num_pages: 274
description: "Nilsson was an extraordinary scholar who shaped many classical fields with a mastery &amp; insight not often seen now. He was extraordinary both in the great range of his knowledge &amp; in the lucid balance of his expressed judgments. It isn't surprising that his classic Sather Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, delivered in 1930—31, should still be in demand. They were part of a trio of masterpieces which exerted a powerful influence on the form of studies in Bronze Age Greece. If we hadn't these books, created in one defined span of his far-ranging life work, our attitudes toward the earliest Greeks would probably have remained far more disjointed &amp; abstract, deprived of an infusing sense of the seeds of later Greek heritage in an antique society. What is surprising, superficially, is that the Sather Lectures have not yet been superseded, either in intellectual concepts or in originality. They are wanted not only as a valued document in a special period of Mycenaean studies, but as the most challenging basic source attempting to harmonize Greek Mythology &amp; physical arrivals from the 2nd millenium BC"—Emily Vermeule Nilsson studied the geographical aspects of the Greek myths. He proved that almost without exception, the places in the myths, especially those in the great cycles of stories, are the very same places as those now known from archeology to have been important Bronze-Age sites. Nilsson made it amply clear, in a host of interesting details which he worked out with ingenuity &amp; almost always with good sense, that the memory of the great Bronze-Age centers survived, &amp; that the stories told of them truly reflected, in Classical times, the Mykenaian Age. To have discovered this great bridge was the triumphant achievement of Nilsson.
language: English
title: The Mycenaean Origin of Greek Mythology
titlecomplete: The Mycenaean Origin of Greek Mythology
genres: Mythology, Archaeology, History, Religion
ratings_count: 41
places: Greece
publisher: University of California Press (Berkeley)