This book examines Greek vase-paintings that depict humorous, burlesque, and irreverent images of Greek mythology and the gods. Many of the images present the gods and heroes as ridiculous and ugly. While the narrative content of some images may appear to be trivial, others address issues that are deeply serious. When placed against the background of the religious beliefs and social frameworks from which they spring, these images allow us to explore questions relating to their meaning in particular communities. Throughout, we see indications that Greek vase-painters developed their own comedic narratives and visual jokes. The images enhance our understanding of Greek society in just the same way as their more sober siblings in serious art. David Walsh is a Visiting Research Scholar in the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures at The University of Manchester."

This study explores the insights into provincial Roman societies that can be gained from the archaeological evidence for burial practice, focused on Britain, drawing on wider work in the archaeology of death. It evaluates the distribution of burial evidence and the factors that condition it, including, it is argued, archaeologically invisible burial continuing from the Iron Age. It reviews the archaeological evidence for cremation rituals and explores how social status was expressed through burial, primarily in case studies from south-east England. Funerary ritual was a dynamic arena for asserting social status throughout the Roman period, taking forms that can be read as both 'traditional' and 'Roman'. The setting of burial is assessed to establish spatial relationships between living and dead in town and country and the distribution of funerary display across the landscape.

This volume brings together the work of leading scholars on two of the most important, yet puzzling, extant ensembles of Hellenistic Age sculpture: the Great Altar at Pergamon, with its Gigantomachy and scenes from the life of Telephos, and the Cave at Sperlonga in Italy, with its epic themes connected especially with the adventures of Odysseus. "From Pergamon to Sperlonga "has three aims: to update the scholarship on two important monuments of ancient art and architecture; to debate questions of iconography, authorship, and date; and to broaden the scope of discussion on these monuments beyond the boundaries of studies done in the past. In addition, the volume brings forward new ideas about how these two monuments are connected and discusses possible means by which stylistic influences were transmitted between them.

This volume, the first in a new series, brings together studies by a range of Danish scholars. The emphasis is on archaeology, reflecting the main sphere of activity of the institute, but future volumes will include contributions from the fields of ancient and modern Greek history, classical philology and cultural studies.;This book deals with work by Danish archaeologists in Crete, Rhodes, Argos, in Athens itself (the Kerameikos necropolis) and in Halikarnassos (now Bodrum) on the west coast of present-day Turkey. The final essay discusses the use of abbreviations in ancient literature, exemplified by the Armenian version of a late-Roman text.;Contributors to this volume include: Erik Hallager, Sanne H. Houby-Hielsen, Signe Isager, Henning Lehmann, P.A. Mountjoy, Birte Poulsen and Ingrid Strom. Soren Dietz is the author of "The Argolid at the Transition to the Mycenean Age".

One Sunday evening in the summer of 2008, while prospecting on commercial land in the vicinity of the village of Warmington, situated on the summit of Edge Hill (south Warwickshire, England), a metal-detectorist saw a small silver disk on the surface. This was followed by the registration of a further two coins by his equipment, then others as he began a methodical survey of the area. After he had alerted the local Warmington Heritage Group to his discovery, the decision was taken to locate and mark the nucleus of the soundings being made and to leave further work to the following day. This revealed a spread of coins, at times up to fifty metres away from the original finds, but it was not till Tuesday that the nucleus itself was excavated, revealing a pot full of unstratified coins. Following cleaning, photographing, and initial identification, the hoard was deposited in the Warwickshire Museum pending arrangement of the necessary inquest in accordance with the Treasure Act. During this period additional coins came to light, bringing the total to 1146 specimens. Chronologically the hoard covers the period from 194/190 BC to AD 64,

This volume contains papers presented at the international conference Networks in the Hellenistic world according to the pottery in the Eastern Mediterranean and beyond which took place at the universities of Cologne and Bonn 23rd 26th February 2011. The organizers, all specialists in Hellenistic pottery of different regions in the Eastern Mediterranean, invited participants working from the Adriatic Sea to Asia Minor and up to Central Asia to consider their material according to the common platform of networks and exchange systems. Among the questions addressed by the contributors are: What is the character of the trade relations between political centres? What is the nature of economic development in minor cities and rural areas? Are some regions cut off from trade routes and thus characterised by a more restricted spectrum of local pottery? Which places traded their pottery globally? Whose pottery was copied, and by whom? Can the repertoire of forms reflect the adoption of specific customs?"

The city of Pompeii, or Colonia Cornelia Veneria Pompeiorum, the stage of the action that takes place here, is seen by the author from the perspective of its integration in the macro-economic system of the Roman Empire. The characters that take the centre stage here are slaves, freed slaves and free citizens of low social status, distinguished from others by the place they occupy within relations of oppression and exploitation. In the pages that follow, the author brings the popular Pompeian soul to life, through its manifestations of love, sexuality, anguish and sadness. The work examines particular linguistic expression of popular Latin and, most specifically, through the graffiti written on the walls of a Roman colonial city, rendered there for the attention of the local community.

In Gardens of the Roman Empire, the pioneering archaeologist Wilhelmina F. Jashemski sets out to examine the role of ancient Roman gardens in daily life throughout the empire. This study, therefore, includes for the first time, archaeological, literary, and artistic evidence about ancient Roman gardens across the entire Roman Empire from Britain to Arabia. Through well-illustrated essays by leading scholars in the field, various types of gardens are examined, from how Romans actually created their gardens to the experience of gardens as revealed in literature and art. Demonstrating the central role and value of gardens in Roman civilization, Jashemski and a distinguished, international team of contributors have created a landmark reference work that will serve as the foundation for future scholarship on this topic. An accompanying digital catalogue will be made available at: www.gardensoftheromanempire.org.

A Landscape of Conflict? Rural Fortifications in the Argolid (400-146 BC) is the first systematic study of Late Classical and Hellenistic rural fortifications in the territories of ancient Argos and the city-states of the Argolic Akte (northeastern Peloponnese). Based on one of the largest regional corpora of Greek fortified sites to date, the volume investigates the function of rural fortifications by placing them in the context of their surrounding landscape. This approach - combining 'traditional' methods of ancient history and landscape archaeology with GIS-based data analyses - helps to readdress the long-standing tension between 'military-strategic' and 'non-military' research agendas in Greek fortification studies, and highlights that Classical and Hellenistic rural fortifications are neither a priori fortified farmsteads nor parts of military-strategic networks of territorial defence. Instead, rural fortifications emerge in this monograph as multifunctional and multifaceted sites, which open a new window into different forms of 'formal' and 'informal' conflict in the ancient countryside and bear witness to a remarkable degree of local motivation and agency. The study thus demonstrates how ancient fortifications can provide an unexpected and so far much underappreciated opportunity for writing local or regional Greek histories - political and military as well as social and economic - from archaeological sources.

The recent crisis in the world of antiquities collecting has prompted scholars and the general public to pay more attention than ever before to the archaeological findspots and collecting histories of ancient artworks. This new scrutiny is applied to works currently on the market as well as to those acquired since (and despite) the 1970 UNESCO Convention, which aimed to prevent the trafficking in cultural property. When it comes to famous works that have been in major museums for many generations, however, the matter of their origins is rarely considered. Canonical pieces like the Barberini Togatus or the Fonseca bust of a Flavian lady appear in many scholarly studies and virtually every textbook on Roman art. But we have no more certainty about these works' archaeological contexts than we do about those that surface on the market today. This book argues that the current legal and ethical debates over looting, ownership and cultural property have distracted us from the epistemological problems inherent in all (ostensibly) ancient artworks lacking a known findspot, problems that should be of great concern to those who seek to understand the past through its material remains.

A detailed study of the masonry defences of one England's most important Roman sites. Erected in c. 270 AD, the masonry walls of the Roman town of Silchester (Calleva Atrebatum; Hampshire, S. England) are part of the third system in a series of defensive works. They stand today to a height of almost 5m and are composed of up to seven lifts or stages, each consisting of a flint core and facing (now almost completely robbed away), capped by a string-course of large blocks and slabs that stretches across the full width (c. 3m) of the walls, formed of a wide variety of rock-types foreign to the district.

The present collection refers not only to the remains of the pagan religion of Greeks and Romans, but also to those of Edomites, Nabataeans and Itureans in the Hellenistic and Roman period. Furthermore, it also includes motifs which are found in Jewish archaeological contexts with a pagan content or a mythological origin (such as the Beth She'arim sarcophagi and the synagogue lintels and mosaics), as well as motifs of an obviously mythological origin (such as the widespread use of the vine and the wine motifs) which appear in the mosaic floors of Jewish synagogues and Christian churches.

This volume combines diverse interests and methodologies with a single purpose: to give an overall picture of the new trends and perspectives currently used in the study of the epoch of Theodosius the Great and his successors, with special emphasis on the dynamics of places, power, belief and learning, and their mutual interdependencies. It is structured in two main sections - Ancient History and Archaeology and Philosophy and Literature. 16 essays in English, 8 in Spanish.

This book undertakes to answer questions relating to the creation of deity assimilation statues for young boys, a common mode of commemoration for the Romans. In addition, it demonstrates that many statues traditionally understood to represent youthful divinities actually possess portraits, even and especially if the faces appear joyful. It also proposes that these deity assimilation statues were commissioned primarily as posthumous commemorations. As such, the sculptural examples should be recognized as belonging to and constituting an important class of funerary sculpture; a class which has been, to this point, overlooked. It is also suggested that despite the fact that they were posthumous commemorations, deity assimilation statues of young boys were not necessarily placed in a sepulchral context, rather, it is maintained that images of children assimilated to divinities primarily served a sentimental purpose, and that, in that capacity, they may have been intended for and regularly kept in a domestic context, close to the surviving family.

This monograph examines the religious and mythological concepts of Zeus from prehistoric times until the Early Archaic period. The research was performed as an interdisciplinary study involving the evidence of the Homeric poems, archaeology, linguistics, as well as comparative Indo-European material. It is argued that Greek Zeus, as a god with certainly established Indo-European origins, was essentially a god of the open sky and the supposed progenitor of everything, a supreme, but not ruling deity; initially, he must have been distinct from the god of storms, who, for unknown reasons, completely disappeared from Greek religion and mythology by as early as the Late Bronze Age. From the time of Homer, Zeus-Father appeared as a storm-god, the autocratic ruler of the universe, and an offspring of elder deities, on the level of mythology. Such a concept does not correspond to the traditional Indo-European patterns and seems to have been formed under the influence of Near-Eastern concepts of the supreme almighty god, on the one hand, and the Cretan-Minoan concept of a young god/divine child, on the other. However, the Homeric concept of Zeus was adopted by his practising cults much later, only from the Late Archaic period.

This research takes an integrative approach to the study of Hellenistic cult and cultic practices in an important part of western Asia by employing a combination of archaeological, numismatic and historical evidence. Although any thorough investigation of Seleukid religion would prove illuminating in itself, this research uses religion as a lens through which to explore the processes of acculturation and rejection within a colonial context. It discusses the state attitude towards, and manipulation of, both Hellenic and indigenous beliefs and places this within a framework developed out of a series of case studies exploring evidence for religion at a regional level. The study outlines the development of religious practices and expression in the region which formed the birthplace of the modern world's three most influential monotheistic religions.

The central focus of this research (covering the period from the middle of the Second Century BC to the middle or late Second Century AD) concerns the form and function of suburban villas and their meaning within Roman society. The research reveals that these buildings served a unique role within the community, portraying an appearance of leisure and culture to the wider community and yet maintaining an intimate connection with the city centre. For the purpose of this study the region of central Italy has been chosen, concentrating on two regions; the political capital at Rome and the vicinity around the Bay of Naples (the centres of Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae). These sites have been selected because of the wealth of archaeological and literary evidence centred upon this region. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, which covered a wide area, including Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae, has provided a unique location for analysing the architecture, decoration and lifestyles of Roman residences. This region was of great social importance to the political leaders of Rome, allowing an in-depth understanding of the domestic residences of many of the highest political leaders during the period. The literary evidence shows that the regions around Rome and the Bay of Naples had many villas owned by leading Roman citizens, and by examining these structures it is possible to gain a greater understanding of their lifestyles and the social climate within the upper strata of the community.

A catalogue and analysis of over 1000 Roman-period oil lamps from the Holy Land within the collection of the Israel Antiquities Authority. The Roman period in Palestine begins with the conquest of the East by Pompey in 63 BCE - essentially the period representing the continuation of the partial political and cultural annexation of the country to Western civilisation following the earlier arrival of Greek and Hellenistic culture.

This book examines dwarfs in myth and everyday life in ancient Egypt and Greece. In both cultures physical beauty was highly admired, even to excess. What happened to those whose appearance did not conform to the 'ideal proportions'? The spectacular forms of dwarfism were always a focus of interest, and it is the most depicted disorder in antiquity. In this study Dr Dasen brings together for the first time a whole range of mostly unpublished or little-known iconographic, epigraphic, literary, and anthropological evidence. She covers areas such as the history of caricature and the portrait; medical history, in particular, the development of the perception of congenital disorders; social history; and history of religion, with questions on the magical and ritual efficiency of the malformed in sacred and theatrical contexts. She considers also the complex relations between mythology and ethnography, as shown, for example, in the Greek myth of the Pygmies. This is a fascinating work, with a wealth of insights for anyone interested in the history of medicine and the ancient world.

In 1995, Jeremy B. Rutter presented the pottery of the Fourth Settlement at Lerna in Lerna III: The Pottery of Lerna IV. The present volume is the companion to the Rutter volume, outlining the architectural sequence of the EH III period at the site with descriptions of the major building types and other features, such as hearths, ovens, and bothroi. Careful examination of the individual buildings and their contents constitutes the core of the text. The changing settlement patterns of the site through time are considered, and sources of influences are suggested.

Associations in the Greco-Roman World provides students and scholars with a clear and readable resource for greater understanding of the social, cultural, and religious life across the ancient Mediterranean. The authors provide new translations of inscriptions and papyri from hundreds of associations, alongside descriptions of more than two dozen archaeological remains of building sites. Complemented by a substantial annotated bibliography and accompanying images, this sourcebook fills many gaps and allows for future exploration in studies of the Greco-Roman religious world, particularly the nature of Judean and Christian groups at that time.

The purpose of this study is to examine the healing strategies employed by the inhabitants of Egypt during the Roman period, from the late first century BC to the fourth century AD, in order to explore how Egyptian, Greek and Roman customs and traditions interacted within the province. Thus this study aims to make an original contribution to the history of medicine, by offering a detailed examination of the healing strategies (of which 'rational' medicine was only one) utilised by the inhabitants of one particular region of the Mediterranean during a key phase in its history, a region, moreover, which by virtue of the survival of papyrological evidence offers a unique opportunity for study. Its interdisciplinary approach, which integrates ancient literary, documentary, archaeological and scientific evidence, presents a new approach to understanding healing strategies in Roman provincial culture. It refines the study of healing within Roman provincial culture, identifies diagnostic features of healing in material culture and offers a more contextualised reading of ancient medical literary and documentary papyri and archaeological evidence. This study differs from previous attempts to examine healing in Roman Egypt in that it tries, as far as possible, to encompass the full spectrum of healing strategies available to the inhabitants of the province. The first part of this study comprises two chapters and focuses on the practitioners of healing strategies, both 'professional' and 'amateur'. Chapter 2 examines those areas of ancient medicine that have traditionally been neglected or summarily dismissed by scholars: 'domestic' and 'folk' medicine with particular emphasis on the extent to which the specific natural environment of any given location affects healing strategies. Chapter Three examines the nature and frequency of eye diseases and injuries suffered by the inhabitants of Roman Egypt. Chapter Four examines the nature and frequency of the fevers suffered by the inhabitants of Roman Egypt, focusing first on the disease malaria, which is attested by papyrological, archaeological and palaeopathological evidence as having been suffered throughout Egypt. Chapter Five examines the dangers that the animal species of Egypt could pose to the inhabitants of the province, focusing particularly upon snakes, scorpions, crocodiles and lions, as attested by papyrological and epigraphic evidence such as private letters, mummy labels and epitaph inscriptions. The concluding chapter underlines the importance for a study of the healing strategies utilised in any province of the Roman Empire (or indeed any region in the ancient world) of taking into account the historical, geographical, cultural and social context of the location in question.

The main aim of this book is to provide a synthesis of all published research on sites of the Urnfield culture (c. 1300 BC - 750 BC) in continental Croatia. Using the basic division into settlements, cemeteries and hoards, the author concentrates on the analysis of the material culture following a typological-comparative method, while in the analysis of the finds from hoards a statistical method was used in order to show frequencies and distribution of certain types of items. Although the available data is scarce and includes a small number of sites that have not been excavated sufficiently, the study tries to obtain as complete a picture on the lifestyle of the people of the Urnfield culture in Croatia as

One of the most visited sites in Italy, the Roman Forum is also one of the best-known wonders of the Roman world. Though a highpoint on the tourist route around Rome, for many visitors the site can be a baffling disappointment. Several of the monuments turn out to be nineteenth- or twentieth-century reconstructions, while the rubble and the holes made by archaeologists have an unclear relationship to the standing remains, and, to all but the most skilled Romanists, the Forum is an unfortunate mess. David Watkin sheds completely new light on the Forum, examining the roles of the ancient remains while revealing what exactly the standing structures embody-including the rarely studied medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque churches, as well as the nearby monuments that have important histories of their own. Watkin asks the reader to look through the veneer of archaeology to rediscover the site as it was famous for centuries. This involves offering a remarkable and engaging new vision of a well-visited, if often misunderstood, wonder. It will be enjoyed by readers at home and serve as a guide in the Forum.

This is a study on textile production in central Tyrrhenian Italy from the final Bronze Age to the Republican period. Textile production is studied here through its technological, social and economic aspects. Textiles and their making were important parts of all fields of life in ancient Italy. Textiles and textile implements are found from settlement sites, burials, votive deposits and sanctuaries. The differences between the finds from different contexts through time point out the changes in material culture related to textile-making. The changes in the materials also indicate the change from household production of textiles