By "Us", if you mean mankind then our oldest "books" are probably the Vedas — the Santana Dharma scriptures. Sanatana incidentally means "eternal" & Sanatana Dharma is the original name for Hinduism, Dharma loosely translated as "Law" - a law that can be applied to philosophy, ethics, logic, physics, cosmos, chemistry, medical etc. But surprisingly & quite disappointingly, the hackernews crowd is quite ignorant of such facts.
What Do Our Oldest Books Say About Us?
21–25 of 25 posts
Re: What Do Our Oldest Books Say About Us?
#22The title of article was more interesting than it's contents.
its contents
Re: What Do Our Oldest Books Say About Us?
#23Thought they meant ancient books from the whole world from all the old civilizations like Egyptians, Roman etc.
Re: What Do Our Oldest Books Say About Us?
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess that's true, but IMHO Beowulf tells you nothing about what those ancient people felt. Not a single one of the characters has any inner life or motivation, it's just a chronicle of monster-slaying. You might as well read a poorly written comic book.
What? This is entirely untrue, and I feel bad that you had a teacher or reading experience that did not focus on how much inner life, motivation, and emotion are in this poem. I have had the exact opposite experience: people think of Beowulf as a monster-fighting action poem and are disappointed or surprised when they read it and discover most of the content is songs, conversation, historical reminiscences, and not-f…
Maybe I'm not explaining myself well -- the passages you've quoted above do tell us in very poetic language that some character is sad that their sons died in battle, but they don't show that, really. As a reader, we have no access to their interior mental state, we just get the narrator's report that Herebald carries "heart-sorrow" (great word!).
Something like this article might explain the distinction I'm not articulating correctly: http://nautil.us/issue/65/in-plain-sight/why-doesnt-ancient-...
Re: What Do Our Oldest Books Say About Us?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was also expecting it to be about much older texts, but I guess that was a reading comprehension failure on my part since it did say "books" and not, for example, "stone tablets". As someone who has been (very, very slowly) reading the translations of ancient Sumerian texts, I was kinda hoping this would be about those. But Sumerians didn't write "books".
You got any suggestions for the Sumerian works? I've read The Literature of Ancient Sumer , and made it through, but didn't enjoy it at all and nothing stuck. Attempted From Distant Days (Akkadian literature) but just couldn't do it. Book was poorly put together and it was pretty much the same stuff as the Sumerian book I'd just finished, which wasn't a huge surprise but man that book is bad. I read all three volumes…
I've listed the books I have below. I haven't read much of them yet (its slow going). The one that I'm currently in the process of reading is "Myths from Mesopotamia" by Stephanie Dalley. I like it so far, but its not an easy read. It gives you a relatively direct translation of the Sumerian texts, so there are many missing fragments (tablets found in different cities tended to have slightly different versions of the same stories, so you couldn't use them to complete missing bits from tablets from another city). This makes it time consuming to read, but does give you an accurate picture.
The books I have and am slowly trying to get through are:
"Myths from Mesopotamia" by Stephanie Dalley
"History Begins At Sumer" by Samuel Noah Kramer
"Guide To Understanding Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Cananite And Phoenician Tablets, Slabs, Symbols And Cuneiform Inscriptions" by Maximiliien de Lafayette
"Cuneiform" by Irving Fincel and Jonathan Taylor
"Sumerian Mythology" by Samuel Noah Kramer
"Introduction to Sumerian Grammar" by Daniel Foxvog
The Cuneiform book was fun (if you're interested in Cuneiform) as cuneiform is easy to write and I was able to write my name phonetically :)