Bøker av Walter Burkert

Defines myth, ritual, and religion. The author locates his work in the context of culture and the history of ideas, and he is not hesitant to draw on sociology and biology. It is suitable for philosophers, historians, and even theologians, as well as for classicists and historians of Greek culture.

Traverses the ancient world's three great centres of cultural exchange - Babylonian Nineveh, Egyptian Memphis, and Iranian Persepolis - to situate classical Greece in its proper historical place, at the Western margin of a Near Eastern-Aegean cultural community that emerged in the Bronze Age and expanded westward in the first millennium BC.

Includes papers and conversations that derive from a conference that pursued the possibility and utility of a general theory of religion and culture, especially one based on violence.

Ancient Greek culture is often described as a miracle, owing little to its neighbors. Walter Burkert argues against a distorted view, toward a more balanced picture. "Under the influence of the Semitic East-from writers, craftsmen, merchants, healers-Greek culture began its unique flowering, soon to assume cultural hegemony in the Mediterranean."

Blood sacrifice, the ritual slaughter of animals, has been basic to religion through history, so that it survives in spiritualized form even in Christianity. How did this violent phenomenon achieve the status of the sacred? This study examines this question.

The foremost historian of Greek religion providers the first comprehensive, comparative study of a little-known aspect of ancient religious beliefs and practices.