In 2015, the Islamic State released a video of men smashing sculptures in Iraq's Mosul Museum as part of a mission to cleanse the world of idolatry. This book unpacks three key facets of that event: the status and power of images, the political importance of museums, and the efficacy of videos in furthering an ideological agenda through the internet. Beginning with the Islamic State's claim that the smashed objects were idols of the "age of ignorance," Aaron Tugendhaft questions whether there can be any political life without idolatry. He then explores the various roles Mesopotamian sculpture has played in European imperial competition, the development of artistic modernism, and the formation of Iraqi national identity, showing how this history reverberates in the choice of the Mosul Museum as performance stage. Finally, he compares the Islamic State's production of images to the ways in which images circulated in ancient Assyria and asks how digitization has transformed politics in the age of social media. An elegant and accessibly written introduction to the complexities of such events, The Idols of ISIS is ideal for students and readers seeking a richer cultural perspective than the media usually provides.

How do we interpret ancient art created before written texts? Scholars usually put ancient art into conversation with ancient texts in order to interpret its meaning. But for earlier periods without texts, such as in the Bronze Age Aegean, this method is redundant. Using cutting-edge theory from art history, archaeology, and anthropology, Carl Knappett offers a new approach to this problem by identifying distinct actions - such as modelling, combining, and imprinting - whereby meaning is scaffolded through the materials themselves. By showing how these actions work in the context of specific bodies of material, Knappett brings to life the fascinating art of Minoan Crete and surrounding areas in novel ways. With a special focus on how creativity manifests itself in these processes, he makes an argument for not just how creativity emerges through specific material engagements but also why creativity might be especially valued at particular moments.

Stretching across the historical region of Mesopotamia, the Akkadian dynasty (ca. 2334-2154 BCE) created a territorial state of unprecedented scale in the ancient Near East by uniting the city-states of Sumer and Akkad and parts of Syria and Iran. To establish and, later, cement their authority over disparate peoples and places, the kings used art and visual culture to extraordinary effect. Exemplars of Kingship conveys the astonishing life of the art of the Akkadian kings by assessing ancient and modern responses to its dynamic forms and transformative ideologies of kingship. For nearly two thousand years after their reign, the Akkadian kings were remembered as exemplary rulers. Modern assessments of ancient memories of Akkadian kingship have concentrated on textual attestations of the kings' place in cultural memory. This book considers the contributions of images to memories of Akkadian kingship. Through close readings of the visuals that remain, Melissa Eppihimer discusses how Akkadian steles, statues, and cylinder seals became models for later rulers in Mesopotamia and beyond who wished to emulate or critique the Akkadian kings-and how these rulers and their contemporaries were reminded of the Akkadian past when they looked at images. Exemplars of Kingship is, therefore, a book about Akkadian art and its reception in antiquity, but it is also concerned with the modern reception of Akkadian art and kingship. It argues that modern responses have constrained our understanding of ancient responses. Through a wide range of examples drawn from almost two millennia, the book highlights the individual decisions that prompted continuity and change during the long history of Mesopotamia and its artistic traditions.

This book presents the results of the study of the wall paintings from the Northeast Bastion at Ayia Irini, situating them within the wider social context of the island of Kea and the Aegean world. Like the spectacularly well-preserved town of Akrotiri on Thera, with which these paintings are contemporary, Ayia Irini thrived 3,500 years ago. But unlike Akrotiri, Ayia Irini was not protected by a layer of volcanic ash. When the site was excavated in the 1960s-1970s by the University of Cincinnati under the auspices of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, the paintings had long since collapsed, fracturing into thousands of small pieces and becoming mixed with stones, broken pottery, and accumulated debris. This study attempts to bring the wall paintings back to life through the best-preserved fragments. Within the Northeast Bastion was a miniature frieze and, in the adjacent room, large-scale panels of plants. Human action set within townscapes, landscapes, and the sea presents a vivid account of the social life and environment of the people for whom this harbor town was vital within the trading network of the time. In this book the social implications of the fascinating and often unique iconography is explored, and the setting within a fortification wall is quite extraordinary. The volume contains many catalog entries, which contain color images of the fragments, and it is also abundantly illustrated with color drawings, visualizations, and photographs.

In this volume, Milette Gaifman explores a phenomenon known as aniconism - the absence of figural images of gods in Greek practiced religion and the adoption of aniconic monuments, namely objects such as pillars and poles, to designate the presence of the divine. Shifting our attention from the well-known territories of Greek anthropomorphism and naturalism, it casts new light on the realm of non-figural objects in Greek religious art. Drawing upon a variety of material and textual evidence dating from the rise of the Greek polis in the eighth century BC to the rise of Christianity in the first centuries AD, this book shows that aniconism was more significant than has often been assumed. Coexisting with the fully figural forms for representing the divine throughout Greek antiquity, aniconic monuments marked an undefined yet fixedly located divine presence. Cults centered on rocks were encountered at crossroads and on the edges of the Greek city. Despite aniconism's liminality, non-figural markers of divine presence became a subject of interest in their own right during a time when mimesis occupied the center of Greek visual culture. The ancient Greeks saw the worship of stones and poles without images as characteristic of the beginning of their own civilization. Similarly, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the existence of aniconism was seen as physical evidence for the continuity of ancient Greek traditions from time immemorial.

A Cultural History of Sport in Antiquity covers the period 800 BCE to 600 CE. From the founding of the Olympics and Rome's celebratory games, sport permeated the cultural life of Greco-Roman antiquity almost as it does our own. Gymnasiums, public baths, monumental arenas, and circuses for chariot racing were constructed, and athletic contests proliferated. Sports-themed household objects were very popular, whilst the exploits of individual athletes, gladiators, and charioteers were immortalized in poetry, monuments, and the mosaic floors of the wealthy. This rich sporting culture attests to the importance of leisure among the middle and upper classes of the Greco-Roman world, but by 600 CE rising costs, barbarian invasions, and Christianity had swept it all away. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Sport presents the first comprehensive history from classical antiquity to today, covering all forms and aspects of sport and its ever-changing social, cultural, political, and economic context and impact. The themes covered in each volume are the purpose of sport; sporting time and sporting space; products, training and technology; rules and order; conflict and accommodation; inclusion, exclusion and segregation; minds, bodies and identities; representation. Paul Christesen is Professor at Dartmouth College, USA. Charles Stocking is Associate Professor at Western University, Canada. Volume 1 in the Cultural History of Sport set General Editors: Wray Vamplew, Mark Dyreson, and John McClelland

In antiquity, Rome represented one of the world's great cultural capitals. The city constituted a collective repository for various commemoratives, cultural artefacts, and curiosities, not to mention plunder taken in war, and over its history became what we might call a 'museum city'. Ancient Rome as a Museum considers how cultural objects and memorabilia both from Rome and its empire came to reflect a specific Roman identity and, in some instances, to even construct or challenge Roman perceptions of power and of the self. In this volume, Rutledge argues that Roman cultural values and identity are indicated in part by what sort of materials Romans deemed worthy of display and how they chose to display, view, and preserve them. Grounded in the growing field of museum studies, this book includes a discussion on private acquisition of cultural property and asks how well the Roman community at large understood the meaning and history behind various objects and memorabilia. Of particular importance was the use of collections by a number of emperors in the further establishment of their legitimacy and authority. Through an examination of specific cultural objects, Rutledge questions how they came to reflect or even perpetuate Roman values and identity.

A sweeping history of premodern architecture told through the material of stone Spanning almost five millennia, Painting in Stone tells a new history of premodern architecture through the material of precious stone. Lavishly illustrated examples include the synthetic gems used to simulate Sumerian and Egyptian heavens; the marble temples and mansions of Greece and Rome; the painted palaces and polychrome marble chapels of early modern Italy; and the multimedia revival in 19th-century England. Poetry, the lens for understanding costly marbles as an artistic medium, summoned a spectrum of imaginative associations and responses, from princes and patriarchs to the populace. Three salient themes sustained this "lithic imagination": marbles as images of their own elemental substance according to premodern concepts of matter and geology; the perceived indwelling of astral light in earthly stones; and the enduring belief that colored marbles exhibited a form of natural-or divine-painting, thanks to their vivacious veining, rainbow palette, and chance images.

Greek Sculpture presents a chronological overview of the plastic and glyptic art forms in the ancient Greek world from the emergence of life-sized marble statuary at the end of the seventh century BC to the appropriation of Greek sculptural traditions by Rome in the first two centuries AD. * Compares the evolution of Greek sculpture over the centuries to works of contemporaneous Mediterranean civilizations * Emphasizes looking closely at the stylistic features of Greek sculpture, illustrating these observations where possible with original works rather than copies * Places the remarkable progress of stylistic changes that took place in Greek sculpture within a broader social and historical context * Facilitates an understanding of why Greek monuments look the way they do and what ideas they were capable of expressing * Focuses on the most recent interpretations of Greek sculptural works while considering the fragile and fragmentary evidence uncovered

The ancient Greeks traveled widely by sea and founded colonies in far-flung locations. On the north coast of the Black Sea were a number of such Greek settlements, places where the Greeks made contact with the local Scythian population. Greek goods were traded extensively throughout the region, and many of these often-luxurious articles eventually made their way into tombs.
From its wealth of such Greek finds from the Black Sea, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg has lent some 175 Greek objects to an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Villa. This richly illustrated catalogue to the exhibition presents nine essays on the archaeology of the northern Black Sea region and its history, culture, and art, including sculpture, pottery, gems, and jewelry. Written by curators at the State Hermitage Museum, Greeks on the Black Sea presents an intriguing world at once Greek and barbarian.

In the ancient world, dance was used to express important truths about the human condition, and this significance can still be seen today in representations of dancers in ancient art. Sculpture, relief carving, vase painting, and other visual media offer a glimpse of the function of dance in antiquity. In the modern era, the Ballets Russes, a Paris-based collective established by Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929), revolutionized dance and revived European and American interest in ballet, in part by drawing on notions of dance from the ancient world. Ballets Russes choreographers, designers, and collaborators looked to ancient culture for subjects and themes, and for a notion of dance as an expressive art form integrated with ritual. Hymn to Apollo explores the role of dance in ancient art and culture and how artists of the Ballets Russes returned to the past as a source for modern expression. Thematic essays and lavish illustrations present a fresh perspective on ancient artifacts, and watercolors, illustrations, sketchbooks, photographs, costumes, and other archival Ballets Russes material show how artists turned to the ancient world to create something new. Contributors include John Bowlt, Rachel Herschman, Kenneth Lapatin, and F. G. Naerebout. Distributed for the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University Exhibition Dates: March 6-June 2, 2019

Statues are among the most familiar remnants of classical art. Yet their prominence in ancient society is often ignored. In the Roman world statues were ubiquitous. Whether they were displayed as public honours or memorials, collected as works of art, dedicated to deities, venerated as gods, or violated as symbols of a defeated political regime, they were recognized individually and collectively as objects of enormous significance.
By analysing ancient texts and images, Statues in Roman Society unravels the web of associations which surrounded Roman statues. Addressing all categories of statuary together for the first time, it illuminates them in ancient terms, explaining expectations of what statues were or ought to be and describing the Romans' uneasy relationship with 'the other population' in their midst.

From Hesiod's first person account of his encounters with the Muses on Mount Helikon to Theokritos' nymphs, love between goddesses and mortal men provides the ancient Greeks with a way of articulating both the genealogical and cultic connection to their gods and to their past. A Moment'sOrnament examines the theme of nympholepsy--the experience of being "seized" by a nymph or a goddess--in ancient Greek cult and poetry from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period. In poetry, this topos, which is ubiquitous in many of the most well-known ancient Greek sources, focuses on the figure of the goddess, or nymph, who falls in love with a mortal man and subsequently bears a mortal child. The theme also finds its way in ritual as stories of encounters between divinities and mortal men give rise to sanctuaries centering on nymphs and nympholepts. Beyond the individual dimension of the nympholeptic experience, these narratives are also integrated within the community through both poetry and shrines. Nympholeptic narratives thus articulate key elements of the bond between mortals and immortals and the connection between myth and ritual in ancient Greece. Both the cave sanctuaries founded by ancient nympholepts and the poets' narratives of love between goddesses and their mortal lovers function as "a moment's ornament" by preserving the memory of an encounter with the otherworldly at the intersection between myth and cult.

Statues of important Romans frequently represented them nude. Men were portrayed naked holding weapons. The naked emperor might wield the thunderbolt of Jupiter, while Roman women assumed the guide of the nude love-goddess, Venus. When faced with these strange images, modern viewers are usually unsympathetic, finding them incongruous, even tasteless. They are mostly written off as just another example of Roman `bad taste'. This book offers a new approach. Comprehensively illustrated with black and white photographs of its subjects, it investigates how this tradition arose, and how the nudity of these portraits was meant to be understood by contemporary viewers. And, since the Romans also employed a range of costumes for their statues (toga, armour, Greek philosopher's cloak), it asks, `What could the nude images express that other costumes could not?' It is Christopher Hallett's claim that - looked at in this way - these `Roman nudes' turn out to be documents of the first importance for the cultural historian.

This generously illustrated book provides a complete overview of current knowledge about the sculptures of the Parthenon and suggests new interpretations of the ancient temple's sculptural creations. Margaretha Lagerlof steps back from viewing the fragments of the sculptures that remain today to focus more clearly on their meanings in the light of classical Athenian knowledge and society. She considers what the sculptures reveal about the Greek sense of democracy and how they characterize women's lives in a warrior culture. Using Plato's philosophy and the visually oriented similes of his myths, Lagerlof offers a new decoding of the aesthetic structure of the Parthenon's entire sculptural ensembles.

The book compares the sculptures of the pediments to those of the metopes and the frieze, uncovering subtle differences in both the nature and the content of the images. Whereas the pediments represent divine elements, for example, the frieze is seen as the domain of human beings, representing events and also the stage of history when humans no longer have direct access to the presence of the gods. The frieze can be interpreted as an invocation of this presence, a means of regaining closeness with the gods. Using a multifaceted and imaginative approach to the sculptures of the Parthenon, Lagerlof finds powerful new meaning in them as well as an enhanced appreciation of their Athenian creators.

The Archbasilica of St John Lateran is the world's earliest cathedral. A Constantinian foundation pre-dating St Peter's in the Vatican, it remains the seat of the Bishop of Rome, the Pope, to this day. This volume brings together scholars of topography, archaeology, architecture, art history, geophysical survey and liturgy to illuminate this profoundly important building. It takes the story of the site from the early imperial period, when it was occupied by elite housing, through its use as a barracks for the emperor's horse guards to Constantine's revolutionary project and its development over 1300 years. Richly illustrated throughout, this innovative volume includes both broad historical analysis and accessible explanations of the cutting-edge technological approaches to the site that allow us to visualise its original appearance.

Komast figures (literally "revellers") on black-figure vases have long been associated with the worship of Dionysos and the origins of Greek drama. In this fully illustrated study, Tyler Jo Smith takes a fresh look at the evidence for komasts, both on vases and in other artistic media produced throughout Archaic Greece. She concludes that the meaning of the dancing figures differs between different regions, such as Corinth, Athens, and Laconia. Komasts are instrumental to the spread of the human figure in early Archaic Greek art and a vital link in the story of both visual and festival culture in Greece during the sixth century BC.

The travel accounts, drawings, and collections of Frederic Cailliaud were an important early contribution to the birth of the new scientific discipline of Egyptology in the first half of the nineteenth century. But one of his major works-on the arts and crafts of ancient Egypt-was never published. For the first time here, his exquisite color plates are presented alongside a translation of his original French text describing them. Explanatory material by Andrew Bednarski and other scholars put the work in context.
Arriving in Egypt in 1815, Cailliaud embarked upon a series of explorations that included the rediscovery of the Roman emerald mines at Mount Zabora and ancient routes to the Red Sea, and expeditions in the Eastern and Western Deserts, and the land we know today as Ethiopia. He made copious notes on the flora and fauna, people and antiquities he saw, and took a collection of over two thousand objects back to France. Cailliaud's beautifully rendered watercolors of scenes on ancient Egyptian tombs and temples (viewed before Champollion's deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs) show animated scenes of ancient daily life, with which he draws parallels to the nineteenth-century activities he observed around him.
This is a work that will appeal not only to Egyptologists (professional and amateur), but also to historians, art historians, and readers interested in design. The original French text, never before published, is included in electronic form."

A generously illustrated selection of John Baines's influential writings on two core areas of ancient Egyptian civilization: the role of writing, which was very different in antiquity from what is familiar in the modern world, and the importance of visual culture. These questions are explored through a number of case studies. The volume assembles articles that were scattered in publications in a variety of disciplines, making available key contributions on core problems of theory, comparison, and analysis in the study of many civilizations and offering important points of departure for further research. Three wholly new essays are included, and the overall approach is an interdisciplinary one, synthesizing insights from archaeology, anthropology, and art history as well as Egyptology.

This is a book about classical sculptures in the early modern period, centuries after the decline and fall of Rome, when they began to be excavated, restored, and collected by British visitors in Italy in the second half of the eighteenth century. Viccy Coltman contrasts the precarious and competitive culture of eighteenth-century collecting, which integrated sculpture into the domestic interior back home in Britain, with the study and publication of individual specimens by classical archaeologists like Adolf Michaelis a century later. Her study is comprehensively illustrated with over 100 photographs.

This innovative, extensively illustrated study examines how classical antiquities and archaeology contributed significantly to the production of the modern Greek nation and its national imagination. It also shows how, in return, national imagination has created and shaped classical antiquities and archaeological practice from the nineteenth century to the present. Yannis Hamilakis covers a diverse range of topics, including the role of antiquities in the foundation of the Greek state in the nineteenth century, the Elgin marbles controversy, the role of archaeology under dictatorial regimes, the use of antiquities in the detention camps of the Greek civil war, and the discovery of the so-called tomb of Philip of Macedonia.