This book investigates Hellenistic popular religion through an interdisciplinary study of terracotta figurines of Egyptian deities, mostly from domestic contexts, from the trading port of Delos. A comparison of the figurines' iconography to parallels in Egyptian religious texts, temple reliefs, and ritual objects suggests that many figurines depict deities or rituals associated with Egyptian festivals. An analysis of the objects' clay fabrics and manufacturing techniques indicates that most were made on Delos. Additionally, archival research on unpublished notes from early excavations reveals new data on many figurines' archaeological contexts, illuminating their roles in both domestic and temple cults. The results offer a new perspective on Hellenistic reinterpretations of Egyptian religion, as well as the relationship between "popular" and "official" cults.

In Taxing Freedom Rachel Zelnick-Abramovitz examines manumission inscriptions from Hellenistic and Roman Thessaly, which record payments made to the poleis by manumitted slaves. In this original study the author explores the purpose of and the motivation behind these payments, apparently exacted as a federal impost, and places them in a wider historical and economic context. Based on a close examination of the epigraphic and literary evidence, Taxing Freedom offers important insights into the nature and extent of slavery and manumission in Hellenistic and Roman Thessaly, the Thessalian fiscal machinery, and the ways by which Thessalian poleis intervened in the economic life of their citizens to secure revenues.

The aim of this monograph is to understand the extent to which the landscape of Roman Berytus and the Bekaa valley is a product of colonial transformation following the foundation of Colonia Iulia Augusta Felix Berytus in 15 BCE. The book explores the changes observed in the cities of Berytus and Heliopolis, as well as the sites at Deir el-Qalaa, Niha, and Hosn Niha. The work fundamentally challenges the traditional paradigm, where Baalbek-Heliopolis is seen as a religious site dating from as early as the Bronze Age and associated with the worship of a Semitic or Phoenician deity triad and replaces it with a new perspective where religious activity is largely a product of colonial change.

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.

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.

Knossos is one of the most important sites in the ancient Mediterranean. It remained amongst the largest settlements on the island of Crete from the Neolithic until the late Roman times, but aside from its size it held a place of particular significance in the mythological imagination of Greece and Rome as the seat of King Minos, the location of the Labyrinth and the home of the Minotaur. Sir Arthur Evans’ discovery of ‘the Palace of Minos’ has indelibly associated Knossos in the modern mind with the ‘lost’ civilisation of Bronze Age Crete. The allure of this ‘lost civilisation’, together with the considerable achievements of ‘Minoan’ artists and craftspeople, remain a major attraction both to scholars and to others outside the academic world as a bastion of a romantic approach to the past. In this volume, James Whitley provides an up-to-date guide to the site and its function from the Neolithic until the present day. This study includes a re-appraisal Bronze Age palatial society, as well as an exploration of the history of Knossos in the archaeological imagination. In doing so he takes a critical look at the guiding assumptions of Evans and others, reconstructing how and why the received view of this ancient settlement has evolved from the Iron Age up to the modern era.

This book involves a new historiographical study of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia that defines its relationship with fifth- and fourth-century historical works as well as its role as a source of Diodorus' Bibliotheke. The traditional and common approach taken by those who studied the HO is primarily historical: scholars have focused on particular, often isolated, topics such as the question of the authorship, the historical perspective of the HO against other Hellenica from the 4th century BC. This book is unconventional in that it offers a study of the HO and fifth- and fourth-century historical works supported by papyrological enquiries and literary strategies, such as intertextuality and narratology, which will undoubtedly contribute to the progress of research in ancient historiography.

In Conflict, Commerce, and an Aesthetic of Appropriation in the Italian Maritime Cities, 1000-1150, Karen Rose Mathews analyzes the relationship between war, trade, and the use of spolia (appropriated objects from past and foreign cultures) as architectural decoration in the public monuments of the Italian maritime republics in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Water and Roman Urbanism: Towns, Waterscapes, Land Transformation and Experience in Roman Britain offers a new perspective for investigating Roman settlement and how urban spaces were created and experienced by focusing on the relationship between settlement and water and the meanings attributed to these places. Rather than a descriptive approach to the urban fabric it emphasises social context and cultural meaning through interpretative frameworks of analysis. Central are the cultural and experiential implications of water forming part of towns, rather than economic and practical arguments, and the way in which these places were used and altered over time. The book emphasises a social approach and has considerable implications for our understanding of life in the Roman period as a whole.

This volume is the product of an interdisciplinary conference held at the University of Texas at Austin. Specialists in the study of inscriptions, architecture, sculpture, coins, tombs, pottery, and texts collaborate to produce new portraits of religion and society in the ancient city of Corinth. The studies focus on groups like the early Roman colonists, the Augustales (priests of Augustus), or the Pauline house churches; on specific cults such as those of Asklepios, Demeter, or the Sacred Spring; on media (e.g., coins, or burial inscriptions); or on the monuments and populations of nearby Kenchreai or Isthmia. The result is a deeper understanding of the religious life of Corinth, contextualized within the socially stratified cultures of the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

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.

In An Arena for Higher Powers Olof Sundqvist investigates ceremonial buildings and religious ruler strategies in Late Iron Age Scandinavia (i.e. AD 550-1050/1100). The author offers here an account of the role played by religion in political undertakings among the pre-Christian ruling elites at halls and cultic buildings. Sundqvist applies a regional approach, so as to be able to account for the specific historical, cultural and social contexts. The focus is mainly on three regions, the Lake Malaren area in Sweden, Trondelag in Norway, and Iceland. Since the political structure and other contextual aspects partly differed in the three regions, the religious strategies for gaining legitimacy and authorization at the sanctuaries also varied to some extent in these areas.

The volume The Politics of Honour in the Greek Cities of the Roman Empire, co-edited by Anna Heller and Onno van Nijf, studies the public honours that Greek cities bestowed upon their own citizens and foreign dignitaries and benefactors. These included civic praise, crowns, proedria, public funerals, honorific statues and monuments. The authors discuss the development of this honorific system, and in particular the epigraphic texts and the monuments through which it is accessible. The focus is on the Imperial period (1st-3rd centuries AD). The papers investigate the forms of honour, the procedures and formulae of local practices, as well as the changes in local honorific habits that resulted from the integration of the Greek cities in the Roman Empire.

Migration, Mobility and Place in Ancient Italy challenges prevailing conceptions of a natural tie to the land and a demographically settled world. It argues that much human mobility in the last millennium BC was ongoing and cyclical. In particular, outside the military context 'the foreigner in our midst' was not regarded as a problem. Boundaries of status rather than of geopolitics were those difficult to cross. The book discusses the stories of individuals and migrant groups, traders, refugees, expulsions, the founding and demolition of sites, and the political processes that could both encourage and discourage the transfer of people from one place to another. In so doing it highlights moments of change in the concepts of mobility and the definitions of those on the move. By providing the long view from history, it exposes how fleeting are the conventions that take shape here and now.

The Iguvine Tables (Tabulae Iguvinae) are among the most invaluable documents of Italic linguistics and religion. Seven bronze tablets discovered in 1444 in the Umbrian town of Gubbio (ancient Iguvium), they record the rites and sacral laws of a priestly brotherhood, the Fratres Atiedii, with a degree of detail unparalleled elsewhere in ancient Italy. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that combines philological and linguistic, as well as ritual analysis, Michael Weiss not only addresses the many interpretive cruces that have puzzled scholars for a century and a half, but also constructs a coherent theory of the entire ritual performance described on Tables III and IV. In addition, Weiss sheds light on many questions of Roman ritual practice and places the Iguvine Tables in their broader Italic and Indo-European contexts.

Please note: This product is a map. It was more than just a wall: it was a whole military zone designed to control movement across the northern frontier of the Roman province of Britannia. Great earthwork barriers survive, along with the remains of forts and temporary camps; watch-towers and fortified gates; civilian settlements, temples, cemeteries, bath-houses, roads and bridges. Stretching across the spine of England from the North-East coast to the Irish Sea, the line of the frontier extends for over 100 miles through every type of landscape: from the streets of urban Tyneside, through arable fields; along the crags of the wild Whin Sill; to the sands of the Solway, and down the coast of Cumbria. Drawing upon the extensive expertise and unrivalled archives of English Heritage, and those of its partners, this map depicts the fruits of modern archaeological research: in field survey, geophysics, excavation, and the analysis of aerial photographs. Using Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 data - the ideal scale for walkers - this revised new map shows with great clarity all the elements of Hadrian's Wall, and distinguishes between those features that are visible and those that have been levelled through time. A brief text explains the remains on the ground, and how to use the map to find them - including the museums and the best places to visit. This World Heritage Site is now more accessible than ever before, so see the landscape through new eyes.

Written by an international cast of experts, The Materiality of Text showcases a wide range of innovative methodologies from ancient history, literary studies, epigraphy, and art history and provides a multi-disciplinary perspective on the physicality of writing in antiquity. The contributions focus on epigraphic texts in order to gauge questions of their placement, presence, and perception: starting with an analysis of the forms of writing and its perception as an act of physical and cultural intervention, the volume moves on to consider the texts' ubiquity and strategic positioning within epigraphic, literary, and architectural spaces. The contributors rethink modern assumptions about the processes of writing and reading and establish novel ways of thinking about the physical forms of ancient texts.

This book presents the results of a major project carried out by a team from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid and the 14th Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities at Lamia. The book gives a full picture of a extensive area of Greece known as Epicnemidian Locris, on which very little has been studied and published in the past. Its relevance in historical times was due to its natural environment and mainly on the pass at Thermopylae, which marked the physical boundary between central/northern Greece and the south, being the scene of repeated conflicts. The book offers a a complete picture of what Epicnemidian Locris was like in the past: its geography, topography, frontiers and the ancient settlements of the region.

The first two centuries AD are conventionally thought of as the "golden age" of the Roman Empire, yet Italy in this period has often been seen as being in a state of decline and even crisis. This book investigates the relationships between city and countryside in Italy in the early Empire, using evidence from literary texts and inscriptions, and the wealth of data derived from archaeological field surveys over recent years. Looking at individual towns and regions as well as at the broader picture, and stressing the diversity of situations across Italy, John R. Patterson examines how changing patterns of building and benefaction in the cities were related to developments in the country, and underlines the resourcefulness of the cities, both large and small, in seeking to maintain and develop their civic traditions.

This illustrated book continues themes in Central European cultural history treated elsewhere with the intention of presenting an interdisciplinary study of early medieval socio-cultural developments.
A continuation of the preceding books, this volume examines the archeological evidence of the groups who settled Central Europe. It aims to amplify the information recorded during the late Roman Empire about societies, social dynamics and ethnological contexts by examining their material culture. The language of significant objects complements the literature of significant texts.
The three parts of the book inform of the historical and archeological evidence; elaborate the socio-cultural conclusions provided by archeology; examine the system of values as reflected in the forms of artistic expression. The study of objects helps clarify the contours of the Germanic populations of pre-Carolingian Central Europe.

Uncovering the Germanic Past brings to light an unexpected side-effect of France's nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution. While laying tracks for new rail lines, quarrying for stone, and expanding lands under cultivation, French labourers uncovered bones and artefacts from long-forgotten cemeteries. Although their original owners were unknown, research by a growing number of amateur archaeologists of the bourgeois class determined that these were the graves of Germanic 'warriors', and their work, presented in provincial learned societies across France, documented evidence for significant numbers of Franks, Burgundians, and Visigoths in late Roman Gaul. They thus challenged prevailing views in France of the population's exclusively Gallic ancestry, contradicting the influential writings of Parisian historians like Augustin Thierry and Numa-Denis Fustel de Coulanges. Although some scholars drew on this material evidence to refine their understanding of the early ancestors of the French, most ignored, at their peril, inconvenient finds that challenged the centrality of the ancient Gauls as the forebears of France. Crossing the boundaries of the fields of medieval archaeology and history, nineteenth-century French history, and the history of science, Effros suggests how the slow progress and professionalization of Merovingian (or early medieval) archaeology, a sub-discipline in the larger field of national archaeology in France, was in part a consequence of the undesirable evidence it brought to light.

The collection Migration, Integration and Connectivity on the Southeastern Frontier of the Carolingian Empire offers insights into the Carolingian southeastern frontier-zone from historical, art-historical and archaeological perspectives. Chapters in this volume discuss the significance of the early medieval period for scholarly and public discourses in the Western Balkans and Central Europe, and the transfer of knowledge between local scholarship and macro-narratives of Mediterranean and Western history. Other essays explore the ways local communities around the Adriatic (Istria, Dalmatia, Dalmatian hinterland, southern Pannonia) established and maintained social networks and integrated foreign cultural templates into their existing cultural habitus. Contributors are Mladen Ancic, Ivan Basic, Goran Bilogrivic, Neven Budak, Florin Curta, Danijel Dzino, Kresimir Filipec, Richard Hodges, Nikola Jaksic, Miljenko Jurkovic, Ante Milosevic, Marko Petrak, Peter Stih, Trpimir Vedris.

Olynthus, an ancient city in northern Greece, was preserved in an exceptionally complete state after its abrupt sacking by Phillip II of Macedon in 348 B.C., and excavations in the 1920s and 1930s uncovered more than a hundred houses and their contents. In this book Nicholas Cahill analyzes the results of the excavations to reconstruct the daily lives of the ancient Greeks, the organization of their public and domestic space, and the economic and social patterns in the city. Cahill compares the realities of daily life as revealed by the archaeological remains with theories of ideal social and household organization espoused by ancient Greek authors. Describing the enormous variety of domestic arrangements, he examines patterns and differences in the design of houses, in the occupations of owners, and in the articulations between household and urban economies, the value of land, and other aspects of ancient life throughout the city. He thus challenges the traditional view that the Greeks had one standard household model and approach to city planning. He shows how the Greeks reconciled conflicting demands of ideal and practice, for instance between egalitarianism and social inequality or between the normative roles of men and women and roles demanded by economic necessities. The book, which is extensively illustrated with plans and photographs, is supported by a Web site containing a database of the architecture and finds from the excavations linked to plans of the site.

Bringing together the work of scholars from disparate fields of enquiry, this volume provides a timely and stimulating exploration of the themes of transmission and translation, charting developments, adaptations and exchanges - textual, visual, material and conceptual - that reverberated across the medieval world, within wide-ranging temporal and geographical contexts. Such transactions generated a multiplicity of fusions expressed in diverse and often startling ways - architecturally, textually and through peoples' lived experiences - that informed attitudes of selfhood and 'otherness', senses of belonging and ownership, and concepts of regionality, that have been further embraced in modern and contemporary arenas of political and cultural discourse. Contributors are Tarren Andrews, Edel Bhreathnach, Cher Casey, Katherine Cross, Amanda Doviak, Elisa Foster, Matthias Friedrich, Jane Hawkes, Megan Henvey, Aideen Ireland, Alison Killilea, Ross McIntire, Lesley Milner, John Mitchell, Nino Simonishvili, and Rachael Vause.