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The exhibition "Beyond Babylon : Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C.," held in 2008 - 2009 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, demonstrated the cultural enrichment that emerged from the intensive interaction of civilizations from western Asia to Egypt and the Aegean in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. During this critical period in human history, powerful kingdoms and large territorial states were formed. Rising social elites created a demand for copper and tin, as well as for precious gold and silver and exotic materials such as lapis lazuli and ivory to create elite objects fashioned in styles that reflected contacts with foreign lands. This quest for metals--along with ...
In all the history of hand-written books, one of the most distinctive and handsome scripts is that of the abbey of Monte Cassino. This study examines for the first time in detail the development of this script during the Abbey's greatest period of wealth and influence, under Desiderius (abbot 1058-1087) and his successor Oderisius (abbot 1087-1105). The characteristic Cassinese hand was established long before, but in this period it was transformed into what is today considered its classic form. The present study rests on a fresh examination of many details of the Beneventan (South Italian) script in aspects incompletely studied before. It aims to provide a new history of Monte Cassino as a writing centre and to offer a context for many unique or valuable texts manuscripts that it processed.
It has often been claimed that "monsters"--supernatural creatures with bodies composed from multiple species--play a significant part in the thought and imagery of all people from all times. The Origins of Monsters advances an alternative view. Composite figurations are intriguingly rare and isolated in the art of the prehistoric era. Instead it was with the rise of cities, elites, and cosmopolitan trade networks that "monsters" became widespread features of visual production in the ancient world. Showing how these fantastic images originated and how they were transmitted, David Wengrow identifies patterns in the records of human image-making and embarks on a search for connections between m...
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Writing from Invention to Decipherment contains a wealth of global scholarship on ancient writing systems from China, Mesopotamia, Central America, and the Mediterranean, to more recent newly created scripts such as the Rongorongo from Easter Island, the Caroline Island scripts, as well as the alphabet. The aim is to dig into the foundations of writing, showcasing the complexities and varieties of scripts, from their invention to the potential decipherment of poorly...
The papers published here are dedicated to the memory of Ellen N. Davis, one of the most valued and beloved Aegean scholars of her generation. All of the articles are in some way inspired or influenced by Davis' own contributions to the field. In the area of metalwork, several papers investigate interconnections within and around the Aegean during the Early, Middle, and Late Bronze Ages (Betancourt, Ferrence, and Muhly, Weingarten, Kopcke), while others examine metal ware in its social context (Wiener). Papers on wall painting range from studies of pigments and optical illusions (Vlachopoulos), to representations of water (Shank). Anthropomorphic representations, or their absence, of goddesses or priestesses (Jones), rulers (Palaima), or initiates (Koehl) are also studied here with new eyes and fresh insights.
The new book by prize-winning biographer Evelyn Juers, author of The House of Exile and The Recluse, portrays the life and background of a pioneering Australian dancer who died at the age of twenty-five in a remote town in India. A uniquely talented dancer and choreographer, Philippa Cullen grew up in Australia in the 1950s and 60s. In the 1970s, driven by the idea of dancing her own music, she was at the forefront of the new electronic music movement, working internationally with performers, avant-garde composers, engineers and mathematicians to build and experiment with theremins and movement-sensitive floors, which she called body-instruments. She had a unique sense of purpose, read widel...
The 27 papers in this volume harken to the themes that Jeffrey Soles has influenced during his illustrious career in Aegean Bronze Age archaeology: ancestry, burial customs, religion, trade, jewelry, the development of the Minoan settlement of Mochlos in eastern Crete, and the rise and fall of the Minoan civilization.
The ancient sources for the life and times of Zenobia are sparse, and the surviving literary works are biased towards the Roman point of view, much as are the sources for two other famous women who challenged Rome, Cleopatra and Boudica. In Empress Zenobia, Pat Southern seeks to tell the other side of the legendary 3rd century queen's place in history. As queen of Palmyra (present-day Syria), Zenobia was acknowledged in her lifetime as beautiful and clever, gathering round her at the Palmyrene court writers and poets, artists and philosophers. It was said that Zenobia claimed descent from Cleopatra, which cannot be true but is indicative of how she saw herself and how she intended to be seen...
Understanding Relations Between Scripts examines the writing systems of the ancient Aegean and Cyprus in the second and first millennia BC, principally Cretan ‘Hieroglyphic’, Linear A, Linear B, Cypro-Minoan and the Cypriot Syllabary. These scripts, of which some are deciphered and others are not, are known to be related to each other. However, the details of their relationships with each other have remained poorly understood and this will be the first volume dedicated solely to this issue. Nine papers aim to reach a better appreciation of relationships between writing systems than has been possible in previous research, through an interdisciplinary dialogue that takes account of both features of the writing systems and the contextual factors affecting the way in which writing was passed on. Each individual contribution furthers this aim by presenting the latest research on the Aegean scripts, demonstrating the great advances in our understanding of script relations that are possible through such detailed and innovative studies.
Reassesses the animal depictions of Bronze Age Crete in terms of human-animal relations rather than a love of nature.