Palaeophilosophy

Investigations into the earliest stages of philosophy usually begin with the Pre-Socratics in the 8th-7th C. BCE. But there is a wealth of documents in other traditions from the Archaic Period (c. 1500-750BCE), which provide ample evidence for the use of central philosophical ideas, such as knowledge, ’science’, divination, space and time, the three-part soul, the human body, God’s nature, archetypal words for cognition, and so forth. This book examines relevant texts from Ancient Egyptian, Biblical Hebrew, Assyrian, Homeric Greek, and others in order to extract underlying ideas significant for philosophical reflection. Our analyses do indeed show that their appearance is 'incidental, unsystematic and pre-philosophical', as one critic said, but they are very much relevant to the earliest stages in the history of philosophy. Although there are scholarly studies of culture-specific fields with regard to some of these topics, there has been no comprehensive work devoted to an in-depth comparative discussion of these interrelated ideas across multiple cultural-religious sources.