in Greece, and when they appear united in Greece it is by means of the thought which is borrowed from India. The famous three qualities of the Sankhyan reappear as the Gnostic 'three classes'.""

"Plato IS full of Sankhyan thought, worked out by him, but taken from Pythagoras. Before the sixth century B.C. all the religious- philosophical Idea of Pythagoras are current in India (L. Schroeder, Pythagoras). If there were but one or two of these cases, they might be set aside as accidental coincidences, but such coincidences are too numerous to be the result of change.""

"The vocabulary of the Kaṇva maṇḍala [8] often coincides with that of the Atri maṇḍala [5] when it shows no correspondence with that of other family books. This subject deserves special treatment."

"Priya compounds are a formation common in Smṛti [....] Epic [....] In AV, VS, and Brāhmaṇa [....] but known in RV only to books viii, i, ix, x."

"[there are a great many] evidences of special rapport between viii and v."

"if the first home of the Aryans can be determined at all by the conditions topographical and meteorological, described in their early hymns, then decidedly the Punjab was not that home. For here there are neither mountains nor monsoon storms to burst, yet storm and mountain belong to the very marrow of the Rigveda... If there is an area which fulfils these conditions, according to Hopkins, it is ―a district […] where monsoon storms and mountain scenery are found, that district, namely, which lies South of Umballa (or Ambālā). It is here, in my opinion, that the Rigveda, taken as a whole, was composed. In every particular, this locality fulfils the physical conditions under which the composition of the hymns was possible, and what is of paramount importance, is the first district east of the Indus that does so."

"[a homeland decidedly east of the Punjab] is supported even by native traditions. At a very early (Brahmanic) period the Northerners‘ are regarded as a suspicious sort of people, whose religious practices, far from being authoritative, are censured. No tradition associates the ancient literature with the Punjāb. In fact, save for one exception, even the legal manuals do not take cognizance of the Northwest. They have the stanza that defines Āryāvarta, and also the stanzas that extend the geographical boundary still further south; but they ignore the North."

"The Punjab is thus omitted altogether from the list. The most western locality is the place where the Sarasouti disappears in the north-west, and the Arabian Sea, west of the southern line of the Vindhyas."

"That, as Nandana observes at this point (sloka 22), each country is given in the order of its authority, the best being first, is clear not only from the last verse, but from the one that follows it. For here it is stated that the ' district fit for sacrifice ' is all the country forming the natural habitat of the black buck, and this differs from the 'country of barbarians' in that the latter is not a place fit for the twice-born to live in. 'Natural habitat ' is not to be taken with the Commentators as making a distinction between country and town, but between the plains and the hills. The Gangetic plain and the country about Kuruksetra, between Delhi and Umballa and south of the former locality, is still the 'natural habitat' of the black buck. This account in Manu concludes with the words: " thus have I briefly expounded to you the home (yoni) of dharma, and its origin (sanmbhavta).""

"Manu, however, has one verse that in connection with this subject is of interest, and deserves to be translated, though till now it never has been rendered into English. I refer to ii. 17, and translate in paraphrase: "The country divinely meted out by the rivers Sarasouti and Ghuggar, and lying between them, is where the (Rig, etc.) Veda arose, and hence is called brahmavarta or 'home of the Veda' in the tradition of the learned.""

"The second book of Manu is concerned with the correct dharma and conduct of the twice-born...The following verses then show what are the less authoritative, but still authoritative countries. In abstract this appears thus: (The district between the Sarasvati and Dhrsadvatl is the home of the Veda); the religious practices found in this country are those of the good. Next to this lies the country south of it (from Thanesar to Mathura),' which is the district of the seers of the Veda (brahmarsidepa), and from Brahmans of this district are to be learned the practices of men to-day. Taking a wider sweep, all the country from west to east between the place where the Sarasouti disappears in the desert and that where the Jumna disappears in the Ganges, and from north to south between the Himalayas and the Vindhya hills is the ' Middle Land.' The ' home of the Aryans' (Aryavarta), as it is called, is the country between these mountains and the two seas."

"和歌に師匠なし。たゞ旧き歌をもつて師となす。心を古風に染め、詞を先達に習はば、誰人かこれを詠ぜざらんや。"

"On this spring night the floating bridge of my dreams has broken away: and lifting off a far peak— a cloud-bank in empty sky."

"In this art of poetry, those who speak ill of Teika should be denied the protection of the gods and Buddhas and condemned to the punishments of hell."