“[...] Only historians make divisions; time does not."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Book 1, Ch.8, Part 1, Segment 1, 1935
"Nevertheless, what wealth these old Egyptians must have had, what power and skill, even in the infancy of history, to bring these vast stones six hundred miles, to raise some of them, weighing many tons, to a height of half a thousand feet, and to pay, or even to feed, the hundred thousand slaves who toiled for twenty years on these Pyramids! Herodotus has preserved for us an inscription that he found on one pyramid, recording the quantity of radishes, garlic and onions consumed by the workmen who built it; these things, too, had to have their immortality. (Diodorus Siculus, who must always be read sceptically, writes: “An inscription on the larger pyramid . . . sets forth that on vegetables and purgatives for the workmen there were paid out over 1600 talents”— i.e M $i6,ooo,ooo.) Despite these familiar friends [that is, the Pyramids] we go away disappointed; there is something barbarically primitive— or barbarically modern— in this brute hunger for size. It is the memory and imagination of the beholder that, swollen with history, make these monuments great; in themselves they are a little ridiculous— vainglorious tombs in which the dead sought eternal life. Perhaps pictures have too much ennobled them: photography can catch everything but dirt, and enhances man-made objects with noble vistas of land and sky. The sunset at Gizeh is greater than the Pyramids."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Book 1, Ch.8, Part 1, Segment 1, 1935 (italics added)
No comments:
Post a Comment