Cyrus H. Gordon quotes - page 3

Prior to 1952, when M. Ventris first published his decipherment of the 'Linear B' tablets from Crete and Greece, showing that they were Greek, everyone assumed that Hebrew was recorded in writing before Greek. But now... we are reading Linear B Greek texts, written before the birth of Abraham. (Cyrus H. Gordon)
Heroic epic and saga (Indic as well as Greek and Hebrew, etc.) combine action with genealogy. This is necessary because the action is performed by aristocrats who require genealogies. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
The priestly guilds were highly mobile, with the result that cultic practices crossed ethnic lines over wide areas. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
When a new religion supplants an old religion, the gods of the old often survive as the demons of the new. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
Archeological discoveries at sites like Ugarit prevent us from regarding Greece as the hermetically sealed Olympian miracle, or Israel as the vacuum-packed miracle from Sinai. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
Despite the polytheism of the East Mediterranean nations, monotheistic trends were always present even in such crass polytheisms such as we find in Homer and in Egyptian literature. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
When Zeus' son Sarpedon meets his fate, Zeus expresses grief for his dead son by causing blood to rain (Iliad 16: 459-461). In Egypt, the function of rain is replaced by the Nile which fructifies the soil. Accordingly, the Biblical Plague of Blood (Exodus 7: 19-25) is the Egyptian equivalent of the bloody rainfall in the Iliad. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
The Samaritans (whose beginnings were pre-Josianic) have a Pentateuch quite similar to the familiar Jewish Pentateuch. ...our Pentateuchal text was fairly well established before the rift between the Samaritans and Judeans. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
Out of the Armana Age synthesis emerged the earliest traditions of Israel and Greece. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
It would be foolhardy to swell the pages of this book with an exhaustive list of Greco-Hebrew differences. Everyone knows that Homer is very different from the Bible. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
I hope that the reader will not regard the contents of this book as an escape from the present world but rather as a key part of it. (Cyrus H. Gordon)
Just as Mycenaean civilisation is a development of the Minoan, so too the Philistines who came to Palestine from Caphtor were an offshoot of the same general Aegean civilisation. ...until David's victories around 1000 B. C., the Philistines dominated the Hebrews, so that, militarily at least, the Davidic monarchy was the Hebrew response to the Philistine stimulus. ...the Achaeans, Trojans, Philistines and Hebrews during the closing centuries of the second millennium belonged to the same international complex of peoples, sharing many conventions and institutions, specifically in military matters. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
Babylonian mathematics and astronomy have left an indelible impression on our exact sciences. We still call some of the planets by their Babylonian names in translation. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
Homeric tradition has its own way of telling us that Minoan/Mycenaean civilisation was intertwined with the culture of the Semitic Phoenicians. Iliad 14: 321-322 makes Phoenix (named after the ancestor of the Phoenicians) the maternal grandfather of Minos. ...Archaeology bears out early cultural connections between the two. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
V. Bérard attributed the [Greece and Israel] links mainly to the role of the Phoenicians. P. Jensen explained matters through the diffusion of the Gilgamesh Epic. ...but their one-sidedness and exaggeration brought them, and indeed the problem itself, into disrepute among critical scholars. The history of the problem has been ably documented by W. Baumgartner... View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
The fitness (physical and moral) of kings were serious matters, for they were believed to bring on a corresponding state of land and people. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
The Conquest of Joshua could not have been a primitive assault, because a civilized land like Canaan with well-fortified cities could easily have repulsed an attack that was militarily naïve. ...Spies were sent to search out the land and lay the groundwork. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
Homer and Bible... towered above their predecessors and contemporaries. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
The incorporation of... earlier sources does not mean that the Pentateuch or Former Prophets is the work of an editor who pasted together various docuements. Once we view the work as a whole, we see that it is a fresh creation though not a creatio ex nihilo. The same holds for Homeric Epic that has been subjected to the same kinds of modern literary criticism. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
By examining the pottery on any given site you can tell during which periods it has been occupied. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
When the characters of epic and heroic saga are on significant missions, they are led divinely. (Cyrus H. Gordon)
The notion of a language of the gods appears in Sanskrit, Greek, Old Norse and Hittite cultures. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon
The incorporation of... earlier sources does not mean that the Pentateuch or Former Prophets is the work of an editor who pasted together various docuements. Once we view the work as a whole, we see that it is a fresh creation though not a creatio ex nihilo. View quote
Cyrus H. Gordon