Henri Frankfort Bücher

The people in ancient times the phenomenal world was teeming with life; the thunderclap, the sudden shadow, the unknown and eerie clearing in the wood, all were living things. This unabridged edition traces the fascinating history of thought from the pre-scientific, personal concept of a "humanized" world to the achievement of detached intellectual reasoning.The authors describe and analyze the spiritual life of three ancient the Egyptians, whose thinking was profoundly influenced by the daily rebirth of the sun and the annual rebirth of the Nile; the Mesopotamians, who believed the stars, moon, and stones were all citizens of a cosmic state; and the Hebrews, who transcended prevailing mythopoeic thought with their cosmogony of the will of God. In the concluding chapter the Frankforts show that the Greeks, with their intellectual courage, were the first culture to discover a realm of speculative thought in which myth was overcome.

Traces the development of Mesopotamian art from Sumerian times to the late Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods. This text also covers the art and architecture of Asia Minor and the Hittites, of the Levant in the second millennium BC, of the Aramaeans and Phoenicians in Syria, and of Ancient Persia.

Publicado originalmente en 1951, este libro es una investigación erudita y rigurosa, a la vez fenomenológica e histórica, sobre la institución de la realeza en las civilizaciones que florecieron en el Próximo Oriente durante la Antigüedad. Los textos primitivos y las ilustraciones de las obras de arte que acompañan a la obra apoyan las conclusiones del autor acerca de las estructuras de pensamiento con que el hombre pregriego captó su mundo y que constituyen una realización tan inaudita como sus monumentos más tangibles.