Misplaced Pages

#913086

130-397: In season three select actors had their names included in the opening credits directly after the main cast members' names, although no montage was made for them In season three select actors had their names included in the opening credits as special guest stars, although no montage was made for them The Lair is set in a small island community, the exact location of which is unknown. Thom,

260-568: A curse. Sanskrit Sanskrit ( / ˈ s æ n s k r ɪ t / ; attributively 𑀲𑀁𑀲𑁆𑀓𑀾𑀢𑀁 , संस्कृत- , saṃskṛta- ; nominally संस्कृतम् , saṃskṛtam , IPA: [ˈsɐ̃skr̩tɐm] ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages . It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from

390-455: A device (an apotropaion ) to ward away unwanted things, and which was in origin a dancer-worn mask. The classic formulation of this view is that of Jane Ellen Harrison , the gorgoneion as a "ritual mask misunderstood": ... in her essence Medusa is a head and nothing more; her potency only begins when her head is severed, and that potency resides in the head; she is in a word a mask with a body later appended. The primitive Greek knew that there

520-433: A focus on Indian philosophies and Sanskrit. Though written in a number of different scripts, the dominant language of Hindu texts has been Sanskrit. It or a hybrid form of Sanskrit became the preferred language of Mahayana Buddhism scholarship; for example, one of the early and influential Buddhist philosophers, Nagarjuna (~200 CE), used Classical Sanskrit as the language for his texts. According to Renou, Sanskrit had

650-601: A full-bodied Gorgon) depicted in relief being displayed at the Temple of Zeus at Olympia . There has been considerable and wide-ranging speculation concerning the possible origins of the story of Perseus and the Gorgons, as well as gorgoneia, the representations of Gorgon faces. The origins of the Perseus-Gorgon story, and gorgoneia, even with respect to each other, are uncertain. The Perseus-Gorgon story might have come first inspiring

780-615: A group of wearable helmet masks from Tiryns , and another group of non-wearable votive masks from the Sanctuary of Orthia at Sparta , which share some features with the typical earliest representations of Gorgon faces. If such masks were in fact intended to represent the face of a Gorgon, then they would show that Gorgons or gorgoneia played a role in some kind of ritualistic or dramatic practice or performance. The gorgonesque votive masks from Sparta have deep S-shaped furrows on either side of wide-mouthed grimaces. Such features resemble those on

910-581: A language competed with numerous, less exact vernacular Indian languages called Prakritic languages ( prākṛta - ). The term prakrta literally means "original, natural, normal, artless", states Franklin Southworth . The relationship between Prakrit and Sanskrit is found in Indian texts dated to the 1st millennium CE. Patañjali acknowledged that Prakrit is the first language, one instinctively adopted by every child with all its imperfections and later leads to

1040-643: A limited role in the Theravada tradition (formerly known as the Hinayana) but the Prakrit works that have survived are of doubtful authenticity. Some of the canonical fragments of the early Buddhist traditions, discovered in the 20th century, suggest the early Buddhist traditions used an imperfect and reasonably good Sanskrit, sometimes with a Pali syntax, states Renou. The Mahāsāṃghika and Mahavastu, in their late Hinayana forms, used hybrid Sanskrit for their literature. Sanskrit

1170-724: A mythological lake set somewhere in westernmost North Africa. And the fifth-century BC poet Pindar has Perseus, apparently on his quest for the Gorgon head, visit the Hyperboreans (usually considered to dwell in the far north). However, whether Pindar means to imply that the Gorgons lived near the Hyperboreans is unclear. Pherecydes notes that Medusa's face turned men to stone, and Pindar describes Medusa's severed head as "stony death". In Prometheus Bound , it says that no mortal can look at them and live. According to Apollodorus, all three of

1300-454: A natural part of the earliest Vedic language, and that these developed in the centuries after the composition had been completed, and as a gradual unconscious process during the oral transmission by generations of reciters. The primary source for this argument is internal evidence of the text which betrays an instability of the phenomenon of retroflexion, with the same phrases having sandhi-induced retroflexion in some parts but not other. This

1430-479: A negative evidence to Pollock's hypothesis, but it is not positive evidence. A closer look at Sanskrit in the Indian history after the 12th century suggests that Sanskrit survived despite the odds. According to Hanneder, On a more public level the statement that Sanskrit is a dead language is misleading, for Sanskrit is quite obviously not as dead as other dead languages and the fact that it is spoken, written and read will probably convince most people that it cannot be

SECTION 10

#1732870006914

1560-546: A pan-Indo-Aryan accessibility to information and knowledge in the ancient and medieval times, in contrast to the Prakrit languages which were understood just regionally. It created a cultural bond across the subcontinent. As local languages and dialects evolved and diversified, Sanskrit served as the common language. It connected scholars from distant parts of South Asia such as Tamil Nadu and Kashmir, states Deshpande, as well as those from different fields of studies, though there must have been differences in its pronunciation given

1690-451: A reference to Athena's aegis . In the Iliad , the aegis is a device, usually associated with Athena , which was decorated with a Gorgon head. Athena wore it in battle as a shield which neither Apollo 's spear, or even Zeus ' thunderbolt could pierce. According to the Iliad , Hephaestus made the aegis for Zeus, while according to a Hesiod fragment, Metis made it for Athena, before Athena

1820-573: A refined and standardized grammatical form that emerged in the mid-1st millennium BCE and was codified in the most comprehensive of ancient grammars, the Aṣṭādhyāyī ('Eight chapters') of Pāṇini . The greatest dramatist in Sanskrit, Kālidāsa , wrote in classical Sanskrit, and the foundations of modern arithmetic were first described in classical Sanskrit. The two major Sanskrit epics, the Mahābhārata and

1950-414: A reporter for the local paper, is investigating a string of deaths of young men, known as the "John Doe murders". His investigation leads him to a sex club called The Lair, which he discovers is run by a coven of vampires led by Damian. Damian is drawn to Thom because Thom is the double of the man who turned Damian into a vampire two centuries earlier. Colin, Damian's lieutenant, schemes to brick Damian behind

2080-534: A restrained language from which archaisms and unnecessary formal alternatives were excluded". The Classical form of the language simplified the sandhi rules but retained various aspects of the Vedic language, while adding rigor and flexibilities, so that it had sufficient means to express thoughts as well as being "capable of responding to the future increasing demands of an infinitely diversified literature", according to Renou. Pāṇini included numerous "optional rules" beyond

2210-439: A similar phonetic structure to Tamil. Hock et al. quoting George Hart state that there was influence of Old Tamil on Sanskrit. Hart compared Old Tamil and Classical Sanskrit to arrive at a conclusion that there was a common language from which these features both derived – "that both Tamil and Sanskrit derived their shared conventions, metres, and techniques from a common source, for it is clear that neither borrowed directly from

2340-415: A striking resemblance to a seal impression from Nuzi c. 1450 BC. This suggests the possibility that Greeks misinterpreted or reinterpreted these Mesopotamian images, giving rise, through a process that Burkert has described as a "creative misunderstanding", to the myth of the Gorgon's petrifying gaze. The consensus among classical scholars seems to be that the function of a gorgoneion was apotropaic , as

2470-528: A wall and take over The Lair. Local lawman Sheriff Trout, also investigating the murders, finds his way to The Lair. A shootout ensues in which Damian's human henchman Frankie is killed. As Sheriff Trout recovers from his gunshot wounds, he takes in Ian, a new arrival to the island who is pursued by a mysterious mainlander. Damian contacts Thom and convinces him to recover Damian's body and restore him. Frankie haunts Colin, warning of his imminent demise. Intrigue blooms in

2600-508: Is akin to that of Latin and Ancient Greek in Europe. Sanskrit has significantly influenced most modern languages of the Indian subcontinent , particularly the languages of the northern, western, central and eastern Indian subcontinent. Sanskrit declined starting about and after the 13th century. This coincides with the beginning of Islamic invasions of South Asia to create, and thereafter expand

2730-620: Is associated with the Ancient Greek adjective gorgós ( γοργός ), which, of an eye or look, means 'grim, fierce, awesome, dazzling', and is thought to derive from the Sanskrit stem garğ . The stem has connotations of noise, and Germanic and Romance languages have many derivatives from this stem referring to the throat (e.g. 'gorge') or the guttural sounds produced in the throat (e.g. 'gargle', 'gurgle'). It has been understood as meaning to growl, roar or howl, while Thalia Feldman suggests that

SECTION 20

#1732870006914

2860-452: Is found in the writing of Bharata Muni , the author of the ancient Natya Shastra text. The early Jain scholar Namisādhu acknowledged the difference, but disagreed that the Prakrit language was a corruption of Sanskrit. Namisādhu stated that the Prakrit language was the pūrvam ('came before, origin') and that it came naturally to children, while Sanskrit was a refinement of Prakrit through "purification by grammar". Sanskrit belongs to

2990-501: Is possible that the mythology and/or the iconography of Gorgons were subject to Near-Eastern influence. In particular elements of full-bodied Gorgon iconography seem to have been borrowed from that of the Mesopotamian Lamashtu . Mesopotamian depictions of Gilgamesh slaying Humbaba , may have influenced the Perseus-Gorgon story, while gorgoneia may be connected to images of Humbaba. The Gorgon as Mistress of Animals , in

3120-524: Is rare in the later version of the language. The Homerian Greek, like Ṛg-vedic Sanskrit, deploys simile extensively, but they are structurally very different. The early Vedic form of the Sanskrit language was far less homogenous compared to the Classical Sanskrit as defined by grammarians by about the mid-1st millennium BCE. According to Richard Gombrich—an Indologist and a scholar of Sanskrit, Pāli and Buddhist Studies—the archaic Vedic Sanskrit found in

3250-479: Is taken along with evidence of controversy, for example, in passages of the Aitareya-Āraṇyaka (700 BCE), which features a discussion on whether retroflexion is valid in particular cases. The Ṛg-veda is a collection of books, created by multiple authors. These authors represented different generations, and the mandalas 2 to 7 are the oldest while the mandalas 1 and 10 are relatively the youngest. Yet,

3380-580: Is the predominant language of one of the largest collection of historic manuscripts. The earliest known inscriptions in Sanskrit are from the 1st century BCE, such as the Ayodhya Inscription of Dhana and Ghosundi-Hathibada (Chittorgarh) . Though developed and nurtured by scholars of orthodox schools of Hinduism, Sanskrit has been the language for some of the key literary works and theology of heterodox schools of Indian philosophies such as Buddhism and Jainism. The structure and capabilities of

3510-526: The Bhagavata Purana , the Panchatantra and many other texts are all in the Sanskrit language. The Classical Sanskrit with its exacting grammar was thus the language of the Indian scholars and the educated classes, while others communicated with approximate or ungrammatical variants of it as well as other natural Indian languages. Sanskrit, as the learned language of Ancient India, thus existed alongside

3640-663: The Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae ( LIMC ). In addition to the many examples found on vase paintings, Gorgons occur in a wide variety of other contexts, including architectural ornamentation, shield devices, and coins. Some representations show full-bodied Gorgons, while others, called gorgoneia , show only the face (or head) of a Gorgon, such as those described in the Iliad as appearing on Athena 's aegis , and Agamemnon 's shield. The earliest representations of both types are found from roughly

3770-568: The Dalai Lama , the Sanskrit language is a parent language that is at the foundation of many modern languages of India and the one that promoted Indian thought to other distant countries. In Tibetan Buddhism, states the Dalai Lama, Sanskrit language has been a revered one and called legjar lhai-ka or "elegant language of the gods". It has been the means of transmitting the "profound wisdom of Buddhist philosophy" to Tibet. The Sanskrit language created

3900-518: The Iliad , the Gorgon's "glaring" eyes were a notably fearsome feature. As Hector pursues the fleeing Achaeans, "exulting in his might" ... ever slaying the hindmost", Homer describes the Trojan hero as having eyes like "the eyes of the Gorgon". And in the Odyssey , Odysseus , although determined "steadfastly" to stay in the underworld , so as to meet other great men among the dead, is seized by such fear at

4030-613: The Indo-European family of languages . It is one of the three earliest ancient documented languages that arose from a common root language now referred to as Proto-Indo-European : Other Indo-European languages distantly related to Sanskrit include archaic and Classical Latin ( c. 600 BCE–100 CE, Italic languages ), Gothic (archaic Germanic language , c.  350 CE ), Old Norse ( c. 200 CE and after), Old Avestan ( c.  late 2nd millennium BCE ) and Younger Avestan ( c. 900 BCE). The closest ancient relatives of Vedic Sanskrit in

The Lair - Misplaced Pages Continue

4160-744: The Rigveda had already evolved in the Vedic period, as evidenced in the later Vedic literature. Gombrich posits that the language in the early Upanishads of Hinduism and the late Vedic literature approaches Classical Sanskrit, while the archaic Vedic Sanskrit had by the Buddha 's time become unintelligible to all except ancient Indian sages. The formalization of the Saṃskṛta language is credited to Pāṇini , along with Patañjali's Mahābhāṣya and Katyayana's commentary that preceded Patañjali's work. Panini composed Aṣṭādhyāyī ('Eight-Chapter Grammar'), which became

4290-526: The Rāmāyaṇa , however, were composed in a range of oral storytelling registers called Epic Sanskrit which was used in northern India between 400 BCE and 300 CE, and roughly contemporary with classical Sanskrit. In the following centuries, Sanskrit became tradition-bound, stopped being learned as a first language, and ultimately stopped developing as a living language. The hymns of the Rigveda are notably similar to

4420-550: The Temple of Apollo at Delphi (latter part of the sixth century BC). In Euripides 's Ion (c. 412–412 BC), the Chorus describes seeing, on the temple's stone walls, Athena "brandishing her gorgon shield" against Enceladus. Pausanias describes seeing a votive golden shield dedicated by the Spartans and their allies after the Battle of Tanagra (457 BC), with a gorgoneion (or possibly

4550-406: The sandhi rules, both internal and external. Quite many words found in the early Vedic Sanskrit language are never found in late Vedic Sanskrit or Classical Sanskrit literature, while some words have different and new meanings in Classical Sanskrit when contextually compared to the early Vedic Sanskrit literature. Arthur Macdonell was among the early colonial era scholars who summarized some of

4680-500: The verbal adjective sáṃskṛta- is a compound word consisting of sáṃ ('together, good, well, perfected') and kṛta - ('made, formed, work'). It connotes a work that has been "well prepared, pure and perfect, polished, sacred". According to Biderman, the perfection contextually being referred to in the etymological origins of the word is its tonal—rather than semantic—qualities. Sound and oral transmission were highly valued qualities in ancient India, and its sages refined

4810-414: The 13th century, a premier center of Sanskrit literary creativity, Sanskrit literature there disappeared, perhaps in the "fires that periodically engulfed the capital of Kashmir" or the "Mongol invasion of 1320" states Pollock. The Sanskrit literature which was once widely disseminated out of the northwest regions of the subcontinent, stopped after the 12th century. As Hindu kingdoms fell in the eastern and

4940-521: The 7th century where he established a major center of learning and language translation under the patronage of Emperor Taizong. By the early 1st millennium CE, Sanskrit had spread Buddhist and Hindu ideas to Southeast Asia, parts of the East Asia and the Central Asia. It was accepted as a language of high culture and the preferred language by some of the local ruling elites in these regions. According to

5070-425: The Classical Sanskrit language launched ancient Indian speculations about "the nature and function of language", what is the relationship between words and their meanings in the context of a community of speakers, whether this relationship is objective or subjective, discovered or is created, how individuals learn and relate to the world around them through language, and about the limits of language? They speculated on

5200-521: The Dravidian languages borrowed from Sanskrit vocabulary, but they have also affected Sanskrit on deeper levels of structure, "for instance in the domain of phonology where Indo-Aryan retroflexes have been attributed to Dravidian influence". Similarly, Ferenc Ruzca states that all the major shifts in Indo-Aryan phonetics over two millennia can be attributed to the constant influence of a Dravidian language with

5330-513: The Dravidian words and forms, without modifying the word order; but the same thing is not possible in rendering a Persian or English sentence into a non-Indo-Aryan language. Shulman mentions that "Dravidian nonfinite verbal forms (called vinaiyeccam in Tamil) shaped the usage of the Sanskrit nonfinite verbs (originally derived from inflected forms of action nouns in Vedic). This particularly salient case of

The Lair - Misplaced Pages Continue

5460-559: The Gorgon being beheaded on the Boeotian pithos is depicted as a female centaur , with neither wings nor snakes present, and the Gorgons on the Eleusis Amphora, have wingless, wasp-shaped bodies with cauldron-like heads, by the end of the seventh century BC, humanoid bodies, with wings, and snakes around their head, necks, or waist, such as depicted on the Medusa pediment, become typical. Unlike

5590-516: The Gorgons chasing Perseus also had "horrible snaky hair", so too in Prometheus Bound where all three Gorgons are described as "winged" as well as "snake-haired". The Gorgon's reputation for ugliness was such that the Athenian comic playwright Aristophones could, in 405 BC, ridicule the women of the Athenian deme Teithras by referring to them as Gorgons. The mythographer Apollodorus gives

5720-545: The Gorgons could turn to stone anyone who saw them. Stheno and Euryale were immortal, whereas Medusa was mortal. According to Apollodorus' version of their story, Perseus was ordered by Polydectes (his enemy) to bring back the head of Medusa. So guided by Hermes and Athena , he sought out the sisters of the Gorgons, the Graeae who had only one eye and one tooth which they shared. Perseus managed to steal their eye and tooth, and refused to return them, unless they would show him

5850-478: The Gorgons, other than to say that the two Gorgons, Sthenno, and Euryale did not grow old. Homer mentions only "the Gorgon" (otherwise unnamed) giving brief descriptions of her, and her head. In the Iliad she is called a "dread monster" and the image of her head, which appears—along with several other terrifying images—on Athena 's aegis , and Agamemnon 's shield, is described as "dread and awful", and "grim of aspect, glaring terribly". Already in

5980-469: The Indo-Aryan language underwent rapid linguistic change and morphed into the Vedic Sanskrit language. The pre-Classical form of Sanskrit is known as Vedic Sanskrit . The earliest attested Sanskrit text is the Rigveda , a Hindu scripture from the mid- to late-second millennium BCE. No written records from such an early period survive, if any ever existed, but scholars are generally confident that

6110-507: The Indo-European languages are the Nuristani languages found in the remote Hindu Kush region of northeastern Afghanistan and northwestern Himalayas, as well as the extinct Avestan and Old Persian – both are Iranian languages . Sanskrit belongs to the satem group of the Indo-European languages. Colonial era scholars familiar with Latin and Greek were struck by the resemblance of

6240-628: The Medusa pediment from the temple of Artemis in Corfu (Fig. 6) shows affinities with images of Lamashtu. As Walter Burkert has noted, Lamashtu has several characteristic iconographic elements which include an animalistic head atop a humanoid body, often in the Knielauf (kneeling-running) position, with the presence of snakes, a horse or ass, animal offspring, and sometimes in the Mistress of Animals configuration. All of these elements are present, for example, in

6370-475: The Medusa pediment. Images which show Perseus, with head turned away, decapitating Medusa (Figs. 1, 7), resemble Mesopotamian depictions of Gilgamesh slaying the wild man Humbaba . Such depictions can show Gilgamesh with head turned away looking behind him for a goddess to pass him a weapon. In particular, a bronze shield strap from Olympia (mid-sixth century BC), which shows Perseus with his head turned away about to decapitate Medusa, assisted by Athena, bears

6500-521: The Muslim rule in the form of Sultanates, and later the Mughal Empire . Sheldon Pollock characterises the decline of Sanskrit as a long-term "cultural, social, and political change". He dismisses the idea that Sanskrit declined due to "struggle with barbarous invaders", and emphasises factors such as the increasing attractiveness of vernacular language for literary expression. With the fall of Kashmir around

6630-489: The Muslim rulers. Hindu rulers such as Shivaji of the Maratha Empire , reversed the process, by re-adopting Sanskrit and re-asserting their socio-linguistic identity. After Islamic rule disintegrated in South Asia and the colonial rule era began, Sanskrit re-emerged but in the form of a "ghostly existence" in regions such as Bengal. This decline was the result of "political institutions and civic ethos" that did not support

SECTION 50

#1732870006914

6760-580: The Perseus-Medusa story. The earliest representations (mid-seventh century BC) of such Gorgons are a Boeotian relief pithos (Fig. 1), which depicts Perseus, with head turned away, decapitating a Gorgon, and the Eleusis Amphora (Fig. 2), which shows two Gorgons chasing Perseus fleeing with a severed Gorgon head. That the Perseus on the pithos averts his gaze shows that already in these earliest images it

6890-448: The Sanskrit garğ , with its connotations of a growling beast—was also part of their mythology. The Hesiodic Shield of Heracles (c. late seventh–mid-sixth century BC), which describes Heracles' shield, has the Gorgons depicted on it chasing Perseus, with their shrill cry seemingly being heard emanating from the shield itself: The Gorgons, dreadful and unspeakable, were rushing after him, eager to catch him; as they ran on

7020-488: The Saṃskṛta language, both in its vocabulary and grammar, to the classical languages of Europe. In The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World , Mallory and Adams illustrate the resemblance with the following examples of cognate forms (with the addition of Old English for further comparison): The correspondences suggest some common root, and historical links between some of

7150-616: The South India, such as the great Vijayanagara Empire , so did Sanskrit. There were exceptions and short periods of imperial support for Sanskrit, mostly concentrated during the reign of the tolerant Mughal emperor Akbar . Muslim rulers patronized the Middle Eastern language and scripts found in Persia and Arabia, and the Indians linguistically adapted to this Persianization to gain employment with

7280-447: The Vedic Sanskrit in these books of the Ṛg-veda "hardly presents any dialectical diversity", states Louis Renou – an Indologist known for his scholarship of the Sanskrit literature and the Ṛg-veda in particular. According to Renou, this implies that the Vedic Sanskrit language had a "set linguistic pattern" by the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Beyond the Ṛg-veda, the ancient literature in Vedic Sanskrit that has survived into

7410-451: The Vedic Sanskrit's bahulam framework, to respect liberty and creativity so that individual writers separated by geography or time would have the choice to express facts and their views in their own way, where tradition followed competitive forms of the Sanskrit language. The phonetic differences between Vedic Sanskrit and Classical Sanskrit, as discerned from the current state of the surviving literature, are negligible when compared to

7540-455: The alphabet, the structure of words, and its exacting grammar into a "collection of sounds, a kind of sublime musical mold" as an integral language they called Saṃskṛta . From the late Vedic period onwards, state Annette Wilke and Oliver Moebus, resonating sound and its musical foundations attracted an "exceptionally large amount of linguistic, philosophical and religious literature" in India. Sound

7670-625: The bottoms of bowls and cups. As with full-bodied Gorgons the earliest representations are found from the mid-sixth century BC. The earliest example of a "beautiful" gorgoneion is the Medusa Rondanini (Fig. 19), which is thought to be a Roman copy of a Greek original dated to either the fifth-century BC or the Hellenistic period. Athena's victory over the Giant Enceladus —with a gorgoneion on her shield—was apparently depicted on

7800-440: The capacity to understand the old Prakrit languages such as Ardhamagadhi . A section of European scholars state that Sanskrit was never a spoken language. However, evidences shows that Sanskrit was a spoken language, essential for oral tradition that preserved the vast number of Sanskrit manuscripts from ancient India. The textual evidence in the works of Yaksa, Panini, and Patanajali affirms that Classical Sanskrit in their era

7930-517: The close relationship between the Indo-Iranian tongues and the Baltic and Slavic languages , vocabulary exchange with the non-Indo-European Uralic languages , and the nature of the attested Indo-European words for flora and fauna. The pre-history of Indo-Aryan languages which preceded Vedic Sanskrit is unclear and various hypotheses place it over a fairly wide limit. According to Thomas Burrow, based on

SECTION 60

#1732870006914

8060-487: The closest meaning for the stem might be the onomatopoeic grrr of a growling beast. According to Hesiod and Apollodorus , the Gorgons were daughters of the primordial sea-god Phorcys and the sea-monster Ceto , and the sisters of three other daughters of Phorcys and Ceto, the Graeae . However, according to Hyginus , they were daughters of "the Gorgon", an offspring of Typhon and Echidna , and Ceto, while Euripides , in his tragedy Ion , has "the Gorgon" being

8190-609: The context of a speech or language, is found in verses 5.28.17–19 of the Ramayana . Outside the learned sphere of written Classical Sanskrit, vernacular colloquial dialects ( Prakrits ) continued to evolve. Sanskrit co-existed with numerous other Prakrit languages of ancient India. The Prakrit languages of India also have ancient roots and some Sanskrit scholars have called these Apabhramsa , literally 'spoiled'. The Vedic literature includes words whose phonetic equivalent are not found in other Indo-European languages but which are found in

8320-639: The crystallization of Classical Sanskrit. As in this period the Indo-Aryan tribes had not yet made contact with the inhabitants of the South of the subcontinent, this suggests a significant presence of Dravidian speakers in North India (the central Gangetic plain and the classical Madhyadeśa) who were instrumental in this substratal influence on Sanskrit. Extant manuscripts in Sanskrit number over 30 million, one hundred times those in Greek and Latin combined, constituting

8450-623: The depictions of gods and heroes, which are usually shown in profile, Archaic Gorgons, even when their bodies are presented in profile (usually running), their heads are (as noted above) always turned frontally displaying their full face, directly gazing at the viewer. Of the depictions of ancient Greek demons, the gorgoneion is, by far, the most frequently occurring. Thought to have had an apotropaic (protective) function, gorgoneia are often found on architectural elements such as temple pediments, and ornamental antefixes and acroteria , or decorating various round objects, such as shields, coins, and

8580-467: The detailed and sophisticated treatise then transmitted it through his students. Modern scholarship generally accepts that he knew of a form of writing, based on references to words such as Lipi ('script') and lipikara ('scribe') in section 3.2 of the Aṣṭādhyāyī . The Classical Sanskrit language formalized by Pāṇini, states Renou, is "not an impoverished language", rather it is "a controlled and

8710-547: The development of gorgoneia, or gorgoneia might have come first, in which case the Perseus story might have served an etiological function, as an origin myth , developed as a way to explain where gorgoneia had come from. It is also possible that the Perseus story and gorgoneia developed independently, but later converged. Since the earliest literary and iconographic evidence of both the Perseus story and gorgoneia are roughly contemporaneous, such evidence seems unable to definitively distinguish between any of these three scenarios. It

8840-467: The differences between the Vedic and Classical Sanskrit. Louis Renou published in 1956, in French, a more extensive discussion of the similarities, the differences and the evolution of the Vedic Sanskrit within the Vedic period and then to the Classical Sanskrit along with his views on the history. This work has been translated by Jagbans Balbir. The earliest known use of the word Saṃskṛta (Sanskrit), in

8970-456: The distant major ancient languages of the world. The Indo-Aryan migrations theory explains the common features shared by Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages by proposing that the original speakers of what became Sanskrit arrived in South Asia from a region of common origin, somewhere north-west of the Indus region , during the early 2nd millennium BCE. Evidence for such a theory includes

9100-615: The edge of night where the Hesperides (and the Graeae?) live. The Cypria apparently had the Gorgons living in Oceanus on a rocky island named Sarpedon. Aeschylus 's Prometheus Bound places them in the far east "across the surging sea" on the "Gorgonean plains of Cisthene", where the Graeae live, while his lost play Phorkides (another name for the Graeae) apparently placed them at "Lake Tritonis",

9230-543: The first language of the respective speakers. The Sanskrit language brought Indo-Aryan speaking people together, particularly its elite scholars. Some of these scholars of Indian history regionally produced vernacularized Sanskrit to reach wider audiences, as evidenced by texts discovered in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra. Once the audience became familiar with the easier to understand vernacularized version of Sanskrit, those interested could graduate from colloquial Sanskrit to

9360-502: The form of the Lumina Orchis , a flower that blossoms only in the moonlight and which casts a strange fascination over local botanist Jake to the dismay of his assistant Tim. By season's end, Jake, Laura, Jonathan and the mysterious mainlander are all dead, Colin is destroyed and Thom is living at The Lair. Season 2.5 was depicted in an online 8-part comic series drawn by comic artist Rosendo Brown, known for Fabulance . Each part in

9490-412: The foundation of Vyākaraṇa, a Vedānga . The Aṣṭādhyāyī was not the first description of Sanskrit grammar, but it is the earliest that has survived in full, and the culmination of a long grammatical tradition that Fortson says, is "one of the intellectual wonders of the ancient world". Pāṇini cites ten scholars on the phonological and grammatical aspects of the Sanskrit language before him, as well as

9620-414: The fourth century BC. One of the earliest such "beautiful" Gorgons (mid-fifth century BC) is a red-figure pelike (Fig. 11), which shows Perseus, with head turned away, about to behead a sleeping Medusa. While gorgoneia continue to be ubiquitous through the end of antiquity, after the fourth century BC full-bodied Gorgons ceased to be represented. Full-bodied Gorgons are usually shown in connection with

9750-537: The gods Varuna, Mitra, Indra, and Nasatya found in the earliest layers of the Vedic literature. O Bṛhaspati, when in giving names they first set forth the beginning of Language, Their most excellent and spotless secret was laid bare through love, When the wise ones formed Language with their mind, purifying it like grain with a winnowing fan, Then friends knew friendships – an auspicious mark placed on their language. — Rigveda 10.71.1–4 Translated by Roger Woodard The Vedic Sanskrit found in

9880-431: The historic Sanskrit literary culture and the failure of new Sanskrit literature to assimilate into the changing cultural and political environment. Sheldon Pollock states that in some crucial way, "Sanskrit is dead ". After the 12th century, the Sanskrit literary works were reduced to "reinscription and restatements" of ideas already explored, and any creativity was restricted to hymns and verses. This contrasted with

10010-478: The intense change that must have occurred in the pre-Vedic period between the Proto-Indo-Aryan language and Vedic Sanskrit. The noticeable differences between the Vedic and the Classical Sanskrit include the much-expanded grammar and grammatical categories as well as the differences in the accent, the semantics and the syntax. There are also some differences between how some of the nouns and verbs end, as well as

10140-481: The island. Sheriff Trout, missing the now-fugitive Ian, recalls another young man from his past. A new arrival to the island is Athan, an antiquities expert who harbours within him the spirit of a male gorgon . On June 21, 2007, here! launched a podcast for the series. Hosted by DJ and here! personality Ben Harvey , the podcast features roundtable discussions of the series and interviews with cast members. No new podcasts associated with season two have been released;

10270-432: The largest cultural heritage that any civilization has produced prior to the invention of the printing press. — Foreword of Sanskrit Computational Linguistics (2009), Gérard Huet, Amba Kulkarni and Peter Scharf Sanskrit has been the predominant language of Hindu texts encompassing a rich tradition of philosophical and religious texts, as well as poetry, music, drama , scientific , technical and others. It

10400-635: The last podcast was released in October 2007. Critical reaction to The Lair has been largely negative. "Awful...in a general sense [but with] true camp value" is how the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette described the show. While the Post-Gazette singles out Moretti's performance for praise, other reviews describe various of the cast as "wooden" and the acting "so amateurishly done as to be comical at times." On January 12, 2024, HereTV revealed it had revived

10530-412: The linguistic expression and sets the standard for the Sanskrit language. Pāṇini made use of a technical metalanguage consisting of a syntax, morphology and lexicon. This metalanguage is organised according to a series of meta-rules, some of which are explicitly stated while others can be deduced. Despite differences in the analysis from that of modern linguistics, Pāṇini's work has been found valuable and

10660-503: The literary works. The Indian tradition, states Winternitz , has favored the learning and the usage of multiple languages from the ancient times. Sanskrit was a spoken language in the educated and the elite classes, but it was also a language that must have been understood in a wider circle of society because the widely popular folk epics and stories such as the Ramayana , the Mahabharata ,

10790-625: The maidens ... she created the many-voiced song of flutes so that she could imitate with musical instruments the shrill cry that reached her ears from the fast-moving jaws of Euryale. Nonnus , in his Dionysiaca , also has the fleeing Perseus "listening for no trumpet but Euryale's bellowing". The desire to evoke this Gorgon cry may account for the typical distended mouth seen in Archaic Gorgon iconography. The earliest literary accounts of Gorgons occur in works by Hesiod and Homer (c. 700–650 BC). Hesiod provides no physical description of

10920-509: The mere thought that he might encounter there the "head of the Gorgon, that awful monster", leaves "straightway". The Hesiodic Shield describes the Gorgons chasing Perseus as being "dreadful and unspeakable" with two snakes wrapped around their waists, and that "upon the terrible heads of the Gorgons rioted great Fear", perhaps a reference to snakes writhing about their heads. Pindar makes snakes for hair explicit, saying that Perseus' Gorgon head "shimmered with hair made of serpents", and that

11050-469: The middle". He also mentions Athena's "Gorgon-faced shield" in his tragedy Electra . In vase-painting, Athena is often shown wearing her aegis, fringed with snake-heads. In some accounts, the blood of "the Gorgon" (any Gorgon?) was said to have both the power to heal and harm. According to Euripides' Ion , Athena gave two drops of blood from the Gorgon she slew for her aegis to Erichthonius , one of which "wards off diseases and nourishes life", while

11180-501: The modern age include the Samaveda , Yajurveda , Atharvaveda , along with the embedded and layered Vedic texts such as the Brahmanas , Aranyakas , and the early Upanishads . These Vedic documents reflect the dialects of Sanskrit found in the various parts of the northwestern, northern, and eastern Indian subcontinent. According to Michael Witzel, Vedic Sanskrit was a spoken language of

11310-490: The monster is begotten to account for it; then the hero is supplied to account for the slaying of the monster. That gorgoneia were used as apotropaic shield devices, at least, seems evident from Agamemnon's gorgoneion-shield, which Homer describes in the Iliad as displaying "the Gorgon, grim of aspect, glaring terribly, and about her were Terror and Rout". Supporting the view that gorgoneia originated as masks, are two groups of seventh-century BC terracotta gorgonion-like masks:

11440-429: The more advanced Classical Sanskrit. Rituals and the rites-of-passage ceremonies have been and continue to be the other occasions where a wide spectrum of people hear Sanskrit, and occasionally join in to speak some Sanskrit words such as namah . Classical Sanskrit is the standard register as laid out in the grammar of Pāṇini , around the fourth century BCE. Its position in the cultures of Greater India

11570-401: The most advanced analysis of linguistics until the twentieth century. Pāṇini's comprehensive and scientific theory of grammar is conventionally taken to mark the start of Classical Sanskrit. His systematic treatise inspired and made Sanskrit the preeminent Indian language of learning and literature for two millennia. It is unclear whether Pāṇini himself wrote his treatise or he orally created

11700-593: The most archaic poems of the Iranian and Greek language families, the Gathas of old Avestan and Iliad of Homer . As the Rigveda was orally transmitted by methods of memorisation of exceptional complexity, rigour and fidelity, as a single text without variant readings, its preserved archaic syntax and morphology are of vital importance in the reconstruction of the common ancestor language Proto-Indo-European . Sanskrit does not have an attested native script: from around

11830-453: The most detailed description: ... the Gorgons had heads twined about with the scales of dragons, and great tusks like swine's, and brazen hands, and golden wings, by which they flew". While such descriptions emphasize the hideous physical features of the Gorgon, by the fifth century BC, Pindar can also describe his snake-haired Medusa as "beautiful". And the Roman poet Ovid tells us that Medusa

11960-469: The most distinctive feature of archaic representations of Gorgons is that the head is always facing frontally (en face) with its large fierce eyes glaring directly at the viewer. Consistent with the change in literary descriptions seen in the works of Pindar and Ovid mentioned above, beginning in the fifth century BC, representations of Gorgons and gorgoneia transition from hideous monsters to beautiful young women, with such representations becoming typical in

12090-409: The mountains of what is today northern Afghanistan across northern Pakistan and into northwestern India. Vedic Sanskrit interacted with the preexisting ancient languages of the subcontinent, absorbing names of newly encountered plants and animals; in addition, the ancient Dravidian languages influenced Sanskrit's phonology and syntax. Sanskrit can also more narrowly refer to Classical Sanskrit ,

12220-423: The much earlier terracotta plaques depicting Humbaba . Medusa and the other Gorgon sisters, Stheno and Euryale , have been featured in art and culture spanning from the days of ancient Greece to present day. Medusa is the most well-known of the three mythological monsters, having been variously portrayed as a monster, a protective symbol, a rallying symbol for liberty, and a sympathetic victim of rape and/or

12350-435: The northwest in the late Bronze Age . Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism , the language of classical Hindu philosophy , and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism . It was a link language in ancient and medieval South Asia, and upon transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia, East Asia and Central Asia in the early medieval era, it became a language of religion and high culture , and of

12480-583: The numbers are thought to signify a wish to be aligned with the prestige of the language. Sanskrit has been taught in traditional gurukulas since ancient times; it is widely taught today at the secondary school level. The oldest Sanskrit college is the Benares Sanskrit College founded in 1791 during East India Company rule . Sanskrit continues to be widely used as a ceremonial and ritual language in Hindu and Buddhist hymns and chants . In Sanskrit,

12610-575: The offspring of Gaia , spawned by Gaia to be an ally for her children the Giants in their war against the Olympian gods. Medusa had two offspring by Poseidon , the winged-horse Pegasus and the warrior Chrysaor . Where the Gorgons were supposed to live varies in the ancient sources. According to Hesiod, the Gorgons lived far to the west beyond Oceanus (the Titan, and world-circling river) near its springs, at

12740-403: The oral transmission of the texts is reliable: they are ceremonial literature, where the exact phonetic expression and its preservation were a part of the historic tradition. However some scholars have suggested that the original Ṛg-veda differed in some fundamental ways in phonology compared to the sole surviving version available to us. In particular that retroflex consonants did not exist as

12870-501: The other "kills, as it is poison from the Gorgon serpents". While according to Apollodorus, Athena gave Asclepius some of the blood the Gorgon, "and while he used the blood that flowed from the veins on the left side for the bane of mankind, he used the blood that flowed from the right side for salvation, and by that means he raised the dead." The loud cry that came from the Gorgons—;perhaps related to 'Gorgon' being derived from

13000-431: The other." Reinöhl further states that there is a symmetric relationship between Dravidian languages like Kannada or Tamil, with Indo-Aryan languages like Bengali or Hindi, whereas the same relationship is not found for non-Indo-Aryan languages, for example, Persian or English: A sentence in a Dravidian language like Tamil or Kannada becomes ordinarily good Bengali or Hindi by substituting Bengali or Hindi equivalents for

13130-411: The pallid adamant, the shield resounded sharply and piercingly with a loud noise. Pindar tells us that the cry of the Gorgons, lamenting the death of Medusa during their pursuit of Perseus, was the reason Athena invented the flute. According to Pindar, the goddess: wove into music the dire dirge of the reckless Gorgons which Perseus heard pouring in slow anguish from beneath the horrible snakey hair of

13260-522: The political elites in some of these regions. As a result, Sanskrit had a lasting impact on the languages of South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, especially in their formal and learned vocabularies. Sanskrit generally connotes several Old Indo-Aryan language varieties. The most archaic of these is the Vedic Sanskrit found in the Rigveda , a collection of 1,028 hymns composed between 1500 BCE and 1200 BCE by Indo-Aryan tribes migrating east from

13390-414: The possible influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is only one of many items of syntactic assimilation, not least among them the large repertoire of morphological modality and aspect that, once one knows to look for it, can be found everywhere in classical and postclassical Sanskrit". The main influence of Dravidian on Sanskrit is found to have been concentrated in the timespan between the late Vedic period and

13520-439: The previous 1,500 years when "great experiments in moral and aesthetic imagination" marked the Indian scholarship using Classical Sanskrit, states Pollock. Scholars maintain that the Sanskrit language did not die, but rather only declined. Jurgen Hanneder disagrees with Pollock, finding his arguments elegant but "often arbitrary". According to Hanneder, a decline or regional absence of creative and innovative literature constitutes

13650-480: The problems of interpretation and misunderstanding. The purifying structure of the Sanskrit language removes these imperfections. The early Sanskrit grammarian Daṇḍin states, for example, that much in the Prakrit languages is etymologically rooted in Sanskrit, but involves "loss of sounds" and corruptions that result from a "disregard of the grammar". Daṇḍin acknowledged that there are words and confusing structures in Prakrit that thrive independent of Sanskrit. This view

13780-596: The regional Prakrit languages, which makes it likely that the interaction, the sharing of words and ideas began early in the Indian history. As the Indian thought diversified and challenged earlier beliefs of Hinduism, particularly in the form of Buddhism and Jainism , the Prakrit languages such as Pali in Theravada Buddhism and Ardhamagadhi in Jainism competed with Sanskrit in the ancient times. However, states Paul Dundas , these ancient Prakrit languages had "roughly

13910-490: The relationship between various Indo-European languages, the origin of all these languages may possibly be in what is now Central or Eastern Europe, while the Indo-Iranian group possibly arose in Central Russia. The Iranian and Indo-Aryan branches separated quite early. It is the Indo-Aryan branch that moved into eastern Iran and then south into South Asia in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE. Once in ancient India,

14040-558: The role of language, the ontological status of painting word-images through sound, and the need for rules so that it can serve as a means for a community of speakers, separated by geography or time, to share and understand profound ideas from each other. These speculations became particularly important to the Mīmāṃsā and the Nyaya schools of Hindu philosophy, and later to Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, states Frits Staal —a scholar of Linguistics with

14170-491: The same relationship to Sanskrit as medieval Italian does to Latin". The Indian tradition states that the Buddha and the Mahavira preferred the Prakrit language so that everyone could understand it. However, scholars such as Dundas have questioned this hypothesis. They state that there is no evidence for this and whatever evidence is available suggests that by the start of the common era, hardly anybody other than learned monks had

14300-525: The same time period, the mid-seventh century BC. Archaic Gorgons typically have snaky hair either with snake-like curls (Figs. 8, 9), or actual snakes protruding from their heads (Figs. 2, 5, 6, 10). The faces of Archaic Gorgons are particularly distinctive, typically with large menacing eyes, tripartite scroll-like ( volute ) noses, wide mouths with rictus-like grins or grimaces, lolling tongues, fangs and/or tusks (Figs. 4, 5, 6), and sometimes beards (Figs. 3, 4, 13, 15). Aside from its particular monstrousness,

14430-551: The semi-nomadic Aryans . The Vedic Sanskrit language or a closely related Indo-European variant was recognized beyond ancient India as evidenced by the " Mitanni Treaty" between the ancient Hittite and Mitanni people, carved into a rock, in a region that now includes parts of Syria and Turkey. Parts of this treaty, such as the names of the Mitanni princes and technical terms related to horse training, for reasons not understood, are in early forms of Vedic Sanskrit. The treaty also invokes

14560-467: The series was a one-page stand-alone story that was meant to fill in the missing links of events that transpired after the Season 2 finale. These stories were: Thom struggles to adjust to life as the only human at The Lair. Colin enthrals Richie from beyond the grave to restore Colin, who schemes to establish a club to rival The Lair. Damian is contacted by the reclusive Frau von Hess, who has plans for him and

14690-476: The series with The Lair: OnlyFangs. Gorgon The Gorgons ( / ˈ ɡ ɔːr ɡ ən z / GOR -gənz ; Ancient Greek : Γοργώνες ), in Greek mythology , are three monstrous sisters, Stheno, Euryale , and Medusa , said to be the daughters of Phorcys and Ceto . They lived near their sisters the Graeae , and were able to turn anyone who looked at them to stone. Euryale and Stheno were immortal, but Medusa

14820-594: The social structures such as the role of the poet and the priests, the patronage economy, the phrasal equations, and some of the poetic metres. While there are similarities, state Jamison and Brereton, there are also differences between Vedic Sanskrit, the Old Avestan, and the Mycenaean Greek literature. For example, unlike the Sanskrit similes in the Ṛg-veda, the Old Avestan Gathas lack simile entirely, and it

14950-641: The turn of the 1st-millennium CE, it has been written in various Brahmic scripts , and in the modern era most commonly in Devanagari . Sanskrit's status, function, and place in India's cultural heritage are recognized by its inclusion in the Constitution of India 's Eighth Schedule languages . However, despite attempts at revival, there are no first-language speakers of Sanskrit in India. In each of India's recent decennial censuses, several thousand citizens have reported Sanskrit to be their mother tongue, but

15080-408: The variants in the usage of Sanskrit in different regions of India. The ten Vedic scholars he quotes are Āpiśali, Kaśyapa , Gārgya, Gālava, Cakravarmaṇa, Bhāradvāja , Śākaṭāyana, Śākalya, Senaka and Sphoṭāyana. In the Aṣṭādhyāyī , language is observed in a manner that has no parallel among Greek or Latin grammarians. Pāṇini's grammar, according to Renou and Filliozat, is a classic that defines

15210-564: The vernacular Prakrits. Many Sanskrit dramas indicate that the language coexisted with the vernacular Prakrits. The cities of Varanasi , Paithan , Pune and Kanchipuram were centers of classical Sanskrit learning and public debates until the arrival of the colonial era. According to Lamotte , Sanskrit became the dominant literary and inscriptional language because of its precision in communication. It was, states Lamotte, an ideal instrument for presenting ideas, and as knowledge in Sanskrit multiplied, so did its spread and influence. Sanskrit

15340-504: The way to the nymphs, which they did. Perseus got from the nymphs, winged sandals, which allowed him to fly, and the cap of Hades , which made him invisible. He also received an adamantine sickle ( harpē ) from Hermes. Perseus then flew to Oceanus, found the Gorgons asleep. And when Perseus managed to behead Medusa by looking at her reflection in his bronze shield, Pegasus and Chrysaor sprang from Medusa's neck, and Stheno and Euryale chased after him, but were unable to see him because he

15470-497: The Ṛg-veda is distinctly more archaic than other Vedic texts, and in many respects, the Rigvedic language is notably more similar to those found in the archaic texts of Old Avestan Zoroastrian Gathas and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey . According to Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton – Indologists known for their translation of the Ṛg-veda – the Vedic Sanskrit literature "clearly inherited" from Indo-Iranian and Indo-European times

15600-408: Was a spoken language ( bhasha ) used by the cultured and educated. Some sutras expound upon the variant forms of spoken Sanskrit versus written Sanskrit. Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang mentioned in his memoir that official philosophical debates in India were held in Sanskrit, not in the vernacular language of that region. According to Sanskrit linguist professor Madhav Deshpande, Sanskrit

15730-427: Was a spoken language in a colloquial form by the mid-1st millennium BCE which coexisted with a more formal, grammatically correct form of literary Sanskrit. This, states Deshpande, is true for modern languages where colloquial incorrect approximations and dialects of a language are spoken and understood, along with more "refined, sophisticated and grammatically accurate" forms of the same language being found in

15860-472: Was adopted voluntarily as a vehicle of high culture, arts, and profound ideas. Pollock disagrees with Lamotte, but concurs that Sanskrit's influence grew into what he terms a "Sanskrit Cosmopolis" over a region that included all of South Asia and much of southeast Asia. The Sanskrit language cosmopolis thrived beyond India between 300 and 1300 CE. Today, it is believed that Kashmiri is the closest language to Sanskrit. Reinöhl mentions that not only have

15990-722: Was also the language of some of the oldest surviving, authoritative and much followed philosophical works of Jainism such as the Tattvartha Sutra by Umaswati . The Sanskrit language has been one of the major means for the transmission of knowledge and ideas in Asian history. Indian texts in Sanskrit were already in China by 402 CE, carried by the influential Buddhist pilgrim Faxian who translated them into Chinese by 418 CE. Xuanzang , another Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, learnt Sanskrit in India and carried 657 Sanskrit texts to China in

16120-463: Was born. However, Euripides , in his tragedy Ion , has a character say that Athena's aegis was made from the skin of the Gorgon, the offspring of Gaia , who Gaia had brought forth as an ally for her children the Giants and who Athena had killed during the Gigantomachy . In the same play, Euripides has Creusa describe a weaving she made "like an aegis, bordered with serpents" with a "Gorgon in

16250-458: Was in his ritual a horrid thing called a Gorgoneion, a grinning mask with glaring eyes and protruding beast-like tusks and pendent tongue. How did this Gorgoneion come to be? A hero had slain a beast called the Gorgon, and this was its head. Though many other associations gathered round it, the basis of the Gorgoneion is a cultus object, a ritual mask misunderstood. The ritual object comes first; then

16380-640: Was not and was slain by the hero Perseus . Gorgons were dread monsters with terrifying eyes. A Gorgon head was displayed on Athena 's aegis , giving it the power both to protect her from any weapon, and instill great fear in any enemy. Gorgon blood was said to have both the power to heal and harm. Representations of full-bodied Gorgons and the Gorgon face, called a gorgoneion (pl. gorgoneia), were popular subjects in Ancient Greek, Etruscan and Roman iconography. While Archaic Gorgons and gorgoneia are universally depicted as hideously ugly, over time they came to be portrayed as beautiful young women. The name 'Gorgon'

16510-582: Was originally a beautiful maiden, but because of a sexual encounter with Neptune (the Roman equivalent of the Greek Poseidon ) in Minerva 's temple (Minerva being the Roman equivalent of the Greek Athena ), Minerva punished Medusa by transforming her beautiful hair into horrible snakes. Gorgons were a popular subject in ancient Greek, Etruscan and Roman art, with over six hundred representations cataloged in

16640-467: Was understood that looking directly at the Gorgon's face was deadly. Of particular interest is the famous Medusa pediment (early sixth century BC) from the temple of Artemis in Corfu (Fig. 6), which shows a winged-Medusa in the characteristic Knielauf (kneeling-running) position, with two snakes wrapped around her waist, like the Gorgons described in the Hesiodic Shield of Heracles . Although

16770-442: Was visualized as "pervading all creation", another representation of the world itself; the "mysterious magnum" of Hindu thought. The search for perfection in thought and the goal of liberation were among the dimensions of sacred sound, and the common thread that wove all ideas and inspirations together became the quest for what the ancient Indians believed to be a perfect language, the "phonocentric episteme" of Sanskrit. Sanskrit as

16900-428: Was wearing Hades' cap of invisibility. When Perseus brought back the Gorgon head, as ordered, with averted eyes he showed the head to Polydectes who was turned to stone. Perseus returned the things he had acquired from the nymphs and Hermes, but gave the Gorgon head to Athena. According to Apollodorus, after Perseus gave the Gorgon head to Athena, she "inserted the Gorgon's head in the middle of her shield", apparently

#913086