Homer Quotes
The roaring seas and many a dark range of mountains lie between us.
Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Samuel Butler, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1898, p. 8.
Abu Ja'far Abdallah ibn Muhammad al-Mansur. And al-Rahman had assembled a very powerful army of blond, blue-eyed Slavic slaves supplemented with black African warriors. The Caliph, was always concerned when one of his subjects had an effective fighting force as he might be a rival. But if the troops were Muslims the danger was not so great as there was a built in loyalty to the Caliph. However, in this case, the fierce fighters were not Muslims. Hence the sea was a desirable barrier.
This quotation was and is still used by many when discussing the Berlin Wall.
The Kurds are an ethnic people—Sunni Muslims by religion who like Armenians and Jews before Israel had no country of their own. There are large contingencies of Kurds in Iraq, Iran and Turkey where historically each of those countries saw the Kurds as part of their Nation. In Turkey, it could be said that almost half the population are Kurds. The Turkish government takes the position that all its citizens are Turks—there is no such thing as a Kurd. Turkey once banned the speaking of Kurdish and would not allow the language to be used in schools insisting that Turkish was the language of the country. Kurds outside of Turkey established terrorist cells and murdered many innocent Turkish people including Turkish Kurds. Turkey, Iraq and Iran have all tried to eliminate any semblance of a Kurdish state or province using force and military means. No country has really aided the Kurds but they have been able to avoid annihilation because of the mountains where they could hide and endure.
Homer (/ˈhoʊmər/; Ancient Greek: Ὅμηρος [hómɛːros], Hómēros) was the presumed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems that are the foundational works of ancient Greek literature. The Iliad is set during the Trojan War, the ten-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greek kingdoms. It focuses on a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles lasting a few weeks during the last year of the war. The Odyssey focuses on the ten-year journey home of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, after the fall of Troy. Many accounts of Homer's life circulated in classical antiquity, the most widespread being that he was a blind bard from Ionia, a region of central coastal Anatolia in present-day Turkey. Modern scholars consider these accounts legendary.
