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Books > Humanities > History > World history > BCE to 500 CE
This book is a new survey of the Celtic and Roman traditions in
Merovingian Gaul, Lombard Italy, and the British Isles from
590-768. In it Corning argues that the main areas of conflict
between the two traditions during this period were the Easter
controversy and by extension the style of tonsure. Corning's work
serves as a valuable case study of the ways in which the early
medieval Church attempted to reach consensus on divisive issues.
Script Switching in Roman Egypt studies the hieroglyphic, hieratic,
demotic, and Old Coptic manuscripts which evidence the conventions
governing script use, the domains of writing those scripts
inhabited, and the shift of scripts between those domains, to
elucidate the obsolescence of those scripts from their domains
during the Roman Period. Utilising macro-level frameworks from
sociolinguistics, the textual culture from four sites is
contextualised within the priestly communities of speech, script,
and practice that produced them. Utilising micro-level frameworks
from linguistics, both the scripts of the Egyptian writing system
written, and the way the orthographic methods fundamental to those
scripts changed, are typologised. This study also treats the way in
which morphographic and alphabetic orthographies are deciphered and
understood by the reading brain, and how changes in spelling over
time both resulted from and responded to dimensions of orthographic
depth. Through a cross-cultural consideration of script
obsolescence in Mesoamerica and Mesopotamia and by analogy to
language death in speech communities, a model of domain-bydomain
shift and obsolescence of the scripts of the Egyptian writing
system is proposed.
While European scholarship in the Classics has a long and
established tradition, very little has been written on the history
of classical scholarship in North America. By providing profiles of
some 600 North American Classicists, this reference book presents a
starting point for defining the history of Classical scholarship in
Canada and the United States. Included are those Classicists who
made significant contributions to the field and those who are
representative figures. The people profiled were either born in the
United States or Canada, or were born in other countries but had
careers in North America. They were either founding fathers of the
profession, scholars known more for their specialized
contributions, or members of smaller or remote institutions who
achieved at least regional distinction for their work. The first
part of each entry provides basic biographical and professional
information. A narrative summary of the person's career follows,
and each profile closes with a short bibliography. The entries are
arranged in alphabetical order and were written by expert
contributors.
This wide-ranging collection, consisting of 50 essays by leading
international scholars in a variety of fields, provides an overview
of the reception history of a major literary genre from Greco-Roman
antiquity to the present day. Section I considers how the 5th- and
4th-century Athenian comic poets defined themselves and their
plays, especially in relation to other major literary forms. It
then moves on to the Roman world and to the reception of Greek
comedy there in art and literature. Section II deals with the
European reception of Greek and Roman comedy in the Medieval,
Renaissance, and Early Modern periods, and with the European stage
tradition of comic theater more generally. Section III treats the
handling of Greco-Roman comedy in the modern world, with attention
not just to literary translations and stage-productions, but to
more modern media such as radio and film. The collection will be of
interest to students of ancient comedy as well as to all those
concerned with how literary and theatrical traditions are passed on
from one time and place to another, and adapted to meet local
conditions and concerns.
Malaria and Rome is the first comprehensive book on the history of malaria in Roman Italy. Aimed at an interdisciplinary readership, it explores the evolution and ecology of malaria, its medical and demographic effects on human populations in antiquity, its social and economic effects, the human responses to it, and the human interpretations of it. Robert Sallares argues that malaria became increasingly prevalent in Roman times in central Italy as a result of ecological change and alterations to the physical landscape such as deforestation. Making full use of contemporary sources and comparative material from other periods, he shows that malaria had a significant effect on mortality rates in certain regions of Roman Italy.
This volume contains editions of 35 texts, which have been
excavated nearly 100 years ago in the ancient Egyptian village of
Karanis, and which were still waiting publication. As all texts
written on papyrus from the Egyptian countryside, these texts give
a new insight into the life of the people who dwelled in a typical
village of the Roman period in Egypt. The texts show the cultural
diversity of those who cohabitated, whether they had Greek or
Egyptian names, whether their main gods were the crocodiles or
Zeus. In the lives of all of them tax-paying played an important
role, as well as caring for their cattle and fields, doing
business, and fullfilling the obligations of the Roman government.
In particular interesting is the personage of Socrates the
tax-collector. Since the ruins of Karanis are still standing (and
worth a visit) with two nearly intact temples from the period of
the texts, a more complete image of village life emerges from texts
and the archaeology behind them. Papyrologists welcome every newly
published text as a further stone of the mosaic image that they try
to create of the past.
This is the first full-scale assessment of the theological, social
and ideational implications of our new understandings of ancient
Israel's social and religious development. Scholars now stress the
gradual emergence of Israel out of the culture of ancient Palestine
and the surrounding ancient Near East rather than contrast Israel
with the ancient world. Our new paradigms stress the ongoing and
unfinished nature of the monotheistic 'revolution', which is indeed
still in process today. Gnuse takes a further bold step in setting
the emergence of monotheism in a wider intellectual context: he
argues brilliantly that the interpretation of Israel's development
as both an evolutionary and revolutionary process corresponds to
categories of contemporary evolutionary thought in the biological
and palaeontological sciences (Punctuated Equilibrium).
Geography of Claudius Ptolemy, originally titled Geographia and
written in the second century, is a depiction of the geography of
the Roman Empire at the time. Though inaccurate due to Ptolemy's
varying methods of measurement and use of outdated data, Geography
of Claudius Ptolemy is nonetheless an excellent example of ancient
geographical study and scientific method. This edition contains
more than 40 maps and illustrations, reproduced based on Ptolemy's
original manuscript. It remains a fascinating read for students of
scientific history and Greek influence.CLAUDIUS PTOLEMY (A.D. 90-
A.D. 168) was a poet, mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, and
geographer who wrote in Greek, though he was a Roman citizen. He is
most well-known for three scientific treatises he wrote on
astronomy, astrology, and geography, respectively titled Almagest,
Apotelesmatika, and Geographia. His work influenced early Islamic
and European studies, which in turn influenced much of the modern
world. Ptolemy died in Alexandria as a member of Greek society.
The story of humanity is the story of textiles-as old as
civilization itself. Textiles created empires and powered
invention. They established trade routes and drew nations' borders.
Since the first thread was spun, fabric has driven technology,
business, politics, and culture. In The Fabric of Civilization,
Virginia Postrel traces this surprising history, exposing the
hidden ways textiles have made our world. The origins of chemistry
lie in the coloring and finishing of cloth. The beginning of binary
code-and perhaps all of mathematics-is found in weaving. Selective
breeding to produce fibers heralded the birth of agriculture. The
belt drive came from silk production. So did microbiology. The
textile business funded the Italian Renaissance and the Mughal
Empire; it left us double-entry bookkeeping and letters of credit,
the David and the Taj Mahal. From the Minoans who exported woolen
cloth colored with precious purple dye to Egypt, to the Romans who
wore wildly expensive Chinese silk, the trade and production of
textiles paved the economic and cultural crossroads of the ancient
world. As much as spices or gold, the quest for fabrics and dyes
drew sailors across strange seas, creating an ever-more connected
global economy. Synthesizing groundbreaking research from
economics, archaeology, and anthropology, Postrel weaves a rich
tapestry of human cultural development.
A Prosopography to Martial's Epigrams is the first dictionary of
all the characters and personal names found in the work of Marcus
Valerius Martialis, containing nearly 1,000 comprehensive entries.
Each of them compiles and analyses all the relevant information
regarding the characters themselves, as well as the literary
implications of their presence in Martial's poems. Unlike other
works of this kind, the book encompasses not only real people,
whose positive existence is beyond doubt, but also fictional
characters invented by the poet or inherited from the cultural and
literary tradition. Its entries provide the passages of the
epigrams where the respective characters appear; the general
category to which they belong; the full name (in the case of
historical characters); onomastic information, especially about
frequency, meaning, and etymology; other literary or epigraphical
sources; a prosopographical sketch; a discussion of relevant
manuscript variants; and a bibliography. Much attention is paid to
the literary portrayal of each character and the poetic usages of
their names. This reference work is a much needed tool and is
intended as a stimulus for further research.
I Know myself, I know myself, I am One With God -From the Pert Em
Heru "The Ru Pert em Heru" or "Ancient Egyptian Book of The Dead,"
or "Book of Coming Forth By Day" as it is more popularly known, has
fascinated the world since the successful translation of Ancient
Egyptian hieroglyphic scripture over 150 years ago. The astonishing
writings in it reveal that the Ancient Egyptians believed in life
after death and in an ultimate destiny to discover the Divine. The
elegance and aesthetic beauty of the hieroglyphic text itself has
inspired many see it as an art form in and of itself. But is there
more to it than that? Did the Ancient Egyptian wisdom contain more
than just aphorisms and hopes of eternal life beyond death? In this
volume Dr. Muata Ashby, the author of over 25 books on Ancient
Egyptian Yoga Philosophy has produced a new translation of the
original texts which uncovers a mystical teaching underlying the
sayings and rituals instituted by the Ancient Egyptian Sages and
Saints. "Once the philosophy of Ancient Egypt is understood as a
mystical tradition instead of as a religion or primitive mythology,
it reveals its secrets which if practiced today will lead anyone to
discover the glory of spiritual self-discovery. The Pert em Heru is
in every way comparable to the Indian Upanishads or the Tibetan
Book of the Dead." $28.95 ISBN# 1-884564-28-3 Size: 81/2" X
The emotions have long been an interest for those studying ancient
Greece and Rome. But while the last few decades have produced
excellent studies of individual emotions and the different
approaches to them by the major philosophical schools, the focus
has been almost entirely on negative emotions. This might give the
impression that the Greeks and Romans had little to say about
positive emotion, something that would be misguided. As the
chapters in this collection indicate, there are representations of
positive emotions extending from archaic Greek poetry to Augustine,
and in both philosophical works and literary genres as wide-ranging
as lyric poetry, forensic oratory, comedy, didactic poetry, and the
novel. Nor is the evidence uniform: while many of the literary
representations give expression to positive emotion but also
describe its loss, the philosophers offer a more optimistic
assessment of the possibilities of attaining joy or contentment in
this life. The positive emotions show some of the same features
that all emotions do. But unlike the negative emotions, which we
are able to describe and analyze in great detail because of our
preoccupation with them, positive emotions tend to be harder to
articulate. Hence the interest of the present study, which
considers how positive emotions are described, their relationship
to other emotions, the ways in which they are provoked or upset by
circumstances, how they complicate and enrich our relationships
with other people, and which kinds of positive emotion we should
seek to integrate. The ancient works have a great deal to say about
all of these topics, and for that reason deserve more study, both
for our understanding of antiquity and for our understanding of the
positive emotions in general.
Blumell and Wayment present a thorough compendium of all published
papyri, parchments, and patristic sources that relate to
Christianity at Oxyrhynchus before the fifth century CE. Christian
Oxyrhynchus provides new and expanded editions of Christian
literary and documentary texts that include updated readings,
English translationsaasome of which represent the first English
translation of a textaaand comprehensive notes. The volume features
New Testament texts carefully collated against other textual
witnesses and a succinct introduction for each Oxyrhynchus text
that provides information about the date of the papyrus, its unique
characteristics, and textual variants. Documentary texts are
grouped both by genre and date, giving readers access to the Decian
Libelli , references to Christians in third- and fourth-century
texts, and letters written by Christians. A compelling resource for
researchers, teachers, and students, Christian Oxyrhynchus enables
broad access to these crucial primary documents beyond specialists
in papyrology, Greek, Latin, and Coptic.
From the early modern period, Greek historiography has been studied
in the context of Cicero's notion historia magistra vitae and
considered to exclude conceptions of the future as different from
the present and past. Comparisons with the Roman, Judeo-Christian
and modern historiography have sought to justify this perspective
by drawing on a category of the future as a temporal mode that
breaks with the present. In this volume, distinguished classicists
and historians challenge this contention by raising the question of
what the future was and meant in antiquity by offering fresh
considerations of prognostic and anticipatory voices in Greek
historiography from Herodotus to Appian and by tracing the roots of
established views on historical time in the opposition between
antiquity and modernity. They look both at contemporary scholarly
argument and the writings of Greek historians in order to explore
the relation of time, especially the future, to an idea of the
historical that is formulated in the plural and is always in
motion. By reflecting on the prognostic of historical time the
volume will be of interest not only to classical scholars, but to
all who are interested in the history and theory of historical
time.
The decline of the Roman Empire has been a subject of fascination
and debate for centuries. In this original new work, Neil Christie
draws on numerous sources, interweaving the latest archaeological
evidence, to reconstruct the period's landscape and events. In the
process, he rethinks some of historians' most widely held and
long-established views: Was the Empire's disintegration caused
primarily by external or internal factors? Why did the Eternal City
of Old Rome collapse in the West, while the 'New Rome' of
Constantinople endured in the East? What was destroyed and what
remained of Roman culture after successive invasions by Vandals,
Goths, Huns and other 'barbarians', and what was the impact of the
new Christian religion? As Christie expertly demonstrates, the
archaeology of the late Roman period reveals intriguing answers to
these and other questions. Taking an innovative, interdisciplinary
approach that combines traditional historical methods and a unique
familiarity with the Empire's physical remnants, he uncovers new
aspects of Rome's military struggles, its shifting geography, and
the everyday lives of its subjects. Written in a clear, accessible
style, The Fall of the Western Roman Empire is a perfect
introduction for newcomers to the subject, and essential reading
for undergraduate students and specialists in archaeology and
ancient history.
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