Articles with keyword: mythology

The author argues that images of the Egyptian deity Horus, dressed as Roman soldiers, are works of Roman propaganda. While the focus here is on the statue from the British Museum, EA 36062, the argument applies to similarly attired images of Horus. Several Egyptian cults spread across the empire, but were rarely depicted as soldiers, and for this reason, one must ask why Horus was shown in this way. The proposal is that such images intended to tell the native Egyptian viewer that since Horus was a servant of the empire through enrollment in the army, the viewer should be also.

In Charles Brockden Brown’s novel, Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, the main character, Huntly, traverses the American wilderness to retrieve Clithero and discover the truth of Waldegrave’s murder. This journey into the woods imitates the literary trope of a katabasis, or descent to the underworld by the archetypal hero. However, Huntly’s epistolary narrative, however, reflects the problematic attempt on his part to qualify himself as a hero. Displaced within his story as a failed hero-figure because of his unreliable narration, his text remains elusive as a moral story, unlike most classical mythological hero tales such as The Odyssey and The Aeneid. In this paper, I use Huntly’s story to foreground his displaced heroism when writing about his descent into the American wilderness. Additionally, I compare and contrast Huntly’s journey with the classical katabasis and how the dangers of the American wilderness transforms into an underworld. Huntly does emerge from this underworld, but he becomes a destructive force. Lastly, I posit that, while Huntly’s narrative parallels the mythological hero’s journey to the underworld and back, the portrayal of his displaced heroism inverts the archetypal hero story and challenges the morality of America as a new nation.

This paper gives an intertextual analysis of Ibrahim Abd Elmeguid’s novel Clouds over Alexandria, which happens to be the last novel of his trilogy about his hometown Alexandria. An intertextual analysis of a text often entails examining its meaning in light of other texts which are incorporated in it through parody, pastiche, citation, paraphrase, allusion, imitation, translation, to name but a few. The incorporated texts could be anything ranging from written works to fables, myth, paintings, songs, or movies since the word “text” has become an inclusive term of late. In his historical novel Clouds over Alexandria, which happens to be the last of his Alexandrian trilogy, Ibrahim Abd Elmeguid historicizes an important socio-political juncture in the history of the city, albeit a sad one which signals the downfall of the once cosmopolitan city and the rise of a less tolerant and colourful entity in its place during the Sadat regime in the seventies. Being a historical novel, Clouds over Alexandria understandably incorporates political and cultural elements. Interestingly, it is also infused with mythical overtones, the latter being a clear reference to the Hellenistic origin of the city and its Graeco-Roman heritage. Zeus, Europa, Antaeus, Hercules, Gaia and Alexander the Great permeate the fabric of the novel through mythological tales narrated lovingly and reverently by the characters. It is the aim of this paper to give an intertextual analysis of the artistic and ideological appropriation of those myths in an attempt to determine their significance or otherwise to the novel and the extent to which they are integrated into its structure.