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Greek Culture first global cultureGreek culture first global culture
Exploring Hellenic influences on Asia, Dr Hyun Jin Kim reveals the 'heirs' to the Greek political and cultural tradition were far beyond Europe's borders.
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- Hellenism's impact on Asia and the Islamic world was the subject of the latest history seminar organised by GOCMV last week, with Seoul-born Dr Hyun Jin Kim revealing the lesser-known facts of ancient Greece's relationship to Asiatic cultures.
In his presentation in Melbourne, Dr Kim unveiled the 'heirs' to the Greek political and cultural tradition were far beyond Europe's borders - from the diffusion of Alexander romances in medieval Eurasia, to the impact of Hellenic traditions on India and East Asia, along with the fusion of Greek, Iranian and Indian cultural influences which gave rise to Gandhara Buddhist art. The essence of his presentation was that the influence of Greek civilisation was never confined to Western Europe.
"The spread of Hellenistic culture into Inner Asia and India in the fourth to first centuries BC brought about a remarkable fusion of Asian and Greek cultures, which continues to impact on the lives of all Asians," said Dr Kim.
"Even China, long thought to be isolated from the rest of Eurasia, was not immune to Greek influence. Greek culture was indeed the first global culture."
The Oxford University-trained academic (now lecturing at the University of Melbourne) said that traditional ideas of Greek cultural influence being largely confined to Europe needed to be rethought.
"The civilisations of the world in recorded history never existed in splendid isolation. It wasn't just medieval Europeans who eagerly embraced the Hellenic legacy of Alexander and his successors. In fact Islamised Alexander romances were being written all over the Muslim world during the Middle Ages."
In a detailed and passionate account of the precedents set by ancient Greece to non-European and non-western cultures, Dr Kim spoke of the importance of the Classics and Greek history as "relevant not just to a few, an arguably ever-shrinking group of devotees in universities in Europe and the US, but to a potential future audience numbering - let's say optimistically three billion - in Asia and Africa".
Dr Kim said it was vital "to overcome the insularity that has far too often become associated with the Classics and by illuminating the interconnectivity of the Eurasian world in antiquity and the critical role of Greco-Roman civilisation within it, reiterate the fact that the Classics are relevant to the modern world, precisely because it is the heritage not just of the West but the whole civilised world of Eurasia".
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Fazit:
Jeder Mensch ist seit langer Zeit schon (zumindest) Kulturgrieche.
Etwaige Erklärungsversuche eigenständiger Kulturen wären nichts anderes denn Untergruppierungen mit einem gewissen nationalem Touch.
Wir alle nehmen es gerne zur Kenntnis und akzeptieren, damit wären irreleitende Terrorreligionen überflüssig, die dem Menschen seit Jahrhunderten einen extremen Schaden zufügen (--> siehe hierzu hochaktuell: der ISLAM mit seinem Musterbeispiel des Islamischen Staates, oder die islamische Diktatur Islamische Republik Iran, oder Islamische Republik Pakistan, Afghanistan, ...).
Alles überflüssige Politreligionen, die den Menschen zu unterdrücken und dumm halten.
The body in ancient greek artReview: Defining Beauty – The Body In Ancient Greek Art
Wednesday 6th May 2015
Marble statue of a discus-thrower by Myron. Roman copy of a bronze Greek original of the 5th century BC.
- THE peerless British Museum under director Neil McGregor shows how Western art and culture was shaped by Ancient Greece Defining Beauty: The Body In Ancient Greek Art
A bronze, Hellenistic or Roman replica after a bronze original from the second quarter or the end of the 4th century BC.
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Neil McGregor is one of the most distinguished and influential Scots of our time. After ten brilliant years as director of the National Gallery in London, he could have rested on his laurels, but went on instead to become director of the British Museum where his 14 year tenure has been even more distinguished. The BM is a huge, unwieldy organisation, a supertanker among museums, but he has steered it deftly from the dangerous shoals of dowdy neglect to the wide, deep waters of international recognition. He is passionate in his belief that our museums are public property, a vital part of our shared imaginative and intellectual capital, and has now extended that idea to present the British Museum as a great international public property, a world museum. It is an extraordinary achievement. Nor would it have been possible if his vision were not matched by an acute political sense. Who else would have had a major exhibition on the walls restating Germany’s centrality in the history of European culture when Angela Merkel came to call? But that sounds opportunistic and that would be out of character. He is more subtle and a deeper thinker. Now he has announced his retirement characteristically against the background of one of the most important exhibitions of his career, Defining Beauty: the Body in Ancient Greek Art. It is not an exhibition he has curated himself, but is plainly shaped by his vision. No dry as dust art historian, he has constantly demonstrated that what justifies the existence of museums is not simply the preservation of the past, but the agency that the art they hold has in the present. That belief has galvanised the British Museum and it is typical of him that this exhibition presents one of the grandest moments in human history, yet is also urgently topical. The Greeks saw their gods in human form and this was the key to seeing divine beauty in ordinary humanity. In other ancient cultures nakedness was shameful. For the Greeks, the unadorned human body became a vehicle for ideals and a vision of human possibility. Bequeathed to us, the value thus placed upon our humanity has shaped much that has mattered most in Western history. Even Christianity, Hellenistic in so many ways, has at its heart the idea of god in human form.
It was the great sculptors, Polykleitos, Myron, and Phidias, sculptor of the Parthenon, who laid the foundations of a human imagery that was wholly new then, but endures to this day. This triumvirate opens the show, Phidias represented by Ilissos, the beautiful river god from the west pediment of the Parthenon, Myron by a Roman copy of his Discobolos, or discus thrower, and Polykleitos by a 20th-century reconstruction of the lost male figure he designed with mathematically perfect proportions. These figures are very grand, but even so, a rare, full-size bronze outshines them. We are used to seeing ancient sculpture in marble and mostly too in Roman copies of Greek originals. The vivid naturalism of this athlete from the classic period of Greek art shows how much we miss, knowing only marble. Greek painting was equally vivid. Almost nothing survives, but some sense of what it was like is provided by vase painting, everyday articles on which art penetrated every corner of life and in which almost every aspect of life was in turn reflected. Greek sculpture was itself painted, however, but it is hard to believe that it looked quite so much like fairground decoration as attempts to recreate the original painted finish here suggest.
The colour was part of the Greek artists’ ambition to create a living likeness. Nevertheless, in Greek art monumental figures were not strongly individualised. The point of this is best seen in the long procession that once marched round the frieze of the Parthenon, Athenians on horseback and on foot on their way to some great civic festival. Several blocks from the frieze are presented separately and, seen close-to, it is clear how their individuality was less important than the fact that these people were part of the greater community that was the democratic city. Here, as in so many ways, the Greeks set a precedent which still matters profoundly. They gave form to the need to find the critical balance between individual and community, something we struggle to maintain in a world of spiralling inequality. The Greek model has been perverted by despots in the past. The Nazis thought they loved Greek idealism, for instance, but they also missed the point, for in its richness this exhibition shows how the Greeks had a humane vision of the whole of humanity, of the human race, not the master race, and indeed there are sympathetic images here of people from Sub-Saharan Africa.
The Greek ideal was originally military; men had to be fit to fight in an age of constant warfare. Heracles was half man, half god and so magnificently personified this heroic, masculine ideal, but the beauty of the wine god Dionysos was feminised and indeed men and women are here in equal strength. Women mostly stayed at home, but the goddess of love Aphrodite could be represented naked. She was, magnificently, and the female form became as celebrated as the male. Indeed, as you enter the exhibition you are greeted by a naked, over-life sized marble Aphrodite crouching with her back to you. Fluttering drapery carved with magical delicacy both conceals and reveals the female form of other monumental figures. Smaller figures, however, present ordinary women in a delightful, everyday light. This domestic world and strikingly too the world of children all found a place in Greek art. Indeed, images of children in sculpture and painted on tiny vases made for a child’s first taste of wine are the first celebrations anywhere of childhood observed in all its charm and innocence. The darker side of human behaviour was represented too, however, in images of battle, but also in satyrs and centaurs, their antics not to be condemned but enjoyed, as images of nymphs and satyrs having fun make clear. The erotic was part of life, both homosexual and heterosexual. When you drained your wine cup you might well find erotic images at the bottom to encourage the party mood.
But after these charming diversions, the climax of the exhibition dramatically drives home the main point. The figure of Dionysos from the east pediment of the Parthenon is set alongside the Belvedere Torso from the Vatican. The conjunction of these two figures is extraordinary anyway, but that is not all. The explosive energy of the Belvedere Torso inspired some of Michelangelo’s mightiest creations and so here alongside these two sculptural giants is his drawing for the figure in the Sistine Chapel of Adam stirring into heroic life at God’s command. In this drawing, by some extraordinary imaginative osmosis Michelangelo effectively recreates the art of the Parthenon which of course he had never seen.
At one level this exhibition could be seen as justifying McGregor’s argument that the British Museum is the best place for the Elgin Marbles. Only there can they be seen in this way as at the heart of world culture. No doubt that is true, but what this show does is far more important than join in an irritating local argument. At a time when humane Western values are under attack and, in adversity, we risk losing confidence in them, McGregor sets out for us, not only their origin, but their continuity, their place in the very wiring of the Western mind. There is nothing polemical here, however. The argument is from examples and that of course is uniquely what a great museum can do. It can give us the direct experience from which we learn without being told what to think. Brought together like this, all the wiring connected, their brilliance shines its light far beyond the walls of the museum.
- The ‘Ancient Greek Sandals’ That Celebrities Love
Spring time is here and sandals are the new must-have accessory, making an astonishing comeback. In ancient times sandals used to be a utilitarian type of shoe that would protect people’s feet while walking. However, throughout the centuries they became so much more, a sign of social status and fashion.
Even though sandals have become very common in modern times, they became immensely popular during the 60s. In 1968, Vogue printed a several-pages-long article, presenting Paco Rabanne’s sandal collection entitled “Laced All the Way.” Since then, sandals have not yet gone out of fashion, while they are reinvented every spring with different colors, designs and materials.
Pantelis Melissinos is a third generation sandalmaker based in downtown Athens. Celebrities such as The Beatles, Maria Callas, Jackie Kennedy-Onassis, Rudolf Nureyev, Kate Moss and Sophia Loren have all visited his shop to find the perfect summer shoes.
Melissinos’ shop first opened in 1920 by Giorgos Melissinos, Pantelis’ grandfather, who used to make leather boots and women’s shoes. Later, his father, Stavros, took over the family business and turned to manufacturing sandals in the early 60s, when a British choreographer asked him to make some sandals for an ancient Greek performance she was staging. A few months later, all the shops in downtown Athens filled their windows with all types of sandals in order to attract the eager customers. Nowadays, Christina Martini also makes and sells her own collection of ancient Greek sandals. She started working at the famous fashion house Chloé, moved on to Louis Vuitton and Balenciaga, and in 2011 she was able to make her own line, Ancient Greek Sandals, and open a store in Corfu.
Martini’s sandals have become famous across the globe, while some of the greatest stars have stopped by her shop to buy a pair. Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow, Elle Macpherson, Rihanna and Sarah Jessica Parker are just some of the celebrities that fell in love with her creations. The collection concept comprises of simple and yet highly successful designs, made with top quality leather.
--> (The 'Ancient Greek Sandals' That Celebrities Love | GreekReporter.com)
theater, Demokratie, Achill, Archimedes, Alex, Asterix bei der Olympiade, das über 2000 jährige Zedernholz (das noch so konserviert ist, dass man es riechen kann, so erhalten ist weil, die Säulen so passgenau sitzen, dass das Holz bewahrt wurde) zwischen den Säulen in der Akropolis (ob die heutige Welt das mit modernen Mittel das nachmachen könnte...in 7 oder 8 Jahren sowas hinzustellen.?)
Alles und Jeder ist Assyrisch. Sogar Mustafas 3'er BMW.
