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Saturday 30 January 2010

Inquiries about Ancient Greece

Under this title, I am presenting the following writings of mine, originally published in The Review, the midweek supplement of Dawn in the early 2000s and written from a perspective which I now see as "the Valley of Wonderment":
  1. Helen of Troy
  2. Herodotus
  3. Socrates
  4. Aristotle
  5. Alexander the Great
  6. Cleopatra

As explained elsewhere, I refer to the twenty years from 1987 to 2006 in the history of Pakistan as "the Valley of Wonderment" because Sheikh Fariduddin Attar has described the valley in The Conference of the Birds as a place where the Unity previously written on the souls is gone. Travelers do not know whether they are dead or alive, awake or asleep, and all they can tell is that they are in love but do not know with whom. There cannot be a more apt description for this phase of our collective life, and I guess it resonated in my writings too.

5 comments:

ReeBz said...

Seems interesting..
Waiting for the more similar posts!

Ranu 802 said...

What a wonderful way of describing Alexander!He was indeed great.

Ranu 802 said...

What a wonderful way of describing Alexander!He was indeed great.

Tasleem said...

I really liked the valuable piece of information that you provided about the Helen of Troy and the different myths about her. This gives us the understanding of those times and almost transports us to that world and we feel as if we have know helen one way or the other. The important thing about this myth of the helen of troy is that it is relevant today one way or the other as it shows that beauty can play havoc with the person who has it and all the othere who become victims of it just as helen's beauty led to a bloody war and burnt the topless towers of ilium.

Fasih Ur Rehman said...

Outstnding .. I wil Only Say .. You Are Doing Great ..