Hello peggy5,
I am confident that what you have is a bust of Plato, one of the most
important philosophers of Ancient Greece.
There is however either an error on the statue itself in the first
letter you give, or it is actually not an N shape, but two vertical
lines with a bar across the top (rather than diagonally). This makes
the word spell out PLATON, which is the Greek way of saying Plato. (If
the first letter was an N, the word would be NLATON, which does not
make sense).
You can view the Greek alphabet with English equivalents here.
http://www.physlink.com/Reference/GreekAlphabet.cfm
The letters that spell Platon are: pi, lambda, alpha, tau, omega, nu.
According to an article about Plato in the Catholic Encyclopedia, the
name Platon means "the broad shouldered".
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12159a.htm
There is another article about Plato on the web site of the Universtiy
of St Andrews, Scotland, where you can also view some pictures of him,
including a number of sculptures
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Plato.html
Plato wrote about many subjects, but one of his most famous concepts
is of "the cave", which appears in his work, "The Republic". In this
he talks about how what we see is just a shadow of the real reality of
things. He uses the image of a cave, in which people are chained to
the wall as prisoners and only see the shadows of objects cast onto
the walls, rather than the objects themselves.
Here is a link to an excerpt from a translation of "The Republic" by Allan Bloom:
http://www.vrc.iastate.edu/why.html (Iowa State University web site)
and here are some lecture notes about the concept from the University
of Washington
http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm
Search strategy:
I know the Greek alphabet and figured that the name must be PLATON. I
also know of Plato's allegory of the cave. Searches were simply to
provide back-up:
1. "Greek alphabet"
2. Plato Platon
3. Plato cave |
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