American - Historian | 1946 -
I write in two very different places: my desk in Palo Alto, California, is piled high with myriad jumbled books and papers whose stratigraphy is a challenge. Summers in Bozeman, Montana, I write in a spare space, surrounded by interesting rocks and fossils instead of books, on an old oak table with nothing but my laptop.
Adrienne Mayor
ChallengeSpaceInterestingRocks
An ancient Scythian nomad skeleton buried with an eagle was reportedly excavated near Aktobe Gorge, Kazakhstan. Ancient petroglyphs in the Altai region depict eagle hunters, and inscribed Chinese stone reliefs show eagles perched on the arms of hunters in tunics, trousers, and boots, identified as northern nomads (1st to 2nd century A.D.).
EagleBootsStoneEaglesAncient
Male buerkitshi are certainly more common than females today, although eagle hunting has always been open to interested girls. Archaeology suggests that eagle huntresses were probably more common in ancient times.
TodayEagleHuntingMoreOpenBeen
The strong bond of sisterhood was a famous trait in classical art and literature about Amazons. But it was modern people who interpreted that as a sexual preference for women. That started in the 20th century. The Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva declared that Amazons were symbolic of lesbianism in antiquity.
WomenArtPeopleBondStrongFamous
I've always been interested in oral traditions and mythological stories and legends from antiquity that have to do with nature, attempts to explain mysterious or puzzling, or very striking phenomena from nature. Things that people observed or heard about in nature.
NaturePeopleLegendsMysterious
In April 2001, I visited Big Bone Lick State Park in Kentucky. The heaps of mastodon and other large skeletons that used to loom out of the brackish backwaters along the Ohio River here are long gone, though the occasional big bone sometimes comes to light.
LightRiverLongSometimesApril
Historical records show that Abenakis and other Natives encountered European explorers and traders in Canada looking for sources of ivory to compete with the Russian trade in Siberian fossil mammoth ivory - these traders routinely asked about ivory 'horns' and teeth.
LookingCanadaTeethHistoricalShow
Just as a fossil is 'petrified time,' so is an ancient artifact or text.
TimeAncientJustTextPetrified
Pictures of Amazons on vase paintings always show them as beautiful, active, spirited, courageous, and brave.
BeautifulBravePicturesActiveShow
The Romans had chosen Pergamon to be the capital of their new province. But by 88 B.C., most of western Asia was allied with King Mithradates, who had taken over the royal palace in Pergamon for his own headquarters.
KingNewRoyalOverPalaceOwn
As early as 1681-82, a group of Abenakis had accompanied the French explorer La Salle on his historic voyage down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. By 1700, many Abenaki and Iroquois Indians spoke French and had some European education, and some were literate in French and Latin.
EducationEarlyDownGroupMexico
I think that the Greeks were extremely ambivalent about the stories of Amazons: they found them both thrilling and rather daunting at the same time.
TimeThinkSameGreeksFoundRather
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Adrienne Mayor quotes