Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [270]
*The existing Great Wall of China dates from the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644 CE). But records of wall-building by the Chinese go back as far as 600 BCE, and the idea to construct a large Great Wall began during the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BCE).
*With the reforms that have come to China during nearly thirty years since China was “reopened” in the post-Mao era, government attitudes toward religion have softened considerably. Now recognizing the value of the Confucian emphasis on correct moral behavior, the Party has returned some temples to the control of religious groups. But religion in China is still very much in official hands. The government initially approved of a movement that combined Buddhist and Taoist philosophies with deep breathing and martial arts exercises. However, Falun Gong, as it is known, has come under official attack since 1999, when 10,000 of its followers demonstrated in front of Party headquarters.
*Early human beings apeared more than a million years ago in what is now China. By about 10,000 BCE, a number of New Stone Age cultures had developed in the Yellow River area and, from them, a distinctly Chinese civilization gradually emerged. One of these was the Longshan culture, which spread over much of what is now the eastern third of the country. China’s first dynasty, the Shang Dynasty (1523–1027 BCE), arose from the Longshan culture during the 1700s BCE.
*Yellow was considered a regal color in recognition of the rich, yellowish silt, or loess, that is deposited by the Huang He, or Yellow River. The yellow loess was the life-sustaining source of good crops in China, just as the Nile’s black earth was for Egypt. When the imperial Forbidden City was later built, its roof tiles were yellow.
*All post-Confucian, the Four Books are Great Learning; the Mean, on moderation; the Analects, a collection of Confucian sayings; and the Mencius, the collected wisdom of Confucius’s successor. Their study remains influential today.
*When the famed photographer Edward S. Curtis filmed a sacred Hopi dance in the American Southwest in the early twentieth century, the performance, never before seen by a white person, turned out to be a complete fabrication for the benefit of the camera.
*“Sub-Saharan” means that part of the African continent that lies south of the Sahara Desert. Ancient Egypt, discussed in chapter 2, and much of northern Africa developed largely separated from the sub-Saharan areas, as the world’s largest desert created a mostly uncrossable barrier until the widespread use of the camel around 750 CE.
*Many questions about human evolution and origins remain unresolved, but the idea that the human species began in Africa is widely accepted. The question of the origin of modern Homo sapiens is still open, and recent discoveries have led to two main schools of thought. One argues that modern humans evolved more or less simultaneously from “archaic” humans in several areas. The second holds out for an African origin of all modern humans. According to the Smithsonian Institute, the oldest known evidence for anatomically modern humans comes from about 130,000 years ago, from sites in eastern Africa.
†The term San is now preferred to the more commonly used “Bushmen,” the tribe prominently featured in the popular 1984 film The Gods Must Be Crazy. The film is a kind of modern myth in which a “gift of the gods”—a Coke bottle dropped from a passing plane—becomes a most unwanted gift, and the tribe decides it must be returned to the gods, requiring one man’s quest and a perilous encounter with “civilization.”
*African art and myth had a powerful impact on a generation of modern Western artists, including, among others, Constantin Brancusi, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso, whose 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon includes figures wearing African tribal