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Hence they chose and combined the more important existing myths, only making such alterations as would fit them to their new hero. Babylon herself had won her position by her own exertions; and it would be a natural idea to give Marduk his opportunity of becoming Creator of the world as the result of successful conflict.
But the most probable solution of the puzzle is that the earliest civilization inherited a number of animal stories, such as are characteristic of savagery in all parts of the world, and that the first literary generations into whose poetic myths those stories were transferred, being as much accustomed to them as to other surroundings of their childhood, such as bloody sacrifices, mystic expiations, and fantastic initiations, saw no incongruity in anything told them of the gods.
True stories are sometimes far stranger than those of the bazaar tale-tellers whose trade it is to invent or remember wondrous tales and stories, myths, and legends." "We have a proverb to that effect, Mir Saheb. Let us sit in the shelter of this rock and you shall tell me the story. Our eyes can work while tongue and ear play or would you sleep?" "Nahin, Sahib!
* I believe that the conclusions of recent scholarship are generally opposed to the Herodotean ideas of any direct acceptance by the Greeks of Egyptian myths: and very certainly, Greek art is developed by giving the veracity and simplicity of real life to Eastern savage grotesque; and not by softening the severity of pure Egyptian design.
On the contrary, they are rational, in its eyes, and according to its level of understanding, however absurd the growth of knowledge may eventually show them to be. Myths, then, in their origin, are told and heard, narrated and accepted, as rational and intelligible. As narrated, they are narratives: can we say that they are anything more? or are they tales told simply for the pleasure of telling?
A. "They may be legends, myths, poems, or what they will, but they are not the Word of God.
The story seems to belong to that large class of myths which have been devised in order to explain the meaning of equivocal words whose true significance has been forgotten.
The storied heights are rich in traditions of gods and heroes, with innumerable myths haunting the ruined temples which cluster round the base of the mountain range, and suggest themselves as relics of an earlier creed than Buddhism or Brahminism.
On the whole, I may perhaps have seen from one hundred to a hundred and fifty nests. The most remarkable circumstance connected with the eider-ducks is their tameness during the period of incubation. I had always regarded as myths the stories told about them in this respect, and should do so still had I not convinced myself of the truth of these assertions by laying hands upon the ducks myself.
So general, indeed, was the diffusion of the myth or legend among the philosophical, historical, and religious systems of antiquity, that Heyne remarks, on this subject, that all the history and philosophy of the ancients proceeded from myths.
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