In April, 2008, an international colloquium was held at the University of Heidelberg-the fourth convocation of a group of scholars (with some rotating members) who gathered to discuss the status of Judah and the Judeans in the exilic and postexilic periods. The goal of this gathering was specifically to address the question of national identity in the period when many now believe this very issue was in significant foment and development, the era of the Persian/Achaemenid domination of the ancient Near East. This volume contains most of the papers delivered at the Heidelberg conference, considering the matter under two rubrics: (1) the biblical evidence (and the diversity of data from the Bible); and (2) the cultural, historical, social, and environmental factors affecting the formation of national identity. Contributors: K. Schmid, J. Schaper, A. C. Hagedorn, C. Nihan, J. Middlemas, D. Rom-Shiloni, J. Woehrle, Y. Dor, K. Southwood, D. N. Fulton, P.-A. Beaulieu, L. E. Pearce, D. Redford, A. Lemaire, J. F. Quack, B. Becking, R. G. Kratz, O. Tal, J. Blenkinsopp, R. Albertz, J. L. Wright, D. S. Vanderhooft, M. Oeming, and A. Kloner. Earlier volumes in the series of conferences are: Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period, Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period, and Judah and the Judeans in the in the Fourth Century B.C.E.

Aelius Aristides' Hieroi Logoi present a unique first-person narrative from the ancient world-a narrative that seems at once public and private, artful and naive. While scholars have embraced the Logoi as a rich source for Imperial-era religion, politics, and elite culture, the style of the text has presented a persistent stumbling block to literary analysis. Setting this dream-memoir of illness and divine healing in the context of Aristides' professional concerns as an orator, this book investigates the text's rhetorical aims and literary aspirations. At the Limits of Art argues that the Hieroi Logoi are an experimental work. Incorporating numerous dream accounts and narratives of divine cure in a multi-layered and open text, Aristides works at the limits of rhetorical convention to fashion an authorial voice that is transparent to the divine. Reading the Logoi in the context of contemporary oratorical practices, and in tandem with Aristides' polemical orations and prose hymns, the book uncovers the professional agendas motivating this unusual self-portrait. Aristides' sober view of oratory as a sacred pursuit was in conflict with a widespread contemporary preference for spectacular public performance. In the Hieroi Logoi, Aristides claims a place in the world of the Second Sophistic on his own terms, offering a vision of his professional inspiration in a style that pushes the limits of literary convention.

An influential view of ecphrasis--the literary description of art objects--chiefly treats it as a way for authors to write about their own texts without appearing to do so, and even insist upon the aesthetic dominance of the literary text over the visual image. However, when considering its use in ancient Roman literature, this interpretation proves insufficient. The Captor's Image argues for the need to see Roman ecphrasis, with its prevalent focus on Hellenic images, as a site of subtle, ongoing competition between Greek and Roman cultures. Through close readings of ecphrases in a wide range of Latin authors--from Plautus, Catullus, and Horace to Vergil, Ovid, and Martial, among others--Dufallo contends that Roman ecphrasis reveals an ambivalent receptivity to Greek culture, an attitude with implications for the shifting notions of Roman identity in the Republican and Imperial periods. Individual chapters explore how the simple assumption of a self-asserting ecphrastic text is called into question by comic performance, intentionally inconsistent narrative, satire, Greek religious iconography, the contradictory associations of epic imagery, and the author's subjection to a patron. Visual material such as wall painting, statuary, and drinkware vividly contextualizes the discussion. As the first book-length treatment of artistic ecphrasis at Rome, The Captor's Image resituates a major literary trope within its hybrid cultural context while advancing the idea of ecphrasis as a cultural practice through which the Romans sought to redefine their identity with, and against, Greekness.

Choreonarratives, a collection of essays by classicists, dance scholars, and dance practitioners, explores the uses of dance as a narrative medium. Case studies from Greek and Roman antiquity illustrate how dance contributed to narrative repertoires in their multimodal manifestations, while discussions of modern and contemporary dance shed light on practices, discourses, and ancient legacies regarding the art of dancing stories. Benefitting from the crossover of different disciplinary, historical, and artistic perspectives, the volume looks beyond current narratological trends and investigates the manifold ways in which dance can acquire meaning, disclose storyworlds ranging from myths to individual life-stories, elicit the narratees' responses, and generate powerful narratives of its own. Together, the eclectic approaches of Choreonarratives rethink dance's capacity to tell, enrich, and inspire stories. Contributors are Sophie M. Bocksberger, Iris J. Buhrle, Marie-Louise Crawley, Samuel N. Dorf, Karin Fenboeck, Susan L. Foster, Laura Gianvittorio-Ungar, Sarah Olsen, Lucia Ruprecht, Karin Schlapbach, Danuta Shanzer, Christina Thurner, Yana Zarifi-Sistovari, Bernhard Zimmermann

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

Aristotle's theory of eternal continuous motion and his argument from everlasting change and motion to the existence of an unmoved primary cause of motion, provided in book VIII of his Physics, is one of the most influential and persistent doctrines of ancient Greek philosophy. Nevertheless, the exact wording of Aristotle's discourse is doubtful and contentious at many places. The present critical edition of Ishaq ibn Hunayn's Arabic translation (9th c.) is supposed to replace the faulty edition by A. Badawi and aims at contributing to the clarification of these textual difficulties by means of a detailed collation of the Arabic text with the most important Greek manuscripts, supported by comprehensive Greek and Arabic glossaries.

This book on the Yahwist comes at the end of a long career of research on the Pentateuch in general and the Yahwist in particular. Van Seters's interest in the Yahwist was stimulated by the 1964 presidential address of the Society of Biblical Literature, given by Professor Fredrick Winnett, "Rethinking the Foundations," which focused on the Yahwist in Genesis. This interest followed a path of work on issues surrounding the Yahwist that culminated in three volumes, Prologue to History: The Yahwist as Historian in Genesis (1992), The Life of Moses: The Yahwist as Historian in Exodus-Numbers (1994), and A Law Book for the Diaspora: Revision in the Study of the Covenant Code (2003). Over the last few years, it has become clear to Van Seters that readers of the three volumes on the Yahwist, which total more than 1,000 pages, easily lose sight of the Yahwist's work as a whole and the way in which it provides a historical prologue and framework for D and the DtrH. In this book, Van Seters seeks to provide a summary sketch of the J history and to make clear how the Priestly corpus has been composed as a supplement to the Yahwist with a radically different form and point of view that has obscured the Yahwist's historical narrative and theological perspective. Part one lays out in simple terms the basic form, structure, and theological perspective of the Yahwist's history, where it has been interrupted by the inclusions of P, and how it is integrated into DtrH. The essays in part two are intended to bring the scholarly discussion of Van Seters's earlier books on the Yahwist more up to date, and their order corresponds roughly to the order of the narrative in the first part of the book. Some of these articles have been published previously, but others are new and quite recent, including "The Yahwist as Historian.

This volume presents the results of the fourteenth workshop of the international network 'Impact of Empire'. It focuses on the ways in which Rome's dominance influenced, changed, and created landscapes, and examines in which ways (Roman) landscapes were narrated and semantically represented. To assess the impact of Rome on landscapes, some of the twenty contributions in this volume analyse functions and implications of newly created infrastructure. Others focus on the consequences of colonisation processes, settlement structures, regional divisions, and legal qualifications of land. Lastly, some contributions consider written and pictorial representations and their effects. In doing so, the volume offers new insights into the notion of 'Roman landscapes' and examines their significance for the functioning of the Roman empire.

Virgil's Georgics depicts the world and its peoples in great detail, but this geographical interest has received little detailed scholarly attention. Hundreds of years later, readers in the British empire used the poem to reflect upon their travels in acts of imagination no less political than Virgil's own. Virgil's Map combines a comprehensive survey of the literary, economic, and political geography of the Georgics with a case study of its British imperial reception c. 1840-1930. Part One charts the poem's geographical interests in relation to Roman power in and beyond the Mediterranean; shifting readers' attention away from Rome, it explores how the Georgics can draw attention to alternative, non-Roman histories. Part Two examines how British travellers quoted directly from the poem to describe peoples and places across the world, at times equating the colonial subjects of European empires to the 'happy farmers' of Virgil's poem, perceived to be unaware, and in need, of the blessings of colonial rule. Drawing attention to the depoliticization of the poem in scholarly discourse, and using newly discovered archival material, this interdisciplinary work seeks to re-politicize both the poem and its history in service of a decolonizing pedagogy. Its unique dual focus allows for an extended exploration, not just of geography and empire, but of Europe's long relationship with the wider world.

This revealing study shows how careful analysis of recent farming practices, and related cultural traditions, in communities around the Mediterranean can enhance our understanding of prehistoric and Greco-Roman societies. * Includes a wealth of original interview material and data from field observation * Provides original approaches to understanding past farming practices and their social contexts * Offers a revealing comparative perspective on Mediterranean societies agronomy * Identifies a number of previously unrecorded climate-related contrasts in farming practices, which have important socio-economic significance * Explores annual tasks, such as tillage and harvest; inter-annual land management techniques, such as rotation; and intergenerational issues, including capital accumulation

Interest in food and drink as an academic discipline has been growing significantly in recent years. This sourcebook is a unique asset to many courses on food as it offers a thematic approach to eating and drinking in antiquity. For classics courses focusing on ancient social history to introductory courses on the history of food and drink, as well as those offerings with a strong sociological or anthropological approach this volume provides an unparalleled compilation of essential source material. The chronological scope of the excerpts extends from Homer in the Eighth Century BCE to the Roman emperor Constantine in the Fourth Century CE. Each thematic chapter consists of an introduction along with a bibliography of suggested readings. Translated excerpts are then presented accompanied by an explanatory background paragraph identifying the author and context of each passage. Most of the evidence is literary, but additional sources - inscriptional, legal and religious - are also included.

On the Agora traces the evolution of the main public square of the Greek polis for the six centuries from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC to the height of the Roman Empire and the Herulian invasion of Greece in 267 AD. Drawing on literary, epigraphic and, especially, archaeological evidence, the book takes a comparative approach to consider how the layout and function of agoras in cities throughout Greece changed during centuries that witnessed far reaching transformations in culture, society and political life. The book challenges the popular view of the post-Classical agora as characterised by decline, makes important arguments about how we use evidence to understand ancient public spaces and proposes many new interpretations of individual sites.

*Includes pictures of Chichen Itza's ruins and art.
*Explains the history of the site and the theories about its purpose and abandonment.
*Describes the layout of Chichen Itza, its important structures, and the theories about the buildings' uses.
*Includes a bibliography for further reading.
Many ancient civilizations have influenced and inspired people in the 21st century, like the Greeks and the Romans, but of all the world's civilizations, none have intrigued people more than the Mayans, whose culture, astronomy, language, and mysterious disappearance all continue to captivate people. At the heart of the fascination is the most visited and the most spectacular of Late Classic Maya cities: Chichen Itza.
Chichen Itza was inhabited for hundreds of years and was a very influential center in the later years of Maya civilization. At its height, Chichen Itza may have had over 30,000 inhabitants, and with a spectacular pyramid, enormous ball court, observatory and several temples, the builders of this city exceeded even those at Uxmal in developing the use of columns and exterior relief decoration. Of particular interest at Chichen Itza is the sacred cenote, a sinkhole was a focus for Maya rituals around water. Because adequate supplies of water, which rarely collected on the surface of the limestone based Yucatan, were essential for adequate agricultural production, the Maya here considered it of primary importance. Underwater archaeology carried out in the cenote at Chichen Itza revealed that offerings to the Maya rain deity Chaac (which may have included people) were tossed into the sinkhole.
Although Chichen Itza was around for hundreds of years, it had a relatively short period of dominance in the region, lasting from about 800-950 A.D. Today, tourists are taken by guides to a building called the Nunnery for no good reason other than the small rooms reminded the Spaniards of a nunnery back home. Similarly the great pyramid at Chichen Itza is designated El Castillo ("The Castle"), which it almost certainly was not, while the observatory is called El Caracol ("The Snail") for its spiral staircase. Of course, the actual names for these places were lost as the great Maya cities began to lose their populations, one by one.
Chichen Itza was partially abandoned in 948, and the culture of the Maya survived in a disorganized way until it was revived at Mayapan around 1200. Why Maya cities were abandoned and left to be overgrown by the jungle is a puzzle that intrigues people around the world today, especially those who have a penchant for speculating on lost civilizations.
Chichen Itza: The History and Mystery of the Maya's Most Famous City comprehensively covers the history of the city, as well as the speculation surrounding the purpose of Chichen Itza and the debate over the buildings. Along with pictures and a bibliography, you will learn about the Maya's most famous city like you never have before, in no time at all.

The Correspondence of the Kings of Ur is a collection of literary letters between the Ur III monarchs and their high officials at the end of the third millennium B.C. The letters cover topics of royal authority and proper governance, defense of frontier regions, and the ultimate disintegration of the empire and represent the largest corpus of Sumerian prose literature we possess. This long-awaited edition, based on extensive collation of almost all extant manuscripts, numbering more than a hundred, includes detailed historical and literary analyses, and copious philological commentary. It entirely supersedes the Michalowski's oft-cited unpublished Yale dissertation of 1976. The edition is accompanied by an extensive analysis of the place of the letters in early second-millennium schooling, treating the letters as literature, followed by chapters that contextualize the epistolary material within historical and historiographic contexts, utilizing many Sumerian archival, literary, and historical sources. The main objective here is to try to navigate the complex issues of authenticity, authority, and fiction that arise from the study of these literary artifacts. In addition, Michalowski offers new hypotheses about many aspects of late third-millennium history, including essays on military history and strategy, on frontiers, on the nature and putative character of nomadism at the time, as well as a long chapter on the role of a people designated as Amorites. The included DVD includes various photographs at high resolution of most of the tablets included in the study.

Many historians in the past have seen Constantine as a secret pagan who used Christianity as a political device or a God-sent Emperor who converted a whole nation to Christianity. Since Constantine's personal beliefs allowed for both paganism and Christianity, he created an Empire of tolerance or a religiously neutral realm (as far as what you wanted to believe). The model set up by Constantine was successfully continued and utilized to keep the Empire together with the notable exceptions of Julian (who tried to move the Empire back to paganism) and Theodosius (who allowed Christians to harass pagans, outlawed many elements of paganism, and eventually had to fight the pagans on the field of battle).

The Confucian-Legalist State analyzes the history of China between the 11th century BCE and 1911 under the guidance of a new theory of social change. It centers on two questions. First, how and why China was unified and developed into a bureaucratic empire under the state of Qin in 221 BCE? Second, how was it that, until the nineteenth century, the political and cultural structure of China that was institutionalized during the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE - 8 CE) showed great resilience, despite great changes in demography, socioeconomic structure, ethnic composition, market relations, religious landscapes, technology, and in other respects brought by rebellions or nomadic conquests? In addressing these two questions, author Dingxin Zhao also explains numerous other historical patterns of China, including but not limited to the nature of ancient China's interstate relations, the logics behind the rising importance of imperil Confucianism during the Western Han dynasty and behind the formation of Neo-Confucian society during the Song dynasty (960-1279 CE), the changing nature of China's religious ecology under the age of Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism, the pattern of interactions between nomads and sedentary Chinese empires, the rise and dominance of civilian government, and China's inability to develop industrial capitalism without the coercion of Western imperialism.