Ancient Architecture - Greek, Ancient Greek Religion, Sites, Tombs, & Ruins - Ancient Greece, History, Religious, General & Miscellaneous Ancient Greek History

Origins Of Greek Religion

Name: Origins Of Greek Religion
Author: Bernard C. Dietrich
ISBN: 9781904675310

by Bernard C. Dietrich

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Overview

Dietrich starts from the premises that beliefs and their associated rites are inherently conservative and that, even where populations change, they tend to do so gradually, creating fusions rather than wholesale disruptions in ritual practice. An understanding of classical Greek religion thus, necessarily, depends on appreciation of its forerunners in the Bronze Age; and they, in turn, on evidence from the better documented religions of the Middle East. Dietrich's four main chapters deal first with those eastern links; then with the old traditions of Minoan Crete; next with the interplay of pre-Greek Minoan and Greek Mycenaean cultures; and finally he attempts to bridge the commonly assumed divide between bronze-age and archaic Greece.