Volume: Volume 6, Issue 2

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.

This article examines the ways in which the literature of classic Greece depicts the concepts of migration and displacement. Different literature styles, such as history, drama and comedy approach the theme, underlining in this way the dense social impact it occupied. Through the revisiting of various classic extracts, this research aims to illustrate the way classic Greece was standing towards both the forcibly exiled and the willingly migrated, to the degree at least, this permeated classic works. Finally, this work aims to draw parallels between the past and today, regarding how the refugee is perceived.

A millenary description of the world as conceived by Chinese culture, appears in the Zhou bi Suanjing or “The book of the Gnomon and the Circular Paths of the Heaven”, according Needham. Situated at Zhou (a legendary city) the dimensions of the earth and heaven, including the size of the Sun are presented in this book. The Chinese Gaì Ti’an astronomical model of a flat earth and a flat heaven, is measured with the aid of a gnomon (biao) and the application of the Pythagorean Theorem. Now, after making an adjustment to the scale of the data, the elements to locate the legendary Zhou City have been found making feasible the correspondence between the dimensions of the Zhoubi’s given world and those of the actual Earth. Here I show that Zhou, centre of the world from which the measures are done, corresponds to the city Jining located in the province of Shandong, China; also, I confirm that the distance between Jining and the Pole of Zhoubi is 4,285 km as could be found with a geographical tool such as the Google-Earth program. With these results I am confident to say that: The city of Zhou appearing in the Zhoubi exists; and, that the Zhoubi was an accurate description of the Earth at the time of Zhou Dynasty (1045 - 256 BC). Moreover, the location of cities as important as Beijing (at 498 km to the north of Jining) would be related with projection of the heaven on The World Description Made in Zhou bi Suanjing Has Been Revealed Earth: it is about one diameter of Sun from Jining. Also, it important to know that this city is recognized as the birth place of the great philosopher Confucius, giving to my findings a relevance that goes beyond the field of Astronomy or Mathematics, in which frame the Zhoubi has been analysed through the years. These findings put new perspectives for the search in other non-mathematical or non-astronomical documents elements for these disciplines.

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.