8 Quotes by Norman F. Cantor

A very long time ago, some 2.5 million years B.C., the mother of human species as we know it, our ultimate ancestor, appeared in East Africa... She was four feet tall and probably black..

In response to [the Philistine] threat [in the ninth century B.C.], the Hebrews could no longer rely on the leadership of 'judges,' ad hoc military leaders (some of them, peculiarly, women; perhaps reflecting as feminists claim, and earlier matriarchal society).

Plato had one Big Idea from which everything else derived. He fundamentally defined reality as that which is permanent and unchanging. Only ideas are permanent and unchanging; anything material deteriorates and decays.

There was no money economy in Egypt, and all exchange of goods was carried out by barter. Each citizen paid a tax in kind of everyt5hing he produced, and the wealth of the pharaoh thus consisted of the grain, livestock, and other goods that he took as taxes. He also received metals and other goods as tribute or in trade from abroad.

The availability of irrigation systems to water the land and produce grain and other food crops was the material foundation for these two great river-valley societies, Egypt and Iraq. They were hydraulic despotisms, in which a small ruling class, with the aid of soldiers and priests, commanded the material resources that gave sustenance to these civilizations and allowed them to build cities, palaces, and tombs.

Because the Egyptians had no feeling that events of the moment were transitory, they viewed the present as eternal. The world was static; what seemed like change was only recurrence of the eternal order. Thus, Egyptian literature does not contain careful records of the deeds, or distinctive characteristics of the pharaohs. Rather they are portrayed as the divine ideal, always just, wise, bold, strong, and victorious.

Sacramental attachments to a dying a resurrected savior was a common idea in the Roman Empire. The religion of Mithraism, very popular in the army and open only to males, bathed the initiate in the blood of a bull.

Morality was viewed by the Egyptians not as the assertion of self against the world but rather as the individual search for harmony with the eternal order... The Egyptian was free to seek out a place in a benevolent world order, but he was not to disrupt it by either nonconformity or self-abnegation.