Cyrus H. Gordon Short Quotes

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Homer and Bible... towered above their predecessors and contemporaries.

Cyrus H. Gordon
The nomadic Semite... roves as a herdsman, partaking of Allah's hospitality.

Cyrus H. Gordon
Out of the Armana Age synthesis emerged the earliest traditions of Israel and Greece.

Cyrus H. Gordon
Traders (like the Phoenicians) carried their methods as well as their wares to Europe by ship.

Cyrus H. Gordon
When the characters of epic and heroic saga are on significant missions, they are led divinely.

Cyrus H. Gordon
The [Judaic] Patriarchs are depicted as Arameans as long as they remained in their native lands.

Cyrus H. Gordon
The notion of a language of the gods appears in Sanskrit, Greek, Old Norse and Hittite cultures.

Cyrus H. Gordon
By examining the pottery on any given site you can tell during which periods it has been occupied.

Cyrus H. Gordon
When a new religion supplants an old religion, the gods of the old often survive as the demons of the new.

Cyrus H. Gordon
The competent archeologist can date pottery much as some of us can date cars or dresses of our own century.

Cyrus H. Gordon
The priestly guilds were highly mobile, with the result that cultic practices crossed ethnic lines over wide areas.

Cyrus H. Gordon
The Sabbath, perhaps the most important labour legislation next to the abolition of slavery, is a Hebrew institution.

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
For every mound excavated in the Near East, a hundred remain untouched.... most of the excavated mounds have been dug only in small part.

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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
Historical, sociological, literary, linguistic, archeological and other techniques must be brought to bear when they are applicable to the material at hand.

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.

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.

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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
Solomon was a 'copper king', and all along that Araba, on both sides, we found many copper mines and smelting stations, all attributable to Solomon and his immediate successors.

Cyrus H. Gordon
Battles ended with sunset or dusk; so heroes, on special occasions when they needed more time, were vouchsafed victory by the stoppage of the sun in Greek as well as Hebrew saga.

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.

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.

Cyrus H. Gordon
It seems strange that so many generations of Old Testament scholars, trained in Greek as well as Hebrew literature, have managed to keep their Greek and Hebrew studies rigidly compartmentalised.

Cyrus H. Gordon
That Homeric epic and the earliest Hebrew poetry were the results of long and rich developments should have been apparent to anyone who realizes that artistic perfection is never created ex nihilo.

Cyrus H. Gordon