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MYTHS OF CRETE & PRE-HELLENIC EUROPE

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Author Topic: MYTHS OF CRETE & PRE-HELLENIC EUROPE  (Read 8914 times)
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Skinwalker
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« Reply #45 on: February 26, 2009, 12:09:32 am »

shamefully, had not advanced much beyond the Aurignacian and Magdalenian stages of culture. The Bushmen appear, in fact, to have remained through long ages in a state of arrested development after breaking away from the ancient progressive races from whom the elements of their civilization were derived. Possibly they even degenerated in the interval.

It is probable that the Cro-Magnon peoples of the Aurignacian stage of culture represented the race of unknown origin which exercised so marked an influence on those of their contemporaries who were in touch with them. They had the largest brains of any of the ancient peoples. Indeed, according to the ethnologists, the skull capacity of their women was greater than that of the average male European in the present age.

This Aurignacian stage of culture, which some date approximately at 20,000 B.C. and others at 30,000 B.C., affords ample indications not only of intellectual activity, but also a marked degree of refinement of thought and feeling. As has been shown in the "Tuan MacCarrell" story of the Pleistocene Age, the Cro-Magnon cave-dwellers of the Late Third Inter-glacial Epoch were accomplished draughtsmen and ivory-carvers. They had an Art history which must be regarded as a reflection of their social history. Apparently they had solved the problem of securing their food-supply with a minimum of effort and had therefore leisure to cultivate the Arts; this triumph they achieved by inventing new implements and improving those inherited from the Mousterian Epoch. Withal, as one cave-picture shows, they possessed domesticated cattle which the women engaged in herding. Consequently they had advanced from the hunting to the pastoral stage of civilization.

Their activities in the sphere of Art began with rude

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childish efforts and culminated in the production of realistic drawings and carvings in the round, and even of decorative designs which stand comparison with those of later and more complex civilizations. It was considered incredible, when discovery was first made of their cave-pictures, that Palæolithic man could have been endowed with either such intense artistic insight and feeling or technical skill as these gave evidence of.

An interesting problem arises in connection with the artistic products of the Aurignacian and Magdalenian stages of culture. Were they connected with ceremonials, and therefore symbolic of religious and magical beliefs; or should they be considered simply as the expression of an Art movement which had been gradually developed for long ages by accomplished flint-knappers who, in producing exquisitely flaked artifacts of symmetrical proportions, displayed that infinite capacity for taking pains which amounts to genius?

There can be no doubt that the finest Aurignacian figurines wrought in stone and bone and ivory were conscious impressions of feminine beauty of form, and that the artists of the Cro-Magnon race were as devoted lovers of Art for Art's sake as those who at a later period shaped the exquisite Solutrean flint lances of laurel-leaf and willow-leaf design. The absence of male figurines, however, suggests that the art of this remote period was fostered as a cult product, and that we should regard these studies of **** women as religious symbols. This inference appears to be corroborated by the finds of grotesque i steatopygous figurines, some of which display no inconsiderable degree of skilful craftsmanship. It is difficult to believe that when artists selected as models women with enormously developed hips and thighs the motif was purely an æsthetic one; their obvious desire

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