A WHOLE host of ...

A compelling and thought-provoking guide to the historical and philosophical notions that have shaped human civilization. From divine majesty  to jihad, from the dawn of time to the present day, from Ancient Greece to North America, each idea is engagingly explained and powerfully illustrated over a double-page spread.

In all, over 175 of the world's most pivotal ideas are liberated from their often obscure and academic contexts, expertly distilled by one of the world's greatest historians and thinkers,and given a new accessibility and ease of interpretation with Dorling Kindersley graphics and design. The book is at once an original and authoritative retelling of the story of civilization, a source book for all students of philosophy and history, and a highly browsable reference for the general reader.

The connections between ground-breaking ideas are highlighted throughout this early UK version of the publication - starting with the oldest - Eating People - the idea of Cannibalism - then Give Me a Sign - the idea of Symbols - and lastly the Global Village - the idea of Cultural Pluralism.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto says - " It seems odd that one thing can signify something else.

Presumably symbols developed from awareness that some events are cued by others.

Language was, probably, the first system of signs people devised - an agreed pattern or code of gestures and utterances with no necessarily obvious resemblance to the things signified.

When the idea of symbolic representation occured to them, they had a means of conveying information and making it available for critical examination - it was an advantage over other species and, ultimately, a means of broadening communication and protracting memory."

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto goes on to say in The New Illusion  - the idea that reality is unknowable - " The invention of geometry showed how the MIND can reach realities that senses obscure or warp - a perfect circle, a line without magnitude. Workers in arithmetic and algebra discovered unreachable numbers - zero and negative numbers, ratios that could never be exactly determined, yet which seemed to underpin the universe Pi for instance (22/7), the value that determines the size of a circle, or what Greek mathematicians called the "Golden Number" (3/2), which seemed to represent perfection of proportion."

Following on from Leonardo da Vinci and the Golden Section used by the ancient Greeks -  Le Corbusier patented and published his
Modulor - a symbolic representation of a series of proportions based on the measurements of a
'six-foot man'  -
which he called
"a measuring tool based on the human body and mathematics" -
and acts as both
a module of measurement and of scale - in addition to providing the means of relating measurements in feet and inches to those of the metric system. 

More recently the film-maker Mark Whitney & art historian Carlo Pedretti produced a state-of-the-art computer animated video - Leonardo's Deluge - using - scenes of natural landscapes around the Arno River to underscore the symbolic significance of these drawings - and the proportional rule of thirds which is now so importantly understood by those involved in the art of film production - and those @zaadz who aspire to be so.

.