Art and Architecture on the Mediterranean Islands [antikvár]

This sea lies stretched between two polar hemispheres. Although a watershed, it binds to itself the two continental extremities of the earth's structure and their civilizations and ultimately connects them with one another, mellowing the polar, the alien to an accommodation, a fructification for man. Southward, across desert and burning rock, the brightness of Africa; northward the sway of the glaciers that pushed south in the cosmic oscillation of the earth's axis, extinguishing vegetation and life for thousands of years. At all events, an elemental and deadly wilderness in both zones. As in the geological, so also in the human sphere: when prehistoric man, making his mark without letters, came forth in the south from his silence, his anonymity, empires arose in the Nile valley, on the alluvial banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris, as unyielding and cruel to man as the timeless vaulted brightness over his head. Stone primacy of the Pharaohs, of priestly castes and almighty bureaucracies. Hierarchical ruling classes, who once came riding in hordes from the steppes of the north and of Asia, had made abject slaves of the aborigines of the fertile alluvial lands. In the rigid edifice of their social forms, which stripped man of power for the exclusive godlike existence and glory of a ruler and his noble and priestly castes, there came to be an impenetrable loneliness of faces, a reign of fear inspired by the powers of heaven and earth, partly as the heritage of prehistory surviving in the breast. And as the first creation to outlive time we find the human image and the human form in the hieratic immotility of an art where realistic forms were unconditionally subordinated to a set of ideas, as to an absolute—the expression of that society's rigid structure. From the north, the home of wanderers, where existence was a struggle against nature, there came the barbaric tribes of nomadic herdsmen and horsemen, forcing their way south in search of better living conditions, breaking into the Mediterranean regions and destroying the first wondrous civilizations. Thus began, after twenty thousand years of matriarchal cultivation of the soil, the division of humanity into masters and slaves — historic times. Yet here, too, prehistoric obscurity prevails at first; man still hunts, and his whole day is determined by it, for hunger is his goad, and he hunts the wild horse, the bison, the mammoth, the stag, just as he did half a million years ago. The world is still inexplicable, uncanny, a chaos; and all is one, the self a part of an overwhelming flood of existence which can only be J comprehended or exorcised through magic. Fox, wolf and gazelle are my ancestors, and sacred. Self is identical with all, part is identical with whole,