Quotes About Ancient

Christianity must be divine," he says, in one of his most unmeasured sallies, "since it has lasted 1,700 years despite the fact that it is so full of villainy and nonsense."79 He shows how almost all ancient peoples had similar myths, and hastily concludes that the myths are thereby proved to have been the inventions of priests: "the first divine was the first rogue who met the first fool.

The gods and myths of Babylon and Nineveh are in many cases modifications or developments of Sumerian theology;

The farther back we trace the Egyptian language the more affinities it reveals with the Semitic tongues of the Near East.

Egyptian engineering was superior to anything known to the Greeks or Romans, or to Europe before the Industrial Revolution;

Sostratus built his great lighthouse of white marble, five hundred feet high, as a beacon to all ancient mariners of the Mediterranean, and as one of the seven wonders of the world.

the fine or composition-money for killing a king was 30,000 thrimsas ($13,000);

An ancient critic spoke of him as "moderate to excess.

The ancient [pagan] faith was diseased at the bottom and at the top. The deification of the emperors revealed not how much the upper classes thought of their rulers, but how little they thought of their gods.

Babylonian mathematics rested on a division of the circle into 360 degrees

Astronomy was the special science of the Babylonians, for which they were famous throughout the ancient world.

They measured time by a clepsydra or water-clock, and a sun-dial, and these seem to have been not merely developed but invented by them.

The division of our month into four weeks, of our clock into twelve hours (instead of twenty-four), of our hour into sixty minutes, and of our minute into sixty seconds, are unsuspected Babylonian vestiges in our contemporary world.XVI

Aristotle argued for slavery as natural and inevitable

To the Romans, the Greeks and the Jews Sumeria was unknown.

No people, ancient or modern," said Max Müller, "has given women so high a legal status as did the inhabitants of the Nile Valley."97

The oldest written records known to us are Sumerian;

Winter reveals the massive, complex, muscular organization of the ancient oak. Like an old man stripped of his Savile Row, tailored suit - no less impressive in his mature nakedness.

In my mind Greece is reduced to one vast pile of shattered marble, shimmering in a heat aze.

Modern formulations are necessary even in defense of very ancient truths. Not because of any alleged anachronism in the old ideas – the Beatitudes remain the essential statements of the Western code – but because the idiom of life is always changing

whereas an ancient text may seem inscrutable, the idea that it may contain a mystery, an ancient cooking pot can speak for itself.

Some man in China say th' truth comes out this', he said unwrapping an ancient, oil-slick Remington automatic shotgun, its barrel chopped off a few millimetres in front of the battered forestock.

This was a savage whose image refused to blend with that ancient picture of a boy in shorts and a shirt.

the ancient mountain kingdom of Abyssinia.

20. He is not born, nor does He ever die; after having been, He again ceases not to be; Unborn, Eternal, Changeless and Ancient, He is not killed when the body is killed.