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Books > Humanities > Archaeology > Archaeology by period / region > European archaeology > Classical Greek & Roman archaeology
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.
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.
Italy's Lost Greece is the untold story of the modern engagement with the ancient Greek settlements of South Italy--an area known since antiquity as Magna Graecia. This "Greater Greece," at once Greek and Italian, has continuously been perceived as a region in decline since its archaic golden age, and has long been relegated to the margins of classical studies. Giovanna Ceserani's evocative and nuanced analysis recovers its significance within the history of classical archaeology. It was here that the Renaissance first encountered an ancient Greek landscape, and during the "Hellenic turn" of eighteenth-century Europe the temples of Paestum and the painted vases of South Italy played major roles, but since then, Magna Graecia--lying outside the national boundaries of modern Greece, and sharing in the complicated regional dynamic of the Italian Mezzogiorno--has fitted awkwardly into the commonly accepted paradigms of Hellenism. The unfolding of this process provides a unique insight into three developments: the humanist investment in the ancient past, the evolution of modern Hellenism, and the making of classical archaeology. Drawing on antiquarian and archaeological writings, histories and travelogues about Magna Graecia, and recent rewritings of the history and imagining of the South, Italy's Lost Greece sheds new light on well known figures in the history of archaeology while recovering forgotten ones. This is an Italian story of European resonance, which transforms our understanding of the transition from antiquarianism to archaeology, of the relationship between nation-making and institution-building in the study of the ancient past, and of the reconstruction of classical Greece in the modern world.
This volume offers the first comprehensive examination of an ancient writing system from Cyprus and Syria known as Cypro-Minoan. After Linear B was deciphered by Michael Ventris in 1952, other un-deciphered scripts of the second millennium BC from the Aegean world (Linear A) and the Eastern Mediterranean (Cypro-Minoan) became the focus of those trying to crack this ancient and historical code. Despite several attempts for both syllabaries, this prospect has remained unrealized. This is especially true for Cypro-Minoan, the script of Late Bronze Age Cyprus found also at Ugarit in Syria, which, counting no more than 250 inscriptions, remains not only poorly documented, but also insufficiently explored in previous scholarship. Today progress in the study of this enigmatic script demands that we direct our attention to gaining new insight through a contextual analysis of Cypro-Minoan by tracing its life in the archaeological record and investigating its purpose and significance in the Cypriot and Syrian settlements that created and used it. With a new methodology concentrating on a ground-breaking contextual approach, Ferrara presents the first large-scale study of Cypro-Minoan with an analysis of all the inscriptions through a multidisciplinary perspective that embraces aspects of archaeology, epigraphy, and palaeography.
Roman Archaeology for Historians provides students of Roman history with a guide to the contribution of archaeology to the study of their subject. It discusses the issues with the use of material and textual evidence to explain the Roman past, and the importance of viewing this evidence in context. It also surveys the different approaches to the archaeological material of the period and examines key themes that have shaped Roman archaeology. At the heart of the book lies the question of how archaeological material can be interpreted and its relevance for the study of ancient history. It includes discussion of the study of landscape change, urban topography, the economy, the nature of cities, new approaches to skeletal evidence and artefacts in museums. Along the way, readers gain access to new findings and key sites - many of which have not been discussed in English before and many, for which, access may only be gained from technical reports. Roman Archaeology for Historians provides an accessible guide to the development of archaeology as a discipline and how the use of archaeological evidence of the Roman world can enrich the study of ancient history, while at the same time encouraging the integration of material evidence into the study of the period's history. This work is a key resource for students of ancient history, and for those studying the archaeology of the Roman period.
The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Cognitive Theory is an interdisciplinary volume that examines the application of cognitive theory to the study of the classical world, across several interrelated areas including linguistics, literary theory, social practices, performance, artificial intelligence and archaeology. With contributions from a diverse group of international scholars working in this exciting new area, the volume explores the processes of the mind drawing from research in psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology, and interrogates the implications of these new approaches for the study of the ancient world. Topics covered in this wide-ranging collection include: cognitive linguistics applied to Homeric and early Greek texts, Roman cultural semantics, linguistic embodiment in Latin literature, group identities in Greek lyric, cognitive dissonance in historiography, kinesthetic empathy in Sappho, artificial intelligence in Hesiod and Greek drama, the enactivism of Roman statues and memory and art in the Roman Empire. This ground-breaking work is the first to organize the field, allowing both scholars and students access to the methodologies, bibliographies and techniques of the cognitive sciences and how they have been applied to classics.
Spirits of the Dead examines the importance attached to preserving the memory of the dead in the Roman world, and explores the ways in which funerary inscriptions can be used to reconstruct Roman lives, however fragmentarily and imperfectly. It is the only study to examine epigraphic, historical, and archaeological evidence in order to gain insight into the way Romans used funerary texts to establish a dialogue with their own society. Maureen Carroll brings together a large body of material from many geographical areas, shedding light on provincial and regional variation in funerary commemoration and even on the differences between funerary traditions of neighbouring towns.
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.
Late Bronze Age tombs in Greece and their attendant mortuary practices have been a topic of scholarly debate for over a century, dominated by the idea of a monolithic culture with the same developmental trajectories throughout the region. This book contributes to that body of scholarship by exploring both the level of variety and of similarity that we see in the practices at each site and thereby highlights the differences between communities that otherwise look very similar. The introduction of wealthy burials in the transition from the Middle Helladic period and the building of elaborate tombs during the Late Bronze Age underscores a long-acknowledged change in cultural importance of burials and their locations for contemporary society. Initially archaeologists were interested in these tombs because of the impressive finds that were discovered in them, but as the body of literature on mortuary rituals has grown more recently these tombs have been utilized as lenses through which we can study the related society in novel ways. By bringing together an international group of scholars working on tombs and cemeteries on mainland Greece, Crete, and in the Dodecanese we are afforded a unique view of the development and diversity of these communities. The papers provide a penetrative analysis of the related issues by discussing tombs connected with sites ranging in size from palaces to towns to villages and in date from the start to the end of the Late Bronze Age. Death in Late Bronze Age Greece contextualizes the mortuary studies in recent debates on diversity at the main palatial and secondary sites and between the economic and political strategies and practices throughout Greece. The papers in the volume illustrate the pervasive connection between the mortuary sphere and society through the creation and expression of cultural narratives, and draw attention to the social tensions played out in the mortuary arena.
Christy Constantakopoulou examines the history of the Aegean islands and changing concepts of insularity, with particular emphasis on the fifth century BC. Islands are a prominent feature of the Aegean landscape, and this inevitably created a variety of different (and sometimes contradictory) perceptions of insularity in classical Greek thought. Geographic analysis of insularity emphasizes the interplay between island isolation and island interaction, but the predominance of islands in the Aegean sea made island isolation almost impossible. Rather, island connectivity was an important feature of the history of the Aegean and was expressed on many levels. Constantakopoulou investigates island interaction in two prominent areas, religion and imperial politics, examining both the religious networks located on islands in the ancient Greek world and the impact of imperial politics on the Aegean islands during the fifth century.
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.
In Truly Beyond Wonders Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis investigates texts and material evidence associated with healing pilgrimage in the Roman empire during the second century AD. Her focus is upon one particular pilgrim, the famous orator Aelius Aristides, whose Sacred Tales, his fascinating account of dream visions, gruelling physical treatments, and sacred journeys, has been largely misunderstood and marginalized. Petsalis-Diomidis rehabilitates this text by placing it within the material context of the sanctuary of Asklepios at Pergamon, where the author spent two years in search of healing. The architecture, votive offerings, and ritual rules which governed the behaviour of pilgrims are used to build a picture of the experience of pilgrimage to this sanctuary. Truly Beyond Wonders ranges broadly over discourses of the body and travel and in so doing explores the place of healing pilgrimage and religion in Graeco-Roman society and culture. It is generously illustrated with more than 80 drawings and photographs, and four colour plates.
This superb guide brings the work of Filippo Coarelli, one of the most widely published and well-known scholars of Roman topography, archeology and art, to a broad English-language audience. Conveniently organized by walking tours and illustrated throughout with clear maps, drawings, and plans, Rome and Environs: An Archaeological Guide covers all of the major, and an unparalleled number of minor, ancient sites in the city, and, unlike most other guides of Rome, includes major and many minor sites within easy reach of the city, such as Ostia Antica, Palestrina, Tivoli, and the many areas of interest along the ancient Roman roads. An essential resource for tourists interested in a deeper understanding of Rome's classical remains, it is also the ideal book for students and scholars approaching the ancient history of one of the world's most fascinating cities. - Covers all the major sites including the Capitoline, the Roman Forum, the Imperial Fora, the Palatine Hill, the Valley of the Colosseum, the Esquiline, the Caelian, the Quirinal, and the Campus Martius. - Discusses important clusters of sites-one on the area surrounding Circus Maximus and the other in the vicinity of the Trastevere, including the Aventine and the Vatican. - Covers the history and development of the city walls and aqueducts. - Follows major highways leading outside of the city to important and fascinating sites in the periphery of Rome. - Features 189 maps, drawings, and diagrams, and an appendix on building materials and techniques. - Includes an updated and expanded bibliography for students and scholars of Ancient Rome.
Who were the ancient Phoenicians, and did they actually exist? The Phoenicians traveled the Mediterranean long before the Greeks and Romans, trading, establishing settlements, and refining the art of navigation. But who these legendary sailors really were has long remained a mystery. In Search of the Phoenicians makes the startling claim that the "Phoenicians" never actually existed. Taking readers from the ancient world to today, this monumental book argues that the notion of these sailors as a coherent people with a shared identity, history, and culture is a product of modern nationalist ideologies--and a notion very much at odds with the ancient sources. Josephine Quinn shows how the belief in this historical mirage has blinded us to the compelling identities and communities these people really constructed for themselves in the ancient Mediterranean, based not on ethnicity or nationhood but on cities, family, colonial ties, and religious practices. She traces how the idea of "being Phoenician" first emerged in support of the imperial ambitions of Carthage and then Rome, and only crystallized as a component of modern national identities in contexts as far-flung as Ireland and Lebanon. In Search of the Phoenicians delves into the ancient literary, epigraphic, numismatic, and artistic evidence for the construction of identities by and for the Phoenicians, ranging from the Levant to the Atlantic, and from the Bronze Age to late antiquity and beyond. A momentous scholarly achievement, this book also explores the prose, poetry, plays, painting, and polemic that have enshrined these fabled seafarers in nationalist histories from sixteenth-century England to twenty-first century Tunisia.
In this book, Gabriel Zuchtriegel explores and reconstructs the unwritten history of Classical Greece - the experience of nonelite colonial populations. Using postcolonial critical methods to analyze Greek settlements and their hinterlands of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, he reconstructs the social and economic structures in which exploitation, violence, and subjugation were implicit. He mines literary sources and inscriptions, as well as archaeological and data from excavations and field surveys, much of it published here for the first time, that offer new insights into the lives and status of nonelite populations in Greek colonies. Zuchtriegel demonstrates that Greece's colonial experience has far-reaching implications beyond the study of archaeology and ancient history. As reflected in foundational texts such as Plato's 'Laws' and Aristotle's 'Politics', the ideology that sustained Greek colonialism is still felt in many Western societies.
From the sixteenth century, classical texts enabled Scottish and English authors and artists to imagine the character and appearance of their forebears and to consider the relevance of these ideas to their contemporaries. Richard Hingley's study crosses traditional academic boundaries by exploring sources usually separately addressed by historians, classicists, archaeologists, and geographers, to provide a new perspective on the origin of English and Scottish identity. His book is the first full exploration of these issues to cover such a long period in the development of British society and to relate ideas derived from Roman sources to the development of empire, while also placing ideas of origin in a European context. It is illustrated throughout with artefact drawings, site plans, and photographs.
Offers up to date full colour maps of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds.
Velleius Paterculus' short work is the earliest surviving attempt on the part of a post-Augustan historian to survey the history of the res publica from its origins to his own times. In a period from which no other contemporary historical narrative survives in more than meagre fragments, Velleius' work is uniquely important. It is a critical counter to the later accounts of Tacitus, Suetonius and Cassius Dio, not simply because it offers a different view of Tiberius, but because Velleius saw continuity where later authors saw only radical change which destroyed the Republic and put monarchy in its place. For other reasons, too, Velleius occupies a unique position in Roman historiography. This collection of papers, by a distinguished cast of scholars, represents a wide-ranging re-examination of Velleius' work, of its place within, and contribution to, Roman historiography and the intellectual history of the early Principate.
The Roman sanctuary at Bath has long been used in scholarship as an example par excellence of religious and artistic syncretisms in Roman Britain. With its monumental temple, baths, and hot springs, its status as one of the most significant Roman sites in the province is unquestioned. But our academic narratives about Roman Bath are also rooted in the narratives of our more recent past. This book begins by exploring how Georgian and Victorian antiquaries developed our modern story of a healing sanctuary at Roman Bath. It shows that a curative function for the sanctuary is in fact unsupported by the archaeological evidence. It then retells the story of Roman Bath by focusing on three interlinked aspects: the entanglement of the sanctuary with Roman imperialism, the role of the hot springs in the lives of worshipers, and Bath's place within the wider world of the western Roman Empire.
Decades after Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B and showed that its language was Greek, nearly one-sixth of its syllabic signs' sound-values are still unknown. This book offers a new approach to establishing these undeciphered signs' possible values. Analysis of Linear B's structure and usage not only establishes these signs' most likely sound-values - providing the best possible basis for future decipherments - but also sheds light on the writing system as a whole. The undeciphered signs are also used to explore the evidence provided by palaeography for the chronology of the Linear B documents and the activities of the Mycenaean scribes. The conclusions presented in this book therefore deepen our understanding not only of the undeciphered signs but also of the Linear B writing system as a whole, the texts it was used to write, and the insight these documents bring us into the world of the Mycenaean palaces. A colour version of figures 5.1-5.4 of chapter 5 can be found under the 'Resources' tab.
Antioch in Syria critically reassesses this ancient city from its Seleucid foundation into Late Antiquity. Although Antioch's prominence is famous, Kristina M. Neumann newly exposes the gradations of imperial power and local agency mediated within its walls through a comprehensive study of the coins minted there and excavated throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East. Patterns revealed through digital mapping and Exploratory Data Analysis serve as a significant index of spatial politics and the policies of the different authorities making use of the city. Evaluating the coins against other historical material reveals that Antioch's status was not fixed, nor the people passive pawns for external powers. Instead, as imperial governments capitalised upon Antioch's location and amenities, the citizens developed in their own distinct identities and agency. Antioch of the Antiochians must therefore be elevated from traditional narratives and static characterisations, being studied and celebrated for the dynamic polis it was.
The Alamanni and Rome focuses upon the end of the Roman Empire. From the third century AD, barbarians attacked and then overran the west. Some - Goths, Franks, Saxons - are well known, others less so. The latter include the Alamanni, despite the fact that their name is found in the French ('Allemagne') and Spanish ('Alemania') for 'Germany'. This pioneering study, the first in English, uses new historical and archaeological findings to reconstruct the origins of the Alamanni, their settlements, their politics, and their society, and to establish the nature of their relationship with Rome. John Drinkwater discovers the cause of their modern elusiveness in their high level of dependence on the Empire. Far from being dangerous invaders, they were often the prey of emperors intent on acquiring military reputations. When much of the western Empire fell to the Franks, so did the Alamanni, without ever having produced their own 'successor kingdom'.
How did the classical Greek city come into being? What role did
religion play in its formation? Athens, with its ancient citadel
and central religious cult, has traditionally been the model for
the emergence of the Greek city-state. But in this original and
controversial investigation, Francois de Polignac suggests that the
Athenian model was probably the exception, not the rule, in the
development of the polis in ancient Greece.
THE BRAND NEW JACK WEST THRILLER AND SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Spectacular...Part-Jack Reacher, part-Indiana Jones' SMH THE END IS HERE Jack West Jr has made it to the Supreme Labyrinth. Now he faces one last race - against multiple rivals, against time, against the collapse of the universe itself - a headlong race that will end at a throne inside the fabled labyrinth. AN IMPOSSIBLE MAZE But the road will be hard. For this is a maze like no other: a maze of mazes. Uncompromising and complex. Demanding and deadly. A CATACLYSMIC CONCLUSION It all comes down to this. It ends here - now - in the most lethal and dangerous place Jack has encountered in all of his many adventures. And in the face of this indescribable peril, with everything on the line, there is only one thing he can do. Attempt the impossible. * * * * * PRAISE FOR THE JACK WEST THRILLERS 'An action hero worthy of Lee Child' Sydney Morning Herald 'Thrilling, action-packed adventure from cover to cover' Guardian 'Nobody writes action like Matthew Reilly' Vince Flynn 'Get ready for a wild ride' Daily Telegraph 'Exciting and entertaining' Chicago Sun-Times * * * * * READERS LOVE THE JACK WEST THRILLERS 'Indiana Jones in a book . . . Immensely entertaining' 'A super duper kick ass soldier' 'A first class all-action historical thriller' 'Heart-pounding stuff' 'Enjoy the rollercoaster ride'
The Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires are usually studied separately, or else included in broader examinations of the Hellenistic world. This book provides a systematic comparison of the roles of local elites and local populations in the construction, negotiation, and adaptation of political, economic, military and ideological power within these states in formation. The two states, conceived as multi-ethnic empires, are sufficiently similar to make comparisons valid, while the process of comparison highlights and better explains differences. Regions that were successively incorporated into the Ptolemaic and then Seleucid state receive particular attention, and are understood within the broader picture of the ruling strategies of both empires. The book focusses on forms of communication through coins, inscriptions and visual culture; settlement policies and the relationship between local and immigrant populations; and the forms of collaboration with and resistance of local elites against immigrant populations and government institutions. |
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