INTS 407 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Paradise Lost, Classical Antiquity, Pishon
26 Aug 2016
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Document Summary
Medieval vision of world permeated with myths of magical creatures and places. Greco-roman philosophers had posited a logical view of the center of the universe (the earth) as a sphere. Columbus"s theories are the meeting point between this medieval mythical geography and the more scientific one of classical antiquity that had recently been re-discovered (p. 14) For bedouin nomads, paradise is a garden with fruits and rivers of milk and honey (makes sense because they lived in a desert) For ancient persians the first man lived in a garden. The term paradise is derived from the greek paradeisos which derives from the persian pairi-daeza which means boundary surrounding a garden . Myth of a return to a paradise lost found in many accounts of origins of man. Greek golden age : everything grew effortlessly, animals and humans coexisted in peace and mutual sharing, human beings would eventually return to this initial age.
