“Seeing that in the middle of Jambudvipa, the home of the gods, there rose up a golden mountain. He made a golden mountain in the
The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon provided several interesting measurements of the human body. They’re precise and diverse and thus don’t seem to have been derived
Shigehisa Kuriyama, in The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine, wrote that ancient Greeks appreciated bodies that had a
I was in a restaurant in a city in central Java called Yogyakarta and met an American couple who had just arrived in Indonesia. America’s
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in Philosophy in the Flesh; The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, wrote that many concepts that people
Native Americans were immersed in their natural environments to an extent that can be hard for most Californian suburbanites to fully appreciate. More than 500
Ancient Greeks built temples and public stoas that emphasized abstract proportions and linear relationships, like this reconstruction of the stoa of Attalus in Athens.
Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia intensely focused on maintaining the sanctity of the state’s territory and displaying it in spectacular temples and palaces. This focus on
Nature wasn’t as kind to the area where early Mesopotamians built their first cities and great temples as it was to ancient Egypt. Deserts on