Quotes by Archaeologists - Page 2

But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man who bears me. Already your horn has been raised, and your wrath has been kindled, and your star has passed by, and your heart has become strong." [--Jesus to Judas]
Rodolphe Kasser
Wouldst thou both eat they cake and have it?
George Edward Herbert
The ‘wounded men’ may, I argue, represent a form of shamanistic suffering, ‘death’ and initiation that was closely associated with somatic hallucinati
James David Lewis-Williams
...the holy men sat in an atmospherereeking of antiquity, so thick with thedust of ages that you can't see through it--nor can they.
Gertrude Bell
We had been hopelessly labouring to plough waste lands; to make nationality grow in a place full of the certainty of God… Among the tribes our creed could be only like the desert grass – a beautiful swift seeming of spring; which, after a day’s heat, fell dusty.
T.E. Lawrence
After a duration of a thousand years, the power of astrology broke down when, with Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, the progress of astronomy overthrew the false hypothesis upon which the entire structure rested, namely the geocentric system of the universe. The fact that the earth revolves in space intervened to upset the complicated play of planetary influences, and the silent stars, related to the unfathomable depths of the sky, no longer made their prophetic voices audible to mankind. Celestial mechanics and spectrum analysis finally robbed them of their mysterious prestige.
Franz Cumont
Among many other things, genius implies the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple, and to recognize inclusive structural principals.
C.W. Ceram
There were at least four contexts in which San shamans acquired insights into the spiritual world: – the trance dance, – special curing rituals, – viewing rock art, and – dreams.
James David Lewis-Williams
To understand the ‘wounded men’ of Upper Palaeolithic art, I now consider somatic hallucinations; these include attenuation of the body and limbs, polymelia (having extra limbs or digits), and, the one on which I focus, pricking and stabbing sensations.
James David Lewis-Williams
A wise man cares not for what he cannot have.
George Edward Herbert
The first two-dimensional images were thus not two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional things in the material world, as researchers have always assumed. Rather, they were ‘fixed’ mental images.
James David Lewis-Williams
He that will learn to pray let him go to Sea.
George Edward Herbert
The two centrepieces of social intelligence are the possession of extensive social knowledge about other individuals, in terms of knowing who allies and friends are, and the ability to infer the mental states of those individuals.
Steven Mithen
Show me a liar and I will show thee a thief.
George Edward Herbert
[W]hen trying to understand the character of the modern mind, it is impossible to separate the effects of genes and the developmental environment.
Steven Mithen
From the literary point of view, the Koran has little merit. Declamation, repetition, puerility, a lack of logic and coherence strike the unprepared reader at every turn. It is humiliating to the human intellect to think that this mediocre literature has been the subject of innumerable commentaries, and that millions of men are still wasting time in absorbing it." (Orpheus, Salmon Reinach, 1932. See page 175 of the book here)
Salomon Reinach
Discover how to visit the past and bring yesterday's stories into our lives today
Gillian Hovell
Objectives are only words written on paper without passion and desire
W. T. Albright
The most unknown, unused and unrecognised tool of the human mind, is the recognition that attitude is always a choice.
Mark Horton
Primary consciousness is a state of being aware of things in the world – of having mental images in the present.But it is not accompanied by any sense of a person with a past and future…
James David Lewis-Williams
Darkly, deeply, beautifully blue - the sky
George Byron Gordon
Society can be a bitch.""And is by no means always right. Society can't know you like you know yourself. So don't let society be the judge of your actions. Only you can judge you.
G.B. Gordon
It is because of this notion [of species essence] that we demand that a severely brain-damaged person should have the same rights as a university professor, or a physically disabled person the same rights as an Olympian sportsman. They are all 'human', whatever their intellectual and physical abilities.
Steven Mithen
Fly the pleasure that bites tomorrow.
George Edward Herbert
Most of us can as we choose make of this world either a palace or a prison.
Sir John Lubbock
The Howeitat spread out along the cliffs to return the peasants' fire. This manner of going displeased Auda, the old lion, who raged that a mercenary village folk should dare to resist their secular masters, the Abu Tayi. So he jerked his halter, cantered his mare down the path, and rode out plain to view beneath the easternmost houses of the village. There he reined in, and shook a hand at them, booming in his wonderful voice: 'Dogs, do you not know Auda?' When they realized it was that implacable son of war their hearts failed them, and an hour later Sherif Nasir in the town-house was sipping tea with his guest the Turkish Governor, trying to console him for the sudden change of fortune.
T.E. Lawrence
The cerebral cortex, the outer ‘skin’ of the brain, contains as many as ten billion neurons. This complexity is daunting. Yet it is out of complex interactions between the billions of neurons that consciousness arises.
James David Lewis-Williams
In southern Africa, a great many figures are ithyphallic. This feature has generally – and rather vaguely – been taken to refer to ‘masculinity’, but the painted contexts of the figures seems to confirm that, as in North America, sexual arousal was a metaphor for altered states of consciousness.
James David Lewis-Williams
Once upon a time an Athenian princesss named Prokne was wed to Tereus, king of the barbarous Thracians of the north. When Prokne's unfortunate sister, Philomela, came for a visit, Tereus fell madly in love with the girl locked her away and raped her, then cut out her tongue to prevent her from telling anyone of the crime. Philomela, however, wove into a cloth the story of her misfortune. When Prokne, receiving the cloth, understood what had befallen, she freed her sister, killed her own son, Itys, whom she had borne to Tereus, and served the child up to his father at a feast--the vilest revenge she could think of. When Tereus discovered the truth, in wrath he pursued the two sisters, thinking to kill them, but the gods transformed all three into birds: Tereus into the hoopoe (a large, crested bird with a daggerlike beak), Philomela into the swallow, which can only twitter unintelligibly, and Prokne into the nightingale, which spends the night singing 'Itys Itys!' in mourning for her dead son. All these birds have reddish spots, it is said, from getting spattered with the blood of the child....It is interesting in our purposes because it shows in yet another way the great importance that clothmaking had in women's lives, becoming central to their mythology as well.
Elizabeth Wayland Barber
Here we see the word "brain" occurring for the first time in human speech, as far as it is known to us; and in discussing injuries affecting the brain, we note the surgeon's effort to delimit his terms as he selects for specialization a series of common and current words to designate three degrees of injury to the skull indicated in modern surgery by the terms "fracture", "compound fracture," and "compound comminuted fracture," all of which the ancient commentator carefully explains.
James Henry Breasted
You must lose a fly to catch a trout.
George Edward Herbert
...some student asked if he [Larry Summers] didn’t have essentially the same relationship with Bob Rubin. Wasn’t Summer’s opposition to capital controls just a sop to Wall Street banks, which wanted to recoup their risky investments regardless of how doing so affected the country in which they had invested? “Summers just lost it,” said one audience member, a business school student. “he looked at the person and said, “you don’t know what you’re talking about and how dare you ask this question of the president of Harvard?
Richard Bradley
Nothing to say. I used to be a ghostwriter for a publisher.’‘Medieval stuff?’‘Eighty-page love stories. You have this guy, untrustworthy but good in bed, and this girl, radiant but innocent. In the end they fall madly in love and it’s incredibly boring. The story doesn’t say when they split up.’‘Of course not,’ said Mathias
Fred Vargas
A person who has the power to take a life, should have the intelligence to choose not to.
Christian Ekström
Increase Mather, President of Harvard University, in his treatise on Remarkable Providences, insists that the smell of herbs alarms the Devil and that medicine expels him. Such beliefs have probably even now not wholly disappeared from among us.
James Henry Breasted
The sky [above Tehran] was like a star-eaten black blanket, and so far as I could read them its constellations were unfamiliar. Lawrence speaks somewhere of drawing 'strength from the depths of the universe'; Malcolm Lowry speaks about the deadness of the stars except when he looked at them with a particular girl; I had neither feeling. The founder of the Jesuits used to spend many hours under the stars; it is hard to be certain whether his first stirrings of scientific speculation or pre-scientific wonder about space and the stars in their own nature were some element in his affinity with starlight, or whether for him they were only a point of departure, but in this matter I think I am about fifty years more modern than Saint Ignatius; stars mean to me roughly what they meant to Donne's generation, a bright religious sand imposing the sense of an intrusion into human language, and arousing a certain personal thirst to be specific.
Peter Levi
Instinct is a makeshift, an admission of helplessness before the problem of reality.
Leo Frobenius
Once human beings had developed higher-order consciousness, they had the ability to see mental images projected onto surfaces and to experience afterimages.
James David Lewis-Williams
My roses are my jewels, the sun and moon my clocks, fruit and water my food and drink.
Hester Lucy Stanhope
There were details like clothing, hair styles and the fragile objects that hardly ever survive for the archaeologist—musical instruments, bows and arrows, and body ornaments depicted as they were worn. … No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely.
Mary Leakey
In altered states of consciousness, the nervous system itself becomes a ‘sixth sense’ that produces a variety of images including entoptic phenomena.
James David Lewis-Williams
San religion is built around belief in a tiered universe. As do other shamanistic peoples throughout the world, the San believe in a realm above and another below the surface of the world on which they live.
James David Lewis-Williams
The portable animal statuettes were therefore far more than decorative trinkets: they were reified three-dimensional spirit animals with all their prophylactic and other powers.
James David Lewis-Williams
Do well and right and let the world sink.
George Edward Herbert
The mouse that hath but one hole is quickly taken.
George Edward Herbert
Sexual arousal and penal erections are associated with both altered states of consciousness and sleep.
James David Lewis-Williams
The principal aim of a vision quest is to ‘see’ a spirit animal that will become the quester’s animal-helper and source of his power.
James David Lewis-Williams
The seat of consciousness and intelligence was from the earliest times regarded by the Egyptians as both the heart and the bowels or abdomen. Our surgeon, however, has observed the fact that injuries to the brain affect other parts of the body, especially in his experience the lower limbs. He notes the drag or shuffle of one foot, presumably the partial paralysis resulting from a cranial wound, and the ancient commentator carefully explains the meaning of the obsolete word used for "shuffle.
James Henry Breasted
Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper, to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.
T.E. Lawrence
The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.
John Still
It is clear from both documentary and archaeological sources that conspicuous display and consumption of wealth was fundamental for an elite male to maintain power and position in society.
Sally Crawford
...as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold - everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment - an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by - I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, 'Can you see anything?' it was all I could do to get out the words, 'Yes, wonderful things.
Howard Carter
Shamanism is not simply a component of society: on the contrary, shamanism, together with its tiered cosmos, can be said to be the overall framework of society.
James David Lewis-Williams
We had deluded ourselves that perhaps peace might find the Arabs able, unhelped and untaught, to defend themselves with paper tools. Meanwhile we glozed our fraud by conducting their necessary war purely and cheaply. But now this gloss had gone from me. Chargeable against my conceit were the causeless, ineffectual deaths of Hesa. My will had gone and I feared to be alone, lest the winds of circumstance, or power, or lust, blow my empty soul away.
T.E. Lawrence
But God caused knowledge to be given to Adam and those with him, so that the kings of chaos and the underworld might not lord it over them." [--Jesus]
Rodolphe Kasser
We were fond together because of the sweep of open places, the taste of wide winds, the sunlight, and the hopes in which we worked. The morning freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us. We were wrought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for. We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep, and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.
T.E. Lawrence
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.
T.E. Lawrence
In the field of Egyptian mathematics Professor Karpinski of the University of Michigan has long insisted that surviving mathematical papyri clearly demonstrate the Egyptians' scientific interest in pure mathematics for its own sake. I have now no doubt that Professor Karpinski is right, for the evidence of interest in pure science, as such, is perfectly conclusive in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus.
James Henry Breasted
Let twelve angels come into being to rule over chaos and the underworld." And look, from the cloud there appeared an angel whose face flashed with fire and whose appearance was defiled with blood. His name was Nebro, which means in translation 'rebel'; others call him Yaldabaoth.
Rodolphe Kasser
Primary consciousness is a kind of ‘remembered present’…
James David Lewis-Williams