The ruined silhouette of the Parthenon on its hill above Athens is one of the world's most famous images. Its 'looted' Elgin Marbles are a global cause celebre. But what actually are they? In a revised and updated edition, Mary Beard, award winning writer, reviewer and leading Cambridge classicist, tells the history and explains the significance of the Parthenon, the temple of the virgin goddess Athena, the divine patroness of ancient Athens.

This book examines the remarkable Velestino hoard, found in Thessaly in the 1920s, and analyses the light that this collection of artifacts sheds on a poorly studied period of Byzantine history, and on largely neglected aspects of Byzantine civilization. Many collections of Byzantine gold- and silverware, such as Vrap and Seuso, have been surrounded by controversy. None, however, has been under more suspicion than the Velestino hoard, particularly with regards to its authenticity. The hoard contains no gold and no silver, and is in fact a collection of bronze and leaden plaques, some with human, and others with animal or geometric representations. The authors examine three distinct aspects of the hoard: the iconography of its components, the method of its production, and the function of those components. The conclusions that they reached provide valuable new insights into eighth-century Byzantine culture. The book explores the Byzantine cultural and political context of the Velestino hoard and will appeal to historians and art historians of early Byzantium, as well as archaeologists and historians of early medieval technologies.

Despite the fact that Athenians consumed great quantities of manufactured goods, and around half of the residents of classical Athens can be shown to have been more or less dependent for survival on manufacturing in some form, this subject has been almost completely neglected by historians. Poiesis brings together ancient texts and inscriptions, recent scholarly analysis, archaeological finds, and the expertise of modern craftsmen to investigate every known facet of Athens' manufacturing activities. Authored by a management consultant and a recent PhD in Ancient History, the book presents the information in terms of contemporary business principles, drawing on supply and demand and risk-return analysis to explain events and choices. Manufacturing operations are classified in a novel framework based on competitive advantage and barriers to entry, concepts previously absent from ancient history. The framework explains why certain segments were suited to the sole craftsman and others to teams of slaves, and deduces earnings potential based upon competitive differentiation. The result is a new angle on how Athenian society operated; in particular it shows how fragmented industry structures, often the result of primitive technology, were fundamental to the workings of the Athenian democracy by enabling citizens to supplement their income through casual manufacturing activity. The book explains how manufacturing for sale emerged from autarchic peasant households, explores whether any of the industries examined changed to any great extent in Hellenistic and Roman times, and shows how some were transformed by the Industrial Revolution. It includes a methodology for quantifying the demographics of participation in manufacturing. By presenting a new paradigm of historical analysis, one complementing political, military, and literary perspectives, the book will be valuable to classicists and ancient and economic historians while remaining accessible to the general reader.

Twilight of Empire is the first book in English to examine the Brest-Litovsk Peace Conference during the later stages of World War I with the use of extensive archival sources. Two separate peace treaties were signed at Brest-Litovsk - the first between the Central Powers and Ukraine and the second between the Central Powers and Bolshevik Russia. Borislav Chernev, through an insightful and in-depth analysis of primary sources and archival material, argues that although its duration was short lived, the Brest-Litovsk settlement significantly affected the post-Imperial transformation of East Central Europe. The conference became a focal point for the interrelated processes of peacemaking, revolution, imperial collapse, and nation-state creation in the multi-ethnic, entangled spaces of East Central Europe. Chernev's analysis expands beyond the traditional focus on the German-Russian relationship, paying special attention to the policies of Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Ukraine. The transformations initiated by the Brest-Litovsk conferences ushered in the twilight of empire as the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Ottoman Empires all shared the fate of their Romanov counterpart at the end of World War I.

The establishment of large-scale water infrastructure is a defining aspect of the process of urbanisation. In places like Britain, the Roman period represents the first introduction of features that can be recognised and paralleled to our modern water networks. Writers have regularly cast these innovations as markers of a uniform Roman identity spreading throughout the Empire, and bringing with it a familiar, modern, sense of what constitutes civilised urban living. However, this is a view that has often neglected to explain how such developments were connected to the important symbolic and ritual traditions of waterscapes in Iron Age Britain. Water and Urbanism in Roman Britain argues that the creation of Roman water infrastructure forged a meaningful entanglement between the process of urbanisation and significant local landscape contexts. As a result, it suggests that archetypal Roman urban water features were often more related to an active expression of local hybrid identities, rather than alignment to an incoming continental ideal. By questioning the familiarity of these aspects of the ancient urban form, we can move away from the unhelpful idea that Roman precedent is a central tenet of the current unsustainable relationship between water and our modern cities. This monograph will be of interest to academics and students studying aspects of Roman water management, urbanisation in Roman Britain, and theoretical approaches to landscape. It will also appeal to those working more generally on past human interactions with the natural world.

Roman Domestic Medical Practice in Central Italy examines the roles that the home, the garden and the members of the household (freeborn, freed and slave) played in the acquisition and maintenance of good physical and mental health and well-being. Focussing on the period from the middle Republic to the early Empire, it considers how comprehensive the ancient Roman general understanding of health actually was, and studies how knowledge regarding various aspects of health was transmitted within the household. Using literary, documentary, archaeological and bioarchaeological evidence from a variety of contexts, this is the first extended volume to provide as comprehensive and detailed a reconstruction of this aspect of ancient Roman private life as possible, complementing existing works on ancient professional medical practice and existing works on domestic medical practice in later historical periods. This volume offers an indispensable resource to social historians, particularly those that focus on the ancient family, and medical historians, particularly those that focus on the ancient world.

This volume is the third in the Advances in Archaeological and Museum Science series sponsored by the Society for Archaeological Sciences (SAS). The purpose of this series is to provide summaries of advances in various topics in ar chaeometry, archaeological science, environmental archaeology, preservation technology, and museum conservation. The SAS exists to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration between archaeologists and colleagues in the natural and physical sciences. SAS mem bers are drawn from many disciplinary fields. However, they all share a common belief that physical science techniques and methods constitute an essential component of contemporary archaeological field and laboratory studies. The series editors wish to thank the reviewers of each of the chapters in this volume for their excellent comments and suggestions. We also wish to thank Chriss jones for her invaluable assistance in the preparation of the texts for submission to the publisher. xi Preface As noted in the introductory chapter, this volume is the second major review of research progress in the study of archaeological obsidian. An earlier book, Advances in Obsidian Glass Studies: Archaeological and Geochemical Perspectives, appeared in 1976. A comparison of the treatment of topics reflected in this earlier work and that contained in this volume not only highlights important advances in the quality and depth of research on archaeological obsidian over more than a quarter of a century but also illustrates more generally some characteristics of developments in the archaeological science field in general."

This volume uses the travels of Roman governors to explore how authority was defined in and by the public places of Greek cities. By demonstrating that the places where imperial officials and local notables met were integral to the strategies by which they communicated with one another, Greek Cities and Roman Governors sheds new light on the significance of civic space in the Roman provinces. It also presents a fresh perspective on the monumental cityscapes of Roman Asia Minor, epicenter of the greatest building boom in classical history. Though of special interest to scholars and students of Roman Asia Minor, Greek Cities and Roman Governors offers broad insights into Roman imperialism and the ancient city.

Along with Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levant, Minoan Crete was one of the primary cultures of the prehistoric Mediterranean world. In this book, L. Vance Watrous offers an up-to-date overview of this important ancient society. Using archaeological evidence from palaces, houses, surveys, caves, and mountain shrines, he describes and traces the development of Minoan Crete from the Neolithic era through the Late Bronze Age. Watrous also presents and interprets Minoan art works in a range of media, including fresco paintings, pottery, and seals, and explains how Minoan Crete affected the culture of classical Greece. Aimed at undergraduate and graduate students, this book can be used in courses on the ancient Mediterranean world and classical archaeology.

In England in Europe, Elizabeth Tyler focuses on two histories: the Encomium Emmae Reginae, written for Emma the wife of the thelred II and Cnut, and The Life of King Edward, written for Edith the wife of Edward the Confessor. Tyler offers a bold literary and historical analysis of both texts and reveals how the two queens actively engaged in the patronage of history-writing and poetry to exercise their royal authority. Tyler's innovative combination of attention to intertextuality and regard for social networks emphasizes the role of women at the centre of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman court literature. In doing so, she argues that both Emma and Edith's negotiation of conquests and factionalism created powerful models of queenly patronage that were subsequently adopted by individuals such as Queen Margaret of Scotland, Countess Adela of Blois, Queen Edith/Matilda, and Queen Adeliza. England in Europe sheds new lighton the connections between English, French, and Flemish history-writing and poetry and illustrates the key role Anglo-Saxon literary culture played in European literature long after 1066.

Prostitutes and Matrons in the Roman World is the first substantial account of elite Roman concubines and courtesans. Exploring the blurred line between proper matron and wicked prostitute, it illuminates the lives of sexually promiscuous women like Messalina and Clodia, as well as prostitutes with hearts of gold who saved Rome and their lovers in times of crisis. It also offers insights into the multiple functions of erotic imagery and the circumstances in which prostitutes could play prominent roles in Roman public and religious life. Tracing the evolution of social stereotypes and concepts of virtue and vice in ancient Rome, this volume reveals the range of life choices and sexual activity, beyond the traditional binary depiction of wives or prostitutes, that were available to Roman women.

By triangulating the Greco-Roman world, classical reception, and disability studies, this book presents a range of approaches that reassess and reimagine traditional themes, from the narrative voice to sensory studies. It argues that disability and disabled people are the 'forgotten other' of not just Classics, but also the Humanities more widely. Beyond the moral merits of rectifying this neglect, this book also provides a series of approaches and case studies that demonstrate the intellectual value of engaging with disability studies as classicists and exploring the classical legacy in the medical humanities. The book is presented in four parts: 'Communicating and controlling impairment, illness and pain'; 'Using, creating and showcasing disability supports and services'; 'Real bodies and retrieving senses: disability in the ritual record'; and 'Classical reception as the gateway between Classics and disability studies'. Chapters by scholars from different academic backgrounds are carefully paired in these sections in order to draw out further contrasts and nuances and produce a sum that is more than the parts. The volume also explores how the ancient world and its reception have influenced medical and disability literature, and how engagements with disabled people might lead to reinterpretations of familiar case studies, such as the Parthenon. This book is primarily intended for classicists interested in disabled people in the Greco-Roman past and in how modern disability studies may offer insights into and reinterpretations of historic case studies. It will also be of interest to those working in medical humanities, sensory studies, and museum studies, and those exploring the wider tension between representation and reality in ancient contexts. As such, it will appeal to people in the wider Humanities who, notwithstanding any interest in how disabled people are represented in literature, art, and cinema, have had less engagement with disability studies and the lived experience of people with impairments. FREE CHAPTER AVAILABLE! Please go to https://bit.ly/3pzpO7n to access the Introduction, which we have made freely available.

Every day Roman urbanites took to the street for myriad tasks, from hawking vegetables and worshipping local deities to simply loitering and socializing. Hartnett takes readers into this thicket of activity as he repopulates Roman streets with their full range of sensations, participants, and events that stretched far beyond simple movement. As everyone from slave to senator met in this communal space, city dwellers found unparalleled opportunities for self-aggrandizing display and the negotiation of social and political tensions. Hartnett charts how Romans preened and paraded in the street, and how they exploited the street's collective space to lob insults and respond to personal rebukes. Combining textual evidence, comparative historical material, and contemporary urban theory with architectural and art historical analysis, The Roman Street offers a social and cultural history of urban spaces that restores them to their rightful place as primary venues for social performance in the ancient world.

My People as Your People provides an in-depth analysis of the chronology, history, and archaeology associated with the reign of Jehoshaphat of Judah. The synthesis of these various elements illuminates a diverse geo-political picture of the southern Levant in the mid-ninth century BCE. In recent years, archaeologists and biblical scholars have dealt quite extensively with the tenth and eighth centuries BCE due to both the controversial aspects of recent interpretations associated with the so-called United Kingdom and the established archaeological data relating to Judah's rise as a significant polity in the eighth century BCE. On the other hand, the ninth century BCE has received considerably less scholarly treatment, despite the fact that many new archaeological strata have been uncovered in recent years that have a direct bearing upon this period. My People as Your People is an attempt to fill this gap in our knowledge. In accomplishing this, it both provides a nuanced understanding of Judah in the mid-ninth century BCE and also demonstrates the significance of this period in the larger setting of the history of the Divided Kingdom.

Since its invention by Renaissance humanists, the myth of the "Middle Ages" has held a uniquely important place in the Western historical imagination. Whether envisioned as an era of lost simplicity or a barbaric nightmare, the medieval past has always served as a mirror for modernity. This book gives an eye-opening account of the ways various political and intellectual projects-from nationalism to the discipline of anthropology-have appropriated the Middle Ages for their own ends. Deploying an interdisciplinary toolkit, author K. Patrick Fazioli grounds his analysis in contemporary struggles over power and identity in the Eastern Alps, while also considering the broader implications for scholarly research and public memory.

From late fourth century BC Seleucid enclave to capital of the Roman east, Antioch on the Orontes was one of the greatest cities of antiquity and served as a hinge between east and west. This book draws on a century of archaeological fieldwork to offer a new narrative of Antioch's origins and growth, as well as its resilience, civic pride, and economic opportunism. Situating the urban nucleus in the context of the rural landscape, this book integrates hitherto divorced cultural basins, including the Amuq Valley and the Massif Calcaire. It also brings into focus the archaeological data, thus proposing a concrete interpretative framework that, grounded in the monuments of Antioch, enables the reader to move beyond text-based reconstructions of the city's history. Finally, it considers the interaction between the environment and the people of the city who shaped this region and forged a distinct identity within the broader Greco-Roman world.

Ancient Civilizations offers a comprehensive and straightforward account of the world's first civilizations and how they were discovered, drawing on many avenues of inquiry including archaeological excavations, surveys, laboratory work, highly specialized scientific investigations, and both historical and ethnohistorical records. This book covers the earliest civilizations in Eurasia and the Americas, from Egypt and the Sumerians to the Indus Valley, Shang China, and the Maya. It also addresses subsequent developments in Southwest Asia, moving on to the first Aegean civilizations, Greece and Rome, the first states of sub-Saharan Africa, divine kings and empires in East and Southeast Asia, and the Aztec and Inka empires of Mesoamerica and the Andes. It includes a number of features to support student learning: a wealth of images, including several new illustrations; feature boxes which expand on key sites, finds, and written sources; and an extensive guide to further reading. With new perceptions of the origin and collapse of states, including a review of the issue of sustainability, this fifth edition has been extensively updated in the light of spectacular new discoveries and the latest theoretical advances. Examining the world's pre-industrial civilizations from a multidisciplinary perspective and offering a comparative analysis of the field which explores the connections between all civilizations around the world, this volume provides a unique introduction to pre-industrial civilizations in all their brilliant diversity. It will prove invaluable to students of Archaeology.

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.

A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'As brilliant a history of the Vikings as one could possibly hope to read' Tom Holland The 'Viking Age' is traditionally held to begin in June 793 when Scandinavian raiders attacked the monastery of Lindisfarne in Northumbria, and to end in September 1066, when King Harald Hardrada of Norway died leading the charge against the English line at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. This book, the most wide-ranging and comprehensive assessment of the current state of our knowledge, takes a refreshingly different view. It shows that the Viking expansion began generations before the Lindisfarne raid, and traces Scandinavian history back centuries further to see how these people came to be who they were. The narrative ranges across the whole of the Viking diaspora, from Vinland on the eastern American seaboard to Constantinople and Uzbekistan, with contacts as far away as China. Based on the latest archaeology, it explores the complex origins of the Viking phenomenon and traces the seismic shifts in Scandinavian society that resulted from an economy geared to maritime war. Some of its most striking discoveries include the central role of slavery in Viking life and trade, and the previously unsuspected pirate communities and family migrations that were part of the Viking 'armies' - not least in England. Especially, Neil Price takes us inside the Norse mind and spirit-world, and across their borders of identity and gender, to reveal startlingly different Vikings to the barbarian marauders of stereotype. He cuts through centuries of received wisdom to try to see the Vikings as they saw themselves - descendants of the first human couple, the Children of Ash and Elm. Healso reminds us of the simultaneous familiarity and strangeness of the past, of how much we cannot know, alongside the discoveries that change the landscape of our understanding. This is an eye-opening and surprisingly moving book.

This book examines the influence of architectural design in the conservation of historic buildings by discussing in detail an important building complex in Rome: the Temple of Venus and Rome, the monastery of Santa Maria Nova and the church of Santa Francesca Romana. As the most complete site in the Roman Forum that has reached our times with a rich architectural stratification almost intact, it is a clear product of continuous preservation and transformation and it has not been studied in its complexity until now. The Temple of Venus and Rome and Santa Francesca Romana at the Roman Forum unravels the original designs and the subsequent interventions, including Giacomo Boni's pioneering conservation of the monastery, carried out while excavating the Roman Forum in the early twentieth century. The projects are discussed in context to show their significance and the relationships between architects and patrons. Through its interdisciplinary focus on architectural design, conservation, archaeology, history and construction, this study is an ideal example for scholars, students and architects of how to carry out research in architectural conservation.

This book is a first presentation of pottery samples from el-Balu' in the northern Ard el-Kerak, the ancient Moabitis which today is Central Jordan. The forms presented here are dating from the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age down to the Persian periods of occupation of the site of el-Balu'. The book does not discuss the pottery in the wider context of Jordanian or Palestinian ceramics; however, the intention was to present pottery from the hitherto only sparsely published Iron Age pottery of the region. With this documentation scholars of the Archaeology of Jordan are invited to work on the ceramics excavated in the Areas A, B, C, D, E, and G of el-Balu'.

This book examines the ways in which lived religion in Roman Italy involved personal and communal experiences of the religious agency generated when ritualised activities caused human and more-than-human things to become bundled together into relational assemblages. Drawing upon broadly posthumanist and new materialist theories concerning the thingliness of things, it sets out to re-evaluate the role of the material world within Roman religion and to offer new perspectives on the formation of multi-scalar forms of ancient religious knowledge. It explores what happens when a materially informed approach is systematically applied to the investigation of typical questions about Roman religion such as: What did Romans understand 'religion' to mean? What did religious experiences allow people to understand about the material world and their own place within it? How were experiences of ritual connected with shared beliefs or concepts about the relationship between the mortal and divine worlds? How was divinity constructed and perceived? To answer these questions, it gathers and evaluates archaeological evidence associated with a series of case studies. Each of these focuses on a key component of the ritualised assemblages shown to have produced Roman religious agency - place, objects, bodies, and divinity - and centres on an examination of experiences of lived religion as it related to the contexts of monumentalised sanctuaries, cult instruments used in public sacrifice, anatomical votive offerings, cult images and the qualities of divinity, and magic as a situationally specific form of religious knowledge. By breaking down and then reconstructing the ritualised assemblages that generated and sustained Roman religion, this book makes the case for adopting a material approach to the study of ancient lived religion.

This volume provides a thorough conspectus of the field of Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek studies, mixing theoretical and historical surveys with critical and thought-provoking case studies in archaeology, history, literature and art. The chapters from this international group of experts showcase innovative methodologies, such as archaeological GIS, as well as providing accessible explanations of specialist techniques such as die studies of coins, and important theoretical perspectives, including postcolonial approaches to the Greeks in India. Chapters cover the region's archaeology, written and numismatic sources, and a history of scholarship of the subject, as well as culture, identity and interactions with neighbouring empires, including India and China. The Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek World is the go-to reference work on the field, and fulfils a serious need for an accessible, but also thorough and critically-informed, volume on the Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms. It provides an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the Hellenistic East.

Human beings have speculated about whether or not there is life after death, and if so, what form that life might take, for centuries. What did people in the ancient world think the next life would hold, and did they imagine there was a chance for a relationship between the living and the dead? How did people in the ancient world keep their dead loved ones alive through memory, and were they afraid the dead might return and haunt the living in another form? What sort of afterlife did the ancient Greeks and Romans imagine for themselves? This volume explores these questions and more. While individual representations of the afterlife have often been examined, few studies have taken a more general view of ideas about the afterlife circulating in the ancient world. By drawing together current research from international scholars on archaeological evidence for afterlife belief, chiefly from funerary sites, together with studies of works of literature, this volume provides a broader overview of ancient ideas about the afterlife than has so far been available. Imagining the Afterlife in the Ancient World explores these key questions through a series of wide-ranging studies, taking in ghosts, demons, dreams, cosmology, and the mutilation of corpses along the way, offering a valuable resource to those studying all aspects of death in the ancient world