ANNUAL INTERDISCIPLINARY SCHOOL OF ANCIENT GREEK, EGYPTOLOGY AND ORIENTAL LANGUAGES. DAY 5
The fifth day began with the reading and translation of the first chapter of Biblical Genesis - in Greek and Latin - by the participants, mostly students of Classical Philology, in the seminar given by dr. Ana-Maria Răducan (ISACCL). The biblical narrative of creation involves the segmentation of the world and the fragmentation of time, as well as the perspective of the divinity that creates through the word that becomes deed and that always ascertains the goodness of its creation.
Then dr. Cătălin - Ștefan Popa (ISACCL) presented the image of angels in Syriac theology, following the visions of two important authors - Narsai from Nisibis and Jacob from Edessa, in the communication "About angels in Syrian exegesis. Prolegomena to the biblical account of the creation of the world", illustrating the complex environment of Syriac Christianity, in which theology, cosmology and philosophy interacted as competing systems, providing a basis for drawing the line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy.
The evening ended with a fascinating lecture by dr. Anca Dan (CNRS, Paris), which illustrated the way in which modern continents were invented, the way the ancient Greeks saw and conceptualized the universe, from Homer and Hesiod to pre-Socratics. and Plato, by dividing the Earth into different parts that are at the origin of the modern world and by imagining other worlds, beyond the Ocean. The speaker pointed out that the notion of continents is a modern one (after the discovery of the new world), but the ancients had a single known world, composed of Europe, Asia and Africa, which they saw as parts of a single known world, the old one, which it was shaped like a sphere.
