Written in Stone by Christopher Stevens

Author:Christopher Stevens
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780753550311
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2016-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

Men, to think

NOMADS 20,000 YEARS AGO understood that it was the human ability to think that made them different from the animals that they hunted and herded. The prehistoric paintings at Lascaux in southern France of horses, aurochs and deer project mental images onto the cave walls: it is proof that we were conscious, and probably had been for hundreds of millennia.

But there are many ways to express what the brain does, and various cultures had different interpretations of men. In India, it was the soul; in Scandanavia, reflective thought; in northern Europe, love; and in Mediterranean countries, intellect. The word mind comes from the Latin mens: we still recite it in the phrase mens sana in corpore sano, a healthy mind in a healthy body. But in Sanskrit, manas is the soul and spirit as well as the mind, and in Old High German minna is love. The meaning of menas in Lithuanian is understanding, and in Old Norse minni is remembrance or reminiscence. The Ancient Greek for mind is menos – but there is a closely related word, for madness: mania.

Graphomania is the compulsion to write books, which might be to blame for what you’re reading – unless that’s logomania, an obsession with words. Erotomania is the stalker’s delusion, the conviction of being loved by a complete stranger; misomania is a paranoid loathing for the world; oniomania is shopaholic’s disease, the compulsion to buy things; potomania is the urge to get hopelessly drunk.

Tulipmania swept Holland in the 1630s, when the flower was so much in demand that a single tulip bulb was exchanged for 90kg (200lb) of wheat and 180kg (400lb) of rye, four oxen, eight pigs and twelve sheep, 480 litres (105 gallons) of wine, 600 litres (132 gallons) of beer, two tons of butter, 450kg (1,000lb) of cheese, a bed, a suit of clothes and a silver goblet – total value 2,500 gold florins, or around £200,000 today.

Mnestis was Greek for memory, which is easily remembered with mnemonics and forgotten again with amnesia. Mnemosyne was the mother of Zeus’s children, the Nine Muses – because in the prehistoric world, none of the arts (epic poetry, love poetry, dance, music, hymns, history, tragedy, comedy and astronomy) was possible without memory. Her name in Rome was Moneta, and coins were minted at her temple – Moneta became money, and started the monetary system. Perhaps this explains why modern society has money on the brain: it all began with the mind.

The Roman goddess of wisdom was Minerva, who sprang in full armour from the brain of her father, Jupiter, after he ate her mother. She was a serious-minded and celibate young woman, who fought off an attempted rape by the blacksmith god Vulcan. Cleaning herself up after the assault, she wiped his semen off her leg with a scrap of wool and threw it to the earth, where it spawned a baby – a monster called Erichton, that was half child and half snake, and so hideous that women who saw it went mad and hurled themselves from the top of the Acropolis.

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