In The Tradition of Hermes Trismegistus, Christian H. Bull argues that the treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus reflect the spiritual exercises and ritual practices of loosely organized brotherhoods in Egypt. These small groups were directed by Egyptian priests educated in the traditional lore of the temples, but also conversant with Greek philosophy. Such priests, who were increasingly dispossessed with the gradual demise of the Egyptian temples, could find eager adherents among a Greek-speaking audience seeking for the wisdom of the Egyptian Hermes, who was widely considered to be an important source for the philosophies of Pythagoras and Plato. The volume contains a comprehensive analysis of the myths of Hermes Trismegistus, a reevaluation of the Way of Hermes, and a contextualization of this ritual tradition.

Grafton Elliot Smith rose from a colonial Australian background to dizzying heights in the British scientific establishment. He became a world authority on neuroanatomy and human prehistory, holding chairs at Cairo, Manchester and University College, London. He was best known publicly for his challenging theory of cultural diffusion, crossing the boundaries of anthropology, archaeology and history, stemming from his expert knowledge of evolution. Most controversy raged about his "Egyptian" theory, which placed ancient Egypt as the dynamic source from which major elements of civilisation were spread by the migration of peoples and mores. This vision stemmed from his ground-breaking dissection of thousands of mummies in Egypt during the great excavations of the 1900s. His speculations, made in association with thinkers such as W H R Rivers and W J Perry, bore fruit in a spate of publications that sparked global debate, arousing particular anger from American ethnologists opposed to ideas of foreign influence upon Mesoamerican cultures. Elliot Smith's ideas were regarded at the time as authentic, if problematic, approaches to important issues in human history. They were subsequently to be caricatured or ignored in anthropological and archaeological disciplines that had moved on to other paradigms. Paul Crook shows how his ideas were developed in the context of his life and times, examining the debates they aroused, his attempts to incorporate anthropology within a broader interdisciplinary school under his leadership in London, and his opposition to Nazi race theory in the 1930s. There has been no full-scale biography of Elliot Smith and little of substance analysing his works. Despite shortcomings, his theory and reputation deserve rehabilitation. An Afterword brings general readers up to date about the whole "diffusion" debate.

Turkey's northern edge is a region of contrasts and diversity. From the rugged peaks of the Pontic mountains and hidden inland valleys to the plains and rocky alcoves of the Black Sea coast, this landscape shaped and was shaped by its inhabitants' ways of life, their local cultural traditions, and the ebbs and flows of land-based and maritime networks of interaction. Between 2009 and 2011, an international team of specialists and students of the Cide Archaeological Project (CAP) investigated the challenging landscapes of the Cide and S enpazar districts of Kastamonu province. CAP presents the first systematic archaeological survey of the western Turkish Black Sea region. The information gathered by the project extends its known human history by 10,000 years and offers an unprecedented insight into the region's shifting cultural, social and political ties with Anatolia and the Circumpontic. This volume presents the project's approach and methodologies, its results and their interpretation within period-specific contexts and through a long-term landscape perspective.

Trends and Turning Points presents sixteen articles, examining the discursive construction of the late antique and Byzantine world, focusing specifically on the utilisation of trends and turning points to make stuff from the past, whether texts, matter, or action, meaningful. Contributions are divided into four complementary strands, Scholarly Constructions, Literary Trends, Constructing Politics, and Turning Points in Religious Landscapes. Each strand cuts across traditional disciplinary boundaries and periodisation, placing historical, archaeological, literary, and architectural concerns in discourse, whilst drawing on examples from the full range of the medieval Roman past. While its individual articles offer numerous important insights, together the volume collectively rethinks fundamental assumptions about how late antique and Byzantine studies has and continues to be discursively constructed. Contributors are: David Barritt, Laura Borghetti, Nikolas Churik, Elif Demirtiken, Alasdair C. Grant, Stephen Humphreys, Mirela Ivanova, Hugh Jeffery, Valeria Flavia Lovato, Francesco Lovino, Kosuke Nakada, Jonas Nilsson, Theresia Raum, Maria Rukavichnikova, and Milan Vukasinovic.

The open access publication of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. In Shrines in a Fluid Space: The Shaping of New Holy Sites in the Ionian Islands, the Peloponnese and Crete under Venetian Rule (14th-16th Centuries), Argyri Dermitzaki reconstructs the devotional experiences within the Greek realm of the Venetian Stato da Mar of Western European pilgrims sailing to Jerusalem. The author traces the evolution of the various forms of cultic sites and the perception of them as nodes of a wider network of the pilgrims' 'holy topography'. She scrutinises travelogues in conjunction with archaeological, visual and historical evidence and offers a study of the cultic phenomena and sites invested with exceptional meaning at the main ports of call of the pilgrims' galleys in the Ionian Sea, the Peloponnese and Crete.