Giuseppe Furlani Quotes (1885-1962)

“Wikipedia: Giuseppe Furlani”

“According to the Babylonian concept, men are, compared to the gods, immensely stupid and ignorant. (p. 98)”

“The Arabs knew Aristotle's doctrines only through Arabic language versions. No Arab philosopher knew Greek. (p. 132)”

“Ea is the great advisor of the gods, and it is therefore natural that he is the first to be aware of the evil that Tiāmat was preparing. (p. 83)”

“Giuseppe Furlani, Babylonian and Assyrian myths, Sansoni - Florence, 1958”

“The concept of the life-giving breath of the god seems to be of Egyptian origin and belongs to the prehistory or protohistory of the idea of ​​the spirit of the god. (p. 103)”

“The Mesopotamians conceived the generation of the gods in perfect agreement with the human one through the work of a male god and a female goddess. Even the primitive gods were therefore procreated by a couple. (p. 77)”

“The fight between the gods and the monster or monsters certainly has an astral, and perhaps even cosmic, character, and could for example symbolize the succession or conflict of the seasons as it manifests itself in nature. (p. 14)”

“Giuseppe Furlani, Arab philosophy, in Characters and ways of Arab culture , vol. II, Royal Academy of Italy, Rome, 1943, pp. 126-157.”

“We don't know exactly what Gilgameš's name means. It is not excluded that the name dates back to a Presumer language, and that the different ways of writing it represent different adaptations to the Sumerian language or attempts at explanation using the words of the Sumerian language. (p. 132)”

“Ḫumbaba, the guardian of the cedar forest, placed there by the gods, is not truly a god but a demon with a monstrous appearance, with a frightening face, cruel and ferocious like his master Enlil. Someone wanted to see in this demonic figure, sometimes invoked to scare children, the personification of a volcano. (p. 117)”

“From what we have explained about the depictions of the conflict between Marduk and Tiāmat, it can be seen that the monster was the famous dragon of Babel, represented countless times in Mesopotamian art, a dragon that could have either an elongated shape, almost like a serpent, or a shortened one of a lion. Originally, however, it must have been a snake. (p. 33)”

“The purpose of the recitation was first of all this: to narrate, to make the great deeds of the god [[Marduk] well known to all ], to praise the way in which, as a young and insignificant son of Ea he had managed, through his great valor, to gain first place in the Babylonian pantheon, and thereby motivate in a certain sense the celebration of the festival. (p. 4)”

“In her relations with Gilgamesh she is the prostitute goddess, a true slut, ferocious, passionate, while in the story of the universal flood, in the eleventh table, she is a merciful goddess, who takes the fate of humanity to heart and deplores the way of acting of the cruel Enlil, provocateur of the destruction of men with the exception of a few survivors. (p. 117)”

“Since in the epic no mention is made of the name of the national god of Babylon, Marduk, raised to his pre-eminent position precisely by the first dynasty mentioned above, it is clear that it must be prior to the advent of this dynasty. Or it could be contemporary with this dynasty, but arose in a state independent of the Babylon of the kings of that dynasty. (p. 121)”

“The Babylonians and Assyrians had a large number of myths and legends, largely based on those of the Sumerian, a nation of southern Mesopotamia who preceded them in history and civilization, from which they drew heavily , so it can be said that the whole Babylonian and Assyrian civilization, and in the first place religion, stands on a rich Sumerian substratum. (p. xiii)”

“It has been held that the first two elements of the name form that of the Sumerian god Enki, the god of water and wisdom, the Ea of the Babylonians and Assyrians. In the third element, du, we saw the Sumerian ideogram meaning to create, produce, and we therefore reproduced the whole name in Babylonian with Ea-bānī, or or . (p. 133)”

“There was perhaps no great god of ancient Mesopotamia of whom it was not said that he had subjugated monstrous and terrible beings, just as it was said of every great god that he had performed acts of formation or creation and destined destinies. Creating, eradicating monsters and destining destinies were common traits of the great gods of the civilizations of the ancient East. (pp. 17-18)”

“In a cylinder from the British Museum, a cylinder dating back to around 800 BCE., Tiāmat has the exact shape of a serpent, as long as the seal itself. [...] In addition to some other similar cylinders, with Tiāmat in the form of a serpent, we also have cylinders with Tiāmat in the guise of a lion-griffin or dragon. This depiction of the monster is very common in the last period, but it is nothing more than an artistic variant of the first. (p. 30)”

“L'Enûma eliš had the same function during the New Year celebration that every hymn to the god had during ceremonies in the temple. The poem is also a grandiose hymn, in which abundant biographical passages of the god are included. They remind the god of his great deeds and invite him to do something grandiose again in favor of the one who recites the hymn. The god who saved his fellow gods from evil beings will certainly want to save his faithful now! (p. 4)”

“Marduk redeemed the gods following Tiāmat from slavery, he freed them from slavery by creating men and making them carry the burden of serving the gods. That is, Marduk, to spare the vanquished gods from serving the other victorious gods, forms humanity which is therefore destined by original and natural disposition to serve the gods, to religion. Humanity is therefore the subject of redemption, it is not to be redeemed, but a part of the gods is redeemable: men redeem the gods. (p. 104)”

“Arabic philosophy was [...] philosophy of foreign origin, Greek speculation, Aristotelian philosophy, and was introduced among the Arabs already done, it did not arise slowly in the country itself from uncertain and modest origins, it did not it has always developed through internal development, it has not always then divided into various currents according to the mental peculiarities of its different followers, as Greek speculation developed, to cite a luminous and almost paradigmatic example. (p. 129)”

“We cannot say anything about the author of the grandiose poem, since in the numerous Mesopotamian texts in cuneiform characters made public so far no information can be found about him, and probably never will be found, as the Babylonians have annexed very little or no importance to the property literature and the belonging of works of literature to this or that artist, just as they have never taken care to pass on to posterity the names of their most famous sculptors, carvers of bas-reliefs and seals, painters, and builders of palaces and temples. (pp. 6-7)”

“Whoever compares the style of the'Enûma eliš with that of our epic will certainly notice a great difference. The Epic is written in a less solemn and toga style than the first and seems less ancient precisely because of its style. From many parts of the two writings it emerges that they had as authors two poets who were quite different in mentality and artistic ability. In both compositions there are also rather down-to-earth songs. However, from an aesthetic point of view the'Epic is superior. (p. 118)”

“This epic, which we could call the Mesopotamian'Odyssey, tells us it goes back a long way in time. It paints us with incisive and sometimes very eloquent features the social and spiritual conditions of southern Mesopotamia around 2800 BCE. and in part certainly from an even more ancient era, since the Sumerian epic and mythical texts on which the Babylonian language versions that constitute our poem are based should have arisen during the era of the third dynasty of Uru, therefore during the period from 2028 to approximately 1920 BCE., but they are certainly at least partly older. (p. 111)”