With Ancestor of the West, three distinguished French historians reveal the story of the birth of writing and reason, demonstrating how the logical religious structures of Near Eastern and Mesopotamian cultures served as precursors to those of the West. "Full of matter for anyone interested in language, religion, and politics in the ancient world."—R. T. Ridley, Journal of Religious History "In this accessible introduction to the ancient world, three leading French scholars explore the emergence of rationality and writing in the West, tracing its development and its survival in our own traditions. . . . Jean Bottero focuses on writing and religion in ancient Mesopotamia, Clarisse Herrenschmidt considers a broader history of ancient writing, and Jean-Pierre Vernant examines classical Greek civilization in the context of Near Eastern history."—Translation Review

Ancestor of the West : Writing, Reasoning, and Religion in Mesopotamia, Elam, and Greece

History

Vernant, Jean-Pierre

Bottéro, Jean

Herrenschmidt, Clarisse

Zabbal, Francois

Fagan, Teresa Lavender

Ancient Civilizations

University of Chicago Press

Paperback w/ white illustrated wraps. Wraps scuffed, light creasing to joints, closed tear less than 1/2 inch to rear panel. Otherwise clean and sound. Very Good. ISBN: 0226143473

Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (European Philosophy and the Human Sciences)

Literature & Fiction

Detienne, Marcel

Classics

For the Greeks, the sharing of cooked meats was the fundamental communal act, so that to become vegetarian was a way of refusing society. It follows that the roasting or cooking of meat was a political act, as the division of portions asserted a social order. And the only proper manner of preparing meat for consumption, according to the Greeks, was blood sacrifice.The fundamental myth is that of Prometheus, who introduced sacrifice and, in the process, both joined us to and separated us from the gods—and ambiguous relation that recurs in marriage and in the growing of grain. Thus we can understand why the ascetic man refuses both women and meat, and why Greek women celebrated the festival of grain-giving Demeter with instruments of butchery.The ambiguity coded in the consumption of meat generated a mythology of the "other"—werewolves, Scythians, Ethiopians, and other "monsters." The study of the sacrificial consumption of meat thus leads into exotic territory and to unexpected findings.In The Cuisine of Sacrifice, the contributors—all scholars affiliated with the Center for Comparative Studies of Ancient Societies in Paris—apply methods from structural anthropology, comparative religion, and philology to a diversity of topics: the relation of political power to sacrificial practice; the Promethean myth as the foundation story of sacrificial practice; representations of sacrifice found on Greek vases; the technique and anatomy of sacrifice; the interaction of image, language, and ritual; the position of women in sacrificial custom and the female ritual of the Thesmophoria; the mythical status of wolves in Greece and their relation to the sacrifice of domesticated animals; the role and significance of food-related ritual in Homer and Hesiod; ancient Greek perceptions of Scythian sacrificial rites; and remnants of sacrificial ritual in modern Greek practices.

The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks

Religion & Spirituality

Jean-Pierre Vernant has profoundly transformed our perceptions of ancient Greece. Published in 1991, this collection of nineteen essays probes deeply into themes of enduring interest-death, the body, the soul, the individual, and relations between mortals and immortals; the mask, the mirror, the image, and the imagination; the self and the other, and, more broadly, the concept of otherness itself, or "alterity"

Mortals and Immortals

History & Criticism

Princeton University Press

Jean-Pierre Vernant has profoundly transformed our perceptions of ancient Greece. Published in 1991, this collection of nineteen essays probes deeply into themes of enduring interest--death, the body, the soul, the individual, and relations between mortals and immortals; the mask, the mirror, the image, and the imagination; the self and the other, and, more broadly, the concept of otherness itself, or "alterity."

Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays

A classic work that rereads questions of "muthos" and "logos" in multifaceted contexts.When Jean-Pierre Vernant first published Myth and Thought among the Greeks in 1965, it transformed the field of ancient Greek scholarship, calling forth a new way to think about Greek myth and thought. In eighteen essays―three of which, along with a new preface, are translated into English for the first time―Vernant freed the subject of ancient Greece from its philological chains and reread the questions of "muthos" and "logos" within multifaced and transdisciplinary contexts―of religion, ritual, and art, philosophy, science, social and economic institutions, and historical psychology. A major contribution to both the humanities and the social sciences, Myth and Thought among the Greeks aims to come to terms with a single, essential question: How were individual persons in ancient Greece inseparable from a social and cultural environment of which they were simultaneously the creators and products? Seven themes organize this stellar work―from "Myth Structures" and "Mythic Aspects of Memory and Time" to "The Organization of Space," "Work and Technological Thought," and "Personal Identity and Religion." A master storyteller, an innovative, precise, and original thinker, Vernant continues to change the narratives we tell about the histories of civilizations and the histories of human beings in their individual and collective identities.

Myth and Thought Among the Greeks (English and French Edition)

Routledge& Kegan Paul

Jean-Pierre Vernant's concise, brilliant essay on the origins of Greek thought relates the cultural achievement of the ancient Greeks to their physical and social environment and shows that what they believed in was inseparable from the way they lived. The emergence of rational thought, Vernant claims, is closely linked to the advent of the open-air politics that characterized life in the Greek polis. 
Vernant points out that when the focus of Mycenaean society gave way to the agora, the change had profound social and cultural implications. "Social experience could become the object of pragmatic thought for the Greeks," he writes, "because in the city-state it lent itself to public debate. The decline of myth dates from the day the first sages brought human order under discussion and sought to define it.... Thus evolved a strictly political thought, separate from religion, with its own vocabulary, concepts, principles, and theoretical aims."

The Origins of Greek Thought

Cornell University Press

Myth and Society in Ancient Greece

BRANCH LINE

In this groundbreaking study, Jean Pierre-Vernant delineates a compelling new vision of ancient Greece. Myth and Society in Ancient Greece takes us far from the calm and familiar images of Polykleitos and the Parthenon to reveal a fundamentally other culture: one of slavery, of masks and death, of scapegoats, of ritual hunting and ecstasies.Vernant's provocative discussion of various institutions and practices including war, marriage, and sacrifice details the complex intersection of the religious, social, and political structures of ancient Greece. The book concludes with Vernant's authoritative genealogy of the study of myth from antiquity to structuralism and beyond.

Zone Books

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Books by Vernant, Jean-Pierre

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Vernant, Jean-Pierre. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Ancestor of the West : Writing, Reasoning, and Religion in Mesopotamia, Elam, and Greece

Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (European Philosophy and the Human Sciences)

The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks

Mortals and Immortals

Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays

Myth and Thought Among the Greeks (English and French Edition)

The Origins of Greek Thought

The Origins of Greek Thought

Myth and Society in Ancient Greece

Myth and Society in Ancient Greece