Böcker av Adrienne Mayor

Traces the story of how ancient cultures envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices and human enhancements, sharing insights into how the mythologies of the past related to and shaped ancient machine innovations.

From acclaimed folklorist and historian Adrienne Mayor, an enchanting collection of the ancient myths that emerged out of the wonders-and disasters-of the natural worldMythopedia is a fun, fact-filled A-Z treasury of myths inspired by natural events. Bringing together fifty legends from antiquity to the present, this delightfully entertaining book takes you around the world to explore sunken kingdoms and lost cities, accursed mountains and treacherous terrains, and lethal lakes and singing sand dunes, explaining the historical background and latest science underlying each tale. As soon as humans invented language, they told stories to explain mysterious things they observed around them-on land, in the seas, and in the skies. Even though these tales are expressed in poetic or supernatural language, they contain surprisingly accurate insights and even eyewitness descriptions of catastrophic events millennia ago. Drawing on her unique insights as a pioneer in the exciting new field of geomythology, Adrienne Mayor describes how cultural memories of tsunamis, volcanic disasters, and other massive geological events can reach back thousands of years as the stories were preserved, elaborated, told, and retold across generations. She shows how geomythology is expanding our understanding of our planet's history over eons, revealing the human desire to explain nature and weave imaginative stories intertwined with keen observation, rational speculation, and memory. With captivating drawings by Michele Angel, Mythopedia is a compendium of many marvels, from the Hindu monkey god Hanuman and his army of bridge-building primates to the terrifying sand demon Shensha shen of China, the gnawing glaciers of Austria, and the vengeful fish-headed snake god Nyami Nyami of Africa's Zambezi River. Features a cloth cover with an elaborate foil-stamped design

The burnt-red badlands of Montana's Hell Creek are a vast graveyard of the Cretaceous dinosaurs that lived 68 million years ago. Those hills were, much later, also home to the Sioux, the Crows, and the Blackfeet, the first people to encounter the dinosaur fossils exposed by the elements. What did Native Americans make of these stone skeletons, and how did they explain the teeth and claws of gargantuan animals no one had seen alive? Did they speculate about their deaths? Did they collect fossils? Beginning in the East, with its Ice Age monsters, and ending in the West, where dinosaurs lived and died, this richly illustrated and elegantly written book examines the discoveries of enormous bones and uses of fossils for medicine, hunting magic, and spells. Well before Columbus, Native Americans observed the mysterious petrified remains of extinct creatures and sought to understand their transformation to stone. In perceptive creation stories, they visualized the remains of extinct mammoths, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and marine creatures as Monster Bears, Giant Lizards, Thunder Birds, and Water Monsters. Their insights, some so sophisticated that they anticipate modern scientific theories, were passed down in oral histories over many centuries. Drawing on historical sources, archaeology, traditional accounts, and extensive personal interviews, Adrienne Mayor takes us from Aztec and Inca fossil tales to the traditions of the Iroquois, Navajos, Apaches, Cheyennes, and Pawnees. Fossil Legends of the First Americans represents a major step forward in our understanding of how humans made sense of fossils before evolutionary theory developed.

The real history of the Amazons in war and loveAmazons-fierce warrior women dwelling on the fringes of the known world-were the mythic archenemies of the ancient Greeks. Heracles and Achilles displayed their valor in duels with Amazon queens, and the Athenians reveled in their victory over a powerful Amazon army. In historical times, Cyrus of Persia, Alexander the Great, and the Roman general Pompey tangled with Amazons.But just who were these bold barbarian archers on horseback who gloried in fighting, hunting, and sexual freedom? Were Amazons real? In this deeply researched, wide-ranging, and lavishly illustrated book, National Book Award finalist Adrienne Mayor presents the Amazons as they have never been seen before. This is the first comprehensive account of warrior women in myth and history across the ancient world, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Great Wall of China.Mayor tells how amazing new archaeological discoveries of battle-scarred female skeletons buried with their weapons prove that women warriors were not merely figments of the Greek imagination. Combining classical myth and art, nomad traditions, and scientific archaeology, she reveals intimate, surprising details and original insights about the lives and legends of the women known as Amazons. Provocatively arguing that a timeless search for a balance between the sexes explains the allure of the Amazons, Mayor reminds us that there were as many Amazon love stories as there were war stories. The Greeks were not the only people enchanted by Amazons-Mayor shows that warlike women of nomadic cultures inspired exciting tales in ancient Egypt, Persia, India, Central Asia, and China.Driven by a detective's curiosity, Mayor unearths long-buried evidence and sifts fact from fiction to show how flesh-and-blood women of the Eurasian steppes were mythologized as Amazons, the equals of men. The result is likely to become a classic.