Ancient funerary reliefs are full of representations of writing materials and instruments, the interpretation of which can help us better understand the phenomenon of ancient literacy. The eight studies in this volume enrich our knowledge of Roman writing with many new aspects and detailed observations.
This work critiques studies of the peoples of Anatolia that overestimate the importance of regional ethnic identities and explain cultural change via Hellenization, instead highlighting local forms of belonging and non-binary views of cultural dynamics.
The purpose of this volume is to investigate scholastic culture in the Hellenistic and Roman eras, with a particular focus on ancient book and material culture as well as scholarship beyond Greek authors and the Greek language. Accordingly, one of the major contributions of this work is the inclusion of multiple perspectives and its contributors engage not only with elements of Greek scholastic culture, but also bring Greek ideas into conversation with developing Latin scholarship (see chapters by Dickey, Nicholls, Marshall) and the perspective of a minority culture (i.e., Jewish authors) (see chapters by Hezser, Adams). This multicultural perspective is an important next step in the discussion of ancient scholarship and this volume provides a starting point for future inquiries.
The material culture of Colossae is here for the first time given as full a collation as possible to the present day. 38 inscriptions, 88 coins and 49 testimonia are brought together in the context of a thorough overview of the site of Colossae. These include evidence that has been thought lost or has been overlooked or misinterpreted or has only recently been discovered. New readings, insights and analyses of the material evidence are brought into a highly creative exchange with the two letters of the Second Testament connected with the site. The texts thereby become additional evidence for an appreciation of the life of a city in the first two centuries of the Common Era. The fullest collation of evidence for the ancient Phrygian city in the Greco-Roman period was the coin catalogue assembled by Hans von Aulock (1987). The most recent catalogue of the inscriptions of Colossae was published by William Calder and William Buckler in 1939. There has never been a full inventory of ancient writings that bear witness to the site. Alan H. Cadwallader in his volume not only updates this material by subjecting it to thorough, critical analysis in the light of comparative evidence from across the Roman province of Asia and the Mediterranean world. New discoveries from the site and from museums and collections in the United Kingdom, Europe, Russia, Australia and the United States are introduced. Into this assemblage and interpretation are brought the letters to the Colossians and Philemon in the Second Testament writings of the Christian Church. For the first time, the letters are released to be players in the highly competitive environment of a city negotiating its way in the new realities of imperial Rome. Here the letters and their recipients become participants in the society of the day, contributing, critiquing and struggling to forge an identity for the Christ followers within that world. Echoes of the gymnasium, gladiatorial spectacles, cosmological speculations, religious devotion and sanction, family structures, commerce and industry, struggles for justice, intercity competition and legal negotiations are found in the letters, echoes that witness to their participation in the life of Colossae. This is a radical new approach, incorporating the turn to material culture as the embedding of literature and its consumers rather than an embellishing backdrop.
By engaging with recent developments in the study of empires, this book examines how inhabitants of Roman imperial Syria reinvented expressions and experiences of Greek, Roman and Syrian identification. It demonstrates how the organization of Greek communities and a peer polity network extending citizenship to ethnic Syrians generated new semiotic frameworks for the performance of Greekness and Syrianness. Within these, Syria's inhabitants reoriented and interwove idioms of diverse cultural origins, including those from the Near East, to express Greek, Roman and Syrian identifications in innovative and complex ways. While exploring a vast array of written and material sources, the book thus posits that Greekness and Syrianness were constantly shifting and transforming categories, and it critiques many assumptions that govern how scholars of antiquity often conceive of Roman imperial Greek identity, ethnicity and culture in the Roman Near East, and processes of 'hybridity' or similar concepts.
In the ancient Graeco-Roman East different types of interaction between Greek and local cultures took place. The present book investigates them from different viewpoints in their different manifestations (education, language, literature, etc.), and in different geographical areas: Egypt, Syria, Pontus Cappadocia, Propontis, Bithynia, Phrygia, Pisidia or the whole of Asia Minor. Did the Greek paideia intermingle with local traditions in the education of the local ruling classes? Did that have an impact on their prestige? Did this affect social classes? What were the extent and consequences of the linguistic contact between Greek and the local languages? Where there phenomena of Greek-local cultural translations or adaptations? What was the degree of penetration of the Greek literary models or topoi? How was the interaction of Greek paideia and the ancestral (local or regional) religions? What was the role of the Greek paideia as a signpost of identity? How did Greek and Latin coexist in this context? To answer such questions, the different papers in the current volume study each of them from a particular point of view, paying attention to the evidence available.
This volume continues the studies on the most important source of late antique Judaism, the Talmud Yerushalmi, in relation to its cultural context. The text of the Talmud is juxtaposed to archaeological findings, Roman law, and contemporary classical authors. The attitude of the Rabbis towards main aspects of urban society in the Mediterranean region of late antiquity is discussed. Hereby Rabbinic Judaism is seen as integrated in the cultural currents prevalent in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. From reviews of the first volume: The essays in this volume do not seek to establish a global approach to the task, or any general methodological principles. Caution is everywhere apparent. ... This is an excellent beginning, and more is promised. It would be good if this initiative prompted more Talmudic scholars to take the Greek background of Palestinian rabbinism seriously, and finally put paid to the tendency to consider it as in some way separated from or in conflict with late antique Hellenism.N.R.M. De Lange in Bulletin of Judaeo-Greek Studies Winter 1998/99, no. 23, p. 24
The Material Dynamics of Festivals in the Graeco-Roman East explores the various ways in which the experience of civic festivals in the Graeco-Roman East was created and framed by material culture. By the second and third centuries AD, Greek festivals were thriving across the eastern Mediterranean. Much of our knowledge of these festivals, and their associated processions, rituals, banquets, and competitions, comes from material culture— inscriptions, coins, architecture, and art-works. Yet each of these pieces of material evidence was the result of a conscious act, of what to record, and where and how to record it, with varying patterns discernible across different areas, and in different media. This volume draws attention to the choices made in a variety of different forms of material culture relating to Greek festivals from the Hellenistic to Roman periods, and unpicks the ways in which they encode or forge particular social relationships and power structures, as well as creating senses of community or communication between different groups. These helped to fix ephemeral events into public memory, to present particular views of their significance for the wider community, and to frame the experience of their participants.
