Nile Into Tiber

Nile Into Tiber

Author: Laurent Bricault

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 591

ISBN-13: 9004154205

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"Egypt in the Roman world" --- Studies on the meaning of Aegyptiaca Romana and the understanding of the cults of Isis in their local context.


The Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

The Local Horizon of Ancient Greek Religion

Author: Hans Beck

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-03-31

Total Pages: 407

ISBN-13: 1009301837

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Which dimensions of the religious experience of the ancient Greeks become tangible only if we foreground its local horizons? This book explores the manifold ways in which Greek religious beliefs and practices are encoded in and communicate with various local environments. Its individual chapters explore 'the local' in its different forms and formulations. Besides the polis perspective, they include numerous other places and locations above and below the polis-level as well as those fully or largely independent of the city-state. Overall, the local emerges as a relational concept that changes together with our understanding of the general or universal forces as they shape ancient Greek religion. The unity and diversity of ancient Greek religion becomes tangible in the manifold ways in which localizing and generalizing forces interact with each other at different times and in different places across the ancient Greek world.


Community and Identity at the Edges of the Classical World

Community and Identity at the Edges of the Classical World

Author: Aaron W. Irvin

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2020-09-28

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1119630703

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A timely and academically-significant contribution to scholarship on community, identity, and globalization in the Roman and Hellenistic worlds Community and Identity at the Edges of the Classical World examines the construction of personal and communal identities in the ancient world, exploring how globalism, multi-culturalism, and other macro events influenced micro identities throughout the Hellenistic and Roman empires. This innovative volume discusses where contact and the sharing of ideas was occurring in the time period, and applies modern theories based on networks and communication to historical and archaeological data. A new generation of international scholars challenge traditional views of Classical history and offer original perspectives on the impact globalizing trends had on localized areas—insights that resonate with similar issues today. This singular resource presents a broad, multi-national view rarely found in western collected volumes, including Serbian, Macedonian, and Russian scholarship on the Roman Empire, as well as on Roman and Hellenistic archaeological sites in Eastern Europe. Topics include Egyptian identity in the Hellenistic world, cultural identity in Roman Greece, Romanization in Slovenia, Balkan Latin, the provincial organization of cults in Roman Britain, and Soviet studies of Roman Empire and imperialism. Serving as a synthesis of contemporary scholarship on the wider topic of identity and community, this volume: Provides an expansive materialist approach to the topic of globalization in the Roman world Examines ethnicity in the Roman empire from the viewpoint of minority populations Offers several views of metascholarship, a growing sub-discipline that compares ancient material to modern scholarship Covers a range of themes, time periods, and geographic areas not included in most western publications Community and Identity at the Edges of the Classical World is a valuable resource for academics, researchers, and graduate students examining identity and ethnicity in the ancient world, as well as for those working in multiple fields of study, from Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman historians, to the study of ethnicity, identity, and globalizing trends in time.


Roman Love Elegy and the Eros of Empire

Roman Love Elegy and the Eros of Empire

Author: Phebe Lowell Bowditch

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-05-22

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 3031148002

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This book explores Roman love elegy from postcolonial perspectives, arguing that the tropes, conventions, and discourses of the Augustan genre serve to reinforce the imperial identity of its elite, metropolitan audience. Love elegy presents the phenomena and discourses of Roman imperialism—in terms of visual spectacle (the military triumph), literary genre (epic in relation to elegy), material culture (art and luxury goods), and geographic space—as intersecting with ancient norms of gender and sexuality in a way that reinforces Rome’s dominance in the Mediterranean. The introductory chapter lays out the postcolonial frame, drawing from the work of Edward Said among other theorists, and situates love elegy in relation to Roman Hellenism and the varied Roman responses to Greece and its cultural influences. Four of the six subsequent chapters focus on the rhetorical ambivalence that characterizes love elegy’s treatment of Greek influence: the representation of the domina or mistress as simultaneously a figure for ‘captive Greece’ and a trope for Roman imperialism; the motif of the elegiac triumph, with varying figures playing the triumphator, as suggestive of Greco-Roman cultural rivalry; Rome’s competing visions of an Attic and an Asiatic Hellenism. The second and the final chapter focus on the figures of Osiris and Isis, respectively, as emblematic of Rome’s colonialist and ambivalent representation of Egypt, with the conclusion offering a deconstructive reading of elegy’s rhetoric of orientalism.


Vasari on Technique

Vasari on Technique

Author: Giorgio Vasari

Publisher:

Published: 1907

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13:

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Traduzione in inglese delle tre introduzioni alle arti dell'architettura, scultura e pittura alle Vite di Giorgio Vasari.


The Language of Ruins

The Language of Ruins

Author: Patricia A. Rosenmeyer

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-04-03

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0190626321

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A colossal statue, originally built to honor an ancient pharaoh, still stands today in Egyptian Thebes, with more than a hundred Greek and Latin inscriptions covering its lower surfaces. Partially damaged by an earthquake, and later re-identified as the Homeric hero Memnon, it was believed to "speak" regularly at daybreak. By the middle of the first century CE, tourists flocked to the colossus of Memnon to hear the miraculous sound, and left behind their marks of devotion (proskynemata): brief acknowledgments of having heard Memnon's cry; longer lists by Roman administrators; and more elaborate elegiac verses by both amateur and professional poets. The inscribed names left behind reveal the presence of emperors and soldiers, provincial governors and businessmen, elite women and military wives, and families with children. While recent studies of imperial literature acknowledge the colossus, few address the inscriptions themselves. This book is the first critical assessment of all the inscriptions considered in their social, cultural, and historical context. The Memnon colossus functioned as a powerful site of engagement with the Greek past, and appealed to a broad segment of society. The inscriptions shed light on contemporary attitudes toward sacred tourism, the role of Egypt in the Greco-Roman imagination, and the cultural legacy of Homeric epic. Memnon is a ghost from the Homeric past anchored in the Egyptian present, and visitors yearned for a "close encounter" that would connect them with that distant past. The inscriptions thus idealize Greece by echoing archaic literature in their verses at the same time as they reflect their own historical horizon. These and other subjects are expertly explored in the book, including a fascinating chapter on the colossus's post-classical life when the statue finds new worshippers among Romantic artists and poets in nineteenth-century Europe.


At the Temple Gates

At the Temple Gates

Author: Heidi Wendt

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-08-18

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0190267151

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In his sixth satire, Juvenal speculates about how Roman wives busy themselves while their husbands are away, namely, by entertaining a revolving door of exotic visitors who include a eunuch of the eastern goddess Bellona, an impersonator of Egyptian Anubis, a Judean priestess, and Chaldean astrologers. From these self-proclaimed religious specialists women solicit services ranging from dream interpretation to the coercion of lovers. Juvenal's catalogue suggests the popularity of such "freelance" experts at the turn of the second century and their familiarity to his audience, whom he could expect to get the joke. Heidi Wendt investigates the backdrop of this enthusiasm for the religion of freelance experts by examining their rise during the first two centuries of the Roman Empire. Unlike civic priests and temple personnel, freelance experts had to generate their own authority and legitimacy, often through demonstrations of skill and learning in the streets, in marketplaces, and at the temple gates, among other locations in the Roman world. Wendt argues that these professionals participated in a highly competitive form of religious activity that intersected with multiple areas of specialty, particularly philosophy and medicine. Over the course of the imperial period freelance experts grew increasingly influential, more diverse with respect to their skills and methods, and more assorted in the ethnic coding of their practices. Wendt argues that this context engendered many of the innovative forms of religion that flourished in the second and third centuries, including phenomena linked with Persian Mithras, the Egyptian gods, and the Judean Christ. The evidence for freelance experts in religion is abundant, but scholars of ancient Mediterranean religion have only recently begun to appreciate their impact on the empire's changing religious landscape. At the Temple Gates integrates studies of Judaism, Christianity, mystery cults, astrology, magic, and philosophy to paint a colorful portrait of religious expertise in early Rome.


The Mysterious Gods of Egypt

The Mysterious Gods of Egypt

Author: Norah Romney

Publisher: DTTV PUBLICATIONS

Published: 2021-02-12

Total Pages: 57

ISBN-13:

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At the beginning of time, there was only Nun, the primeval waters of chaos, then in a great flood, the Sun got interned, rose from the water, and willed himself into creation. Atum then created Ayr, a son he named shu and moisture, a daughter he named Tefnut. They were the first divine pair and soon had children of their own. The earth named gab and the sky called nut the second divine pair then had four children: Osiris, Isis, Seth, and Neftis. They were completing the group of nine primeval gods known as the Ennead. Osiris then married his sister Isis, and the two ruled over Egypt together in an unprecedented time of peace and prosperity; however they're jealous, brother Seth desired the throne for himself and murdered Osiris, dismembering his body scattering the parts across the land. Isis then searched for the pieces of her husband's body and, with the help of her sister Nephthys was eventually able to collect them with the help of the scholar god Thoth and the funeral god Anubis. Isis was able to reconstruct Osiris, creating the first mummy. Osiris impregnated Isis after his resurrection; however, he was too weak to remain in the world, instead of traveling to the Duat, the Land of the Dead, where he became Lord. Seth then took the throne for himself, forcing Isis to flee and give birth to her son Horus in hiding. She raised Horus until he was an adult and able to challenge his uncle Seth for the throne. After a violent contest, the case was settled in a divine legal trial hosted by the Ennead. Acting as judge was Geb, the God of the earth who ruled in favor of Horus, who then took his rightful place as king of Egypt. Future Pharaohs claimed descent from Horus, with it being this divine ancestry that gave them the right to rule. Amun, the hidden one, was the foremost God of Egypt thought to be the invisible force behind all things, even creation itself, unlike other gods linked to only one aspect of the world: the sky, the earth, or the Sun. Amun was a universal God who had links to all parts of the cosmos; his prominence also increased as he absorbed other gods throughout Egyptian history, taking on their roles and powers. The most important of these was his merger with the Sun God Ra combining to become Amon Ra. In this role, he became linked with the Sun, an essential part of the Egyptian world. In this combined state, Amon Ra rose to prominence, becoming Egypt's chief deity and the king of the Gods. Amon became so widely worshipped that he came close to becoming the sole deity of Egypt. The other gods merely being aspects of his great power. Osiris, judge of the Dead and King of the underworld, was one of the most respected ancient Egyptian gods. His death and resurrection story inspired the Egyptians to follow in his footsteps and seek immortality for themselves. The elaborate tombs and burial rituals found in ancient Egypt were all built-in search of this goal, with the funerary practices being done to aid the spirit in its journey through the underworld. Pharaohs and wealthy Nobles could afford more elaborate burials with trinkets and spells to help them in their journey, but the average Egyptian could survive the underworld as well.


A Social Archaeology of Roman and Late Antique Egypt

A Social Archaeology of Roman and Late Antique Egypt

Author: Ellen Swift

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 0198867344

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Artefact evidence has the unique power to illuminate many aspects of life that are rarely explored in written sources, yet this potential has been underexploited in research on Roman and Late Antique Egypt. This book presents the first in-depth study that uses everyday artefacts as its principal source of evidence to transform our understanding of the society and culture of Egypt during these periods. It represents a fundamental reference work for scholars, with much new and essential information on a wide range of artefacts, many of which are found not only in Egypt but also in the wider Roman and late antique world. By taking a social archaeology approach, it sets out a new interpretation of daily life and aspects of social relations in Roman and Late Antique Egypt, contributing substantial insights into everyday practices and their social meanings in the past. Artefacts from University College London's Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology are the principal source of evidence; most of these objects have not been the subject of any previous research. The book integrates the close study of artefact features with other sources of evidence, including papyri and visual material. Part one explores the social functions of dress objects, while part two explores the domestic realm and everyday experience. An important theme is the life course, and how both dress-related artefacts and ordinary functional objects construct age and gender-related status and facilitate appropriate social relations and activities. There is also a particular focus on wider social experience in the domestic context, as well as broader consideration of economic and social changes across the period.


Diodorus Siculus and the World of the Late Roman Republic

Diodorus Siculus and the World of the Late Roman Republic

Author: Charles Muntz

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-01-02

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0190649011

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In Diodorus Siculus and the World of the Late Roman Republic, Charles E. Muntz offers a fresh look at one of the most neglected historians of the ancient world, and recovers Diodorus's originality and importance as a witness to a profoundly tumultuous period in antiquity. Muntz analyzes the first three books of Diodorus's Bibliotheke historike, some of the most varied and eclectic material in his work, in which Diodorus reveals through the history, myths, and customs of the "barbarians" the secrets of successful states and rulers, and contributes to the debates surrounding the transition from Republic to Empire. Muntz establishes just how linked the "barbarians" of the Bibliotheke are to the actors of the crumbling Republic, and demonstrates that through the medium of the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Indians, and others Diodorus engages with the major issues and intellectual disputes of his time, including the origins of civilization, the propriety of ruler-cult, the benefits of monarchy, and the relationship between myth and history. Diodorus has many similarities with other authors writing on these topics, including Cicero, Lucretius, Varro, Sallust, and Livy but, as Muntz argues, engaging with such controversial issues, even indirectly, could be especially dangerous for a Greek provincial such as Diodorus. Indeed, for these reasons he may never have completed or fully published the Bibliotheke in his lifetime. Through his careful and precise investigations, Muntz demonstrates Diodorus's historical context at its full size and scope.