This book deals with the Iecur Placentinum, the bronze model of a sheep's liver, bearing 42 Etruscan inscriptions. The Piacenza Liver is a highly interesting document of the utmost importance for the understanding of Etruscan religion. It will appear that the network with the inscribed names of divinities on both sides of the Liver depicts a microcosmos reflecting the macrocosmos, the Etruscan division of heaven.

One group of ancient Egyptian drawings has captured the curiosity of scholars and laypeople alike: images of animals acting like people. They illustrate animal fables originally from a larger mythological narrative, making them an integral part of New Kingdom Thebes's religious environment. This book examines the purpose of animal fables, drawing cross cultural and temporal comparisons to other storytelling and artistic traditions. This publication is also the first thorough art historical treatment of the ostraca and papyri. The drawings' iconography and aesthetic value are carefully examined, providing further nuance to our understanding of ancient Egyptian art.

This is a ground-breaking philosophical-historical study of the work of Galen of Pergamum. It contains four case-studies on (1) Galen's remarkable and original thoughts on the relation between body and soul, (2) his notion of human nature, (3) his engagement with Plato's Timaeus, (4) and black bile and melancholy. It shows that Galen develops an innovative view of human nature that problematizes the distinction between body and soul.

The Mixtec peoples were among the major original developers of Mesoamerican civilization. Centuries before the Spanish Conquest, they formed literate urban states and maintained a uniquely innovative technology and a flourishing economy. Today, thousands of Mixtecs still live in Oaxaca, in present-day southern Mexico, and thousands more have migrated to locations throughout Mexico, the United States, and Canada. In this comprehensive survey, Ronald Spores and Andrew K. Balkansky--both preeminent scholars of Mixtec civilization--synthesize a wealth of archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data to trace the emergence and evolution of Mixtec civilization from the time of earliest human occupation to the present.
The Mixtec region has been the focus of much recent archaeological and ethnohistorical activity. In this volume, Spores and Balkansky incorporate the latest available research to show that the Mixtecs, along with their neighbors the Valley and Sierra Zapotec, constitute one of the world's most impressive civilizations, antecedent to--and equivalent to--those of the better-known Maya and Aztec. Employing what they refer to as a "convergent methodology," the authors combine techniques and results of archaeology, ethnohistory, linguistics, biological anthropology, ethnology, and participant observation to offer abundant new insights on the Mixtecs' multiple transformations over three millennia.

This book asks why politically-powerful entities invested in the Amphiareion, a sanctuary renowned for its precarity and dependency. The answer lies in unravelling the intricacies of the shrine's epigraphical record and the stories about the communities and individuals responsible for creating it. By explaining patterns in inscribed display against the backdrop of broader events and phenomena emerging within central Greece, this book revisits the Amphiareion's narrative and emphasises its political implications for its neighbours. This interpretation offers new perspectives on the sanctuary and exposes agents' manipulation of it in the course of reinventing their self-image in a changing Greek world.

Editing and examining source-critically for the first time the Late Babylonian ritual texts dealing with the New Year Festival, this book proposes an incisive re-interpretation of the most frequently discussed of all Mesopotamian rituals. The festival's twelve-day paradigm is dissolved in favor of a more historically dynamic model, with the ritual texts being firmly anchored in the Hellenistic period. As part of a larger group of texts constituting what can be called Late Babylonian Priestly Literature, they reflect the Babylonian priesthoods' fears and aspirations of that time much more than an actual ritual reality.