Search results for tag #ancientgreece
Long post [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
On a more uplifting note, my wife has a paper out in the latest issue of Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural, titled Aquatic Birds and the Liminality of the Sea in Greco-Roman Mythology:In the Greco-Roman worldview, the sea forms a permeable boundary between the realms of humans, the gods, and the dead. This article demonstrates that seabirds embody the connective role of the sea in Greco-Roman mythology. Seabirds nest on land, feed by diving into water, and fly in the air. Therefore, these birds are imagined connecting the world of mortals with that of the dead and the gods, and they illustrate the transitions humans live through in their interactions with the gods and their experience of death.Here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/2/article/979701
A disclaimer: my wife has been running a project on birds in ancient mythology for many years, and I've been involved in it since 2018 or so (in other words I'm more than a bit biased here, for several reasons). For my part I've been using qualitative data analysis techniques like Formal Concept Analysis and Rough Set Theory to explore datasets she and her students have been creating using D'Arcy Thompson's Glossary of Greek Birds as a focal point. There's a page about the FCA analysis on the linked site.
I find it fascinating that some of the arguments about the role birds play in Greek myths become visible in such analyses. For instance, one of the things we've observed in the data is that the words/concepts "female" and "metamorphosis" appearing in a myth fragment are strongly associated with some form of "diving into the sea" also appearing (the metamorphoses in question often being death-related, and diving into the sea, as the above paper argues, represents death to the ancient Greeks).
#writing #AcademicPublishing #AcademicWriting #AncientGreece #GreekMythology #birds #death #FormalConceptAnalysis #FCA #RoughSetTheory #RST
Hyperion's name comes from two Greek words that together mean "watcher from above" or "he who goes above".
Hyperion was a Titan, the ancient Greek gods that preceded the Olympian gods like Zeus, Athena, etc. Prometheus, Atlas, and the word Titan itself are frequently used to name tech projects. A fun web search is "COMPANY_NAME Titan"; try it. It seems lost on these folks that the Titans were deposed by the Olympian gods and condemned to an eternity in Tartarus, a kind of hell. In other words they're the loser gods, if you want to be simplistic and vulgar about it.
It is believed that one of Hyperion's offspring, Helios, as well as all of Helios's offspring, were imagined as being black-skinned.
My wife, who is a classicist, and I regularly shake our heads about the names of tech projects like this. I always ask her for the dirt on the name, and she always delivers (as in the above, which I credit to her).
#DataCenters #Cloud #AI #Facebook #Meta #Hyperion #GreekGods #AncientGreece #Titans #Classics
Beach vacations only became popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries as part of the lifestyle of the wealthy in Western countries. Early Europeans, and especially the ancient Greeks, thought the beach was a place of hardship and death. As a seafaring people, they mostly lived on the coastline, yet they feared the sea and thought that an agricultural lifestyle was safer and more respectable.From The beach wasn’t always a vacation destination - for the ancient Greeks, it was a scary place: https://theconversation.com/the-beach-wasnt-always-a-vacation-destination-for-the-ancient-greeks-it-was-a-scary-place-259356
A post in The Conversation by my favorite classicist (my wife!)
In ancient Greek mythology, the Titans were a group of former gods defeated and deposed by the Olympian gods led by Zeus. In defeat they were banished to Tartarus, an abyss of torment and suffering. Some of the more well-known Titans, like Atlas and Prometheus, were condemned to eternal torture.
Odd to choose that group in particular as a source of names.