Bøger af Mary Settegast

In his Timaeus and Critias dialogues, Plato wrote of two ancient civilizations that flourished more than 9,000 years before his time. Socrates accepted the account as true, and modern archaeological techniques may yet prove him right.In Plato, Prehistorian, Mary Settegast takes us from the cave paintings of Lascaux to the shrines of Çatalhöyük, demonstrating correspondences both to Plato's tale and to the mystery religions of antiquity. She then traces the mid-seventh millennium impulse that revitalized the spiritual life of Çatalhöyük and spread agriculture from Iran to the Greek Peninsula--at precisely the time given by Aristotle for the legendary Persian prophet Zarathustra, for whom the cultivation of the earth was a religious imperative.This new edition of Mary Settegast's ground-breaking synthesis of classical and archaeological scholarship features an appendix by Alistair Coombs on the recent excavations at Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey, which have upended the conventional view of the rise of civilization.

The tumultuous changes that took place around the Mediterranean in 6300 BC are seen here through the eyes of a boy who was born into a family of hunter-foragers in northern Turkey. While still young, Tulirane is taken from his family and forced to live as a slave among the obsidian masters of Çatalhöyük (Bhelsakros in our story), a "town" of some 8,000 people that has only become more baffling as archaeological technologies have become more precise.As Tuli moves from one world into another-from the open wilderness that sheltered the foragers into the closed, white-plastered chambers that sheltered the townsfolk of Çatalhöyük-he becomes acutely aware of the differences in how the people in each of these two worlds live and die, and what they hold dear.Mary Settegast has written several non-fiction books about archaeology and cultural change, but this is her first novel. It is intended not only for young adults but for all ages who are interested in Old World prehistory and the ultimate triumph of agriculture over hunting and gathering.