The Flood Myths of Early China
Title | The Flood Myths of Early China PDF eBook |
Author | Mark Edward Lewis |
Publisher | State University of New York Press |
Total Pages | 258 |
Release | 2012-02-01 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 0791482227 |
Early Chinese ideas about the construction of an ordered human space received narrative form in a set of stories dealing with the rescue of the world and its inhabitants from a universal flood. This book demonstrates how early Chinese stories of the re-creation of the world from a watery chaos provided principles underlying such fundamental units as the state, lineage, the married couple, and even the human body. These myths also supplied a charter for the major political and social institutions of Warring States (481–221 BC) and early imperial (220 BC–AD 220) China. In some versions of the tales, the flood was triggered by rebellion, while other versions linked the taming of the flood with the creation of the institution of a lineage, and still others linked the taming to the process in which the divided principles of the masculine and the feminine were joined in the married couple to produce an ordered household. While availing themselves of earlier stories and of central religious rituals of the period, these myths transformed earlier divinities or animal spirits into rulers or ministers and provided both etiologies and legitimation for the emerging political and social institutions that culminated in the creation of a unitary empire.
The Flood Myths of Early China
Title | The Flood Myths of Early China PDF eBook |
Author | Mark Edward Lewis |
Publisher | SUNY Press |
Total Pages | 264 |
Release | 2006-06-01 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780791466643 |
Explores how the flood myths of early China provided a template for that society's major social and political institutions.
The Flood Myths of Early China
Title | The Flood Myths of Early China PDF eBook |
Author | Mark Edward Lewis |
Publisher | SUNY Press |
Total Pages | 256 |
Release | 2006-02-02 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 9780791466636 |
Explores how the flood myths of early China provided a template for that society’s major social and political institutions.
The Flood Myth
Title | The Flood Myth PDF eBook |
Author | Alan Dundes |
Publisher | Univ of California Press |
Total Pages | 468 |
Release | 1988 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 9780520063532 |
The Construction of Space in Early China
Title | The Construction of Space in Early China PDF eBook |
Author | Mark Edward Lewis |
Publisher | State University of New York Press |
Total Pages | 514 |
Release | 2012-02-01 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 0791482499 |
This book examines the formation of the Chinese empire through its reorganization and reinterpretation of its basic spatial units: the human body, the household, the city, the region, and the world. The central theme of the book is the way all these forms of ordered space were reshaped by the project of unification and how, at the same time, that unification was constrained and limited by the necessary survival of the units on which it was based. Consequently, as Mark Edward Lewis shows, each level of spatial organization could achieve order and meaning only within an encompassing, superior whole: the body within the household, the household within the lineage and state, the city within the region, and the region within the world empire, while each level still contained within itself the smaller units from which it was formed. The unity that was the empire's highest goal avoided collapse back into the original chaos of nondistinction only by preserving within itself the very divisions on the basis of family or region that it claimed to transcend.
The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood
Title | The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood PDF eBook |
Author | David R. Montgomery |
Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company |
Total Pages | 305 |
Release | 2012-08-27 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 0393083969 |
How the mystery of the Bible's greatest story shaped geology: a MacArthur Fellow presents a surprising perspective on Noah's Flood. In Tibet, geologist David R. Montgomery heard a local story about a great flood that bore a striking similarity to Noah’s Flood. Intrigued, Montgomery began investigating the world’s flood stories and—drawing from historic works by theologians, natural philosophers, and scientists—discovered the counterintuitive role Noah’s Flood played in the development of both geology and creationism. Steno, the grandfather of geology, even invoked the Flood in laying geology’s founding principles based on his observations of northern Italian landscapes. Centuries later, the founders of modern creationism based their irrational view of a global flood on a perceptive critique of geology. With an explorer’s eye and a refreshing approach to both faith and science, Montgomery takes readers on a journey across landscapes and cultures. In the process we discover the illusive nature of truth, whether viewed through the lens of science or religion, and how it changed through history and continues changing, even today.
Art and Immortality in the Ancient Near East
Title | Art and Immortality in the Ancient Near East PDF eBook |
Author | Mehmet-Ali Ataç |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 303 |
Release | 2018-03-08 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 1107154952 |
Far from being a Judeo-Christian invention, apocalyptic thought had its roots in the ancient Near East and was expressed in its art.