You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In Ethiopia and Eritrea manuscripts, often beautifully illustrated, have been for centuries the principal means of recording not just the Scriptures but also historical information. Ethiopic manuscripts thus provide a unique window into the life and culture of Ethiopians and Eritreans up to the twenty-first century. The collection of Ethiopic manuscripts in the Bodleian Library in Oxford is one of the most significant in Europe. The Bodleian acquired its first Ge'ez manuscript in 1636 and further expanded its collection in 1843, when it acquired twenty-four of the manuscripts that the Scottish explorer James Bruce had brought back from Ethiopia and Eritrea. During the twentieth and twenty-fi...
The three Garima Gospels are the earliest surviving Ethiopian gospel books. They provide glimpses of lost late antique luxury gospel books and art of the fifth to seventh centuries, in the Aksumite kingdom of Ethiopia as well as in the Christian East. As this work shows, their artwork is closely related to Syriac, Armenian, Greek, and Georgian gospel books and to the art of late antique (Coptic) Egypt, Nubia, and Himyar (Yemen). Like most gospel manuscripts, the Garima Gospels contain ornately decorated canon tables which function as concordances of the different versions of the same material in the gospels. Analysis of these tables of numbered parallel passages, devised by Eusebius of Caesa...
Spanning centuries and the vastness of the Roman Empire, The Last Statues of Antiquity is the first comprehensive survey of Roman honorific statues in the public realm in Late Antiquity. Drawn from a major research project and corresponding online database that collates all the available evidence for the "statue habit" across the Empire from the late third century AD onwards, the volume examines where, how, and why statues were used, and why these important features of urban life began to decline in number before eventually disappearing around AD 600. Adopting a detailed comparative approach, the collection explores variation between different regions--including North Africa, Asia Minor, and the Near East--as well as individual cities, such as Aphrodisias, Athens, Constantinople, and Rome. A number of thematic chapters also consider the different kinds of honorand, from provincial governors and senators, to women and cultural heroes. Richly illustrated, the volume is the definitive resource for studying the phenomenon of late-antique statues. The collection also incorporates extensive references to the project's database, which is freely accessible online.
From 1981 until 1986, the archaeologist Judith McKenzie, then a graduate student at the University of Sydney, traveled to the ancient site of Petra in Jordan, living in a cave there for extended periods, in order to survey and measure architectural moldings on the rock-cut monuments. It was a critical time in the history of Petra, where, for centuries, its local inhabitants, known as the Bdoul, had lived and worked. But that tradition was coming to a close. In 1985, the Bdoul began a move to the nearby village of Umm Sayhoun, as directed by the Jordanian government. This first-hand account of life in a cave at Petra, based on diaries Judith kept at the time she lived among the Bdoul, is ther...
The present volume contains twelve chapters authored by specialists of Asian, African and European manuscript cultures reflecting on the cohesion of written artefacts, particularly manuscripts. Assuming that 'codicological units' exist in every manuscript culture and that they are usually composed of discrete elements (such as clay tablets, papyrus sheets, bamboo slips, parchment bifolios, palm leaves), the issue of the cohesion of the constituents is a general one. The volume presents a series of case studies on devices and strategies adopted to achieve this cohesion by manuscript cultures distant in space (from China to West Africa) and time (from the third millennium bce to the present). ...
Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity constitutes an exceptional religious tradition flourishing in sub-Saharan Africa already since late antiquity. The volume places Ethiopian Orthodoxy into a global context and explores the various ways in which it has been interconnected with the wider Christian world from the Aksumite period until today. By highlighting the formative role of both wide-ranging translocal religious interactions as well as disruptions thereof, the contributors challenge the perception of this African Christian tradition as being largely isolated in the course of its history. Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity in a Global Context: Entanglements and Disconnections offers a new perspective on the Horn of Africa’s Christian past and reclaims its place on the map of global Christianity.
Twelve scholars contextualize and critically examine the key debates about the controversy over icons and their veneration that would fundamentally shape Byzantium and Orthodox Christianity.
The so-called ‘Canon Tables’ of the Christian Gospels are an absolutely remarkable feature of the early, late antique, and medieval Christian manuscript cultures of East and West, the invention of which is commonly attributed to Eusebius and dated to first decades of the fourth century AD. Intended to host a technical device for structuring, organizing, and navigating the Four Gospels united in a single codex – and, in doing so, building upon and bringing to completion previous endeavours – the Canon Tables were apparently from the beginning a highly complex combination of text, numbers and images, that became an integral and fixed part of all the manuscripts containing the Four Gosp...
Michael C.A. Macdonald is one of the great names of Arabian Studies. He pioneered the field of Ancient North Arabian and made invaluable contributions to the history of Arabia and the nomads of the Near East, their languages, and their scripts. This volume gathers thirty-two innovative contributions from leading scholars in the field to honor the career of Michael C.A. Macdonald, covering the languages and scripts of ancient Arabia, their history and archaeology, the Hellenistic Near East, and the modern dialects and languages of Arabia. The book is an essential part of the library of any who study the Near East, its languages and its cultures.
This book explores the construction processes and the mechanisms of transmission of knowledge between the eastern and western Mediterranean lands from the late Roman period to the early centuries of Islam.