The Phantom Image

The Phantom Image
Author: Patrick R. Crowley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2019-12-10
Genre: Art
ISBN: 022664829X

Drawing from a rich corpus of art works, including sarcophagi, tomb paintings, and floor mosaics, Patrick R. Crowley investigates how something as insubstantial as a ghost could be made visible through the material grit of stone and paint. In this fresh and wide-ranging study, he uses the figure of the ghost to offer a new understanding of the status of the image in Roman art and visual culture. Tracing the shifting practices and debates in antiquity about the nature of vision and representation, Crowley shows how images of ghosts make visible structures of beholding and strategies of depiction. Yet the figure of the ghost simultaneously contributes to a broader conceptual history that accounts for how modalities of belief emerged and developed in antiquity. Neither illustrations of ancient beliefs in ghosts nor depictions of afterlife, these images show us something about the visual event of seeing itself. The Phantom Image offers essential insight into ancient art, visual culture, and the history of the image.

The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire

The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire
Author: Kendra Eshleman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2012-11-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139851837

This book examines the role of social networks in the formation of identity among sophists, philosophers and Christians in the early Roman Empire. Membership in each category was established and evaluated socially as well as discursively. From clashes over admission to classrooms and communion to construction of the group's history, integration into the social fabric of the community served as both an index of identity and a medium through which contests over status and authority were conducted. The juxtaposition of patterns of belonging in Second Sophistic and early Christian circles reveals a shared repertoire of technologies of self-definition, authorization and institutionalization and shows how each group manipulated and adapted those strategies to its own needs. This approach provides a more rounded view of the Second Sophistic and places the early Christian formation of 'orthodoxy' in a fresh context.

Corinth in Contrast

Corinth in Contrast
Author: Steven J Friesen
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2013-10-02
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004261311

In Corinth in Contrast, archaeologists, historians, art historians, classicists, and New Testament scholars examine the stratified nature of socio-economic, political, and religious interactions in the city from the Hellenistic period to Late Antiquity. The volume challenges standard social histories of Corinth by focusing on the unequal distribution of material, cultural, and spiritual resources. Specialists investigate specific aspects of cultural and material stratification such as commerce, slavery, religion, marriage and family, gender, and art, analyzing both the ruling elite of Corinth and the non-elite Corinthians who made up the majority of the population. This approach provides insight into the complex networks that characterized every ancient urban center and sets an agenda for future studies of Corinth and other cities rule by Rome.

Visualizing the invisible with the human body

Visualizing the invisible with the human body
Author: J. Cale Johnson
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 504
Release: 2019-11-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110642689

Physiognomy and ekphrasis are two of the most important modes of description in antiquity and represent the necessary precursors of scientific description. The primary way of divining the characteristics and fate of an individual, whether inborn or acquired, was to observe the patient’s external characteristics and behaviour. This volume focuses initially on two types of descriptive literature in Mesopotamia: physiognomic omens and what we might call ekphrastic description. These modalities are traced through ancient India, Ugaritic and the Hebrew Bible, before arriving at the physiognomic features of famous historical figures such as Themistocles, Socrates or Augustus in the Graeco-Roman world, where physiognomic discussions become intertwined with typological analyses of human characters. The Arabic compendial culture absorbed and remade these different physiognomic and ekphrastic traditions, incorporating both Mesopotamian links between physiognomy and medicine and the interest in characterological ‘types’ that had emerged in the Hellenistic period. This volume offer the first wide-ranging picture of these modalities of description in antiquity.

Roman Crete: New Perspectives

Roman Crete: New Perspectives
Author: Jane E. Francis
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2016-05-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1785700960

The last several decades have seen a dramatic increase in interest in the Roman period on the island of Crete. Ongoing and some long-standing excavations and investigations of Roman sites and buildings, intensive archaeological survey of Roman areas, and intensive research on artifacts, history, and inscriptions of the island now provide abundant data for assessing Crete alongside other Roman provinces. New research has also meant a reevaluation of old data in light of new discoveries, and the history and archaeology of Crete is now being rewritten. The breadth of topics addressed by the papers in this volume is an indication of Crete’s vast archaeological potential for contributing to current academic issues such as Romanization/acculturation, climate and landscape studies, regional production and distribution, iconographic trends, domestic housing, economy and trade, and the transition to the late-Antique era. These papers confirm Crete’s place as a fully realized participant in the Roman world over the course of many centuries but also position it as a newly discovered source of academic inquiry.

Roman in the Provinces

Roman in the Provinces
Author: Gail L. Hoffman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: Art, Roman
ISBN: 9781892850225

"Roman in the Provinces: Art on the Periphery of Empire" accompanies an exhibition of the same name that will open at Yale University Art Gallery in August 2014 and will travel to the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College in February 2015. With objects assembled primarily from Yale University Art Gallery s world-class Roman and Byzantine collection and including a few significant loans from other institutions, "Roman in the Provinces" explores the varied ways in which different individuals, groups, and regions across the empire reacted to being Roman. Drawing especially on materials from Yale University s excavations at Gerasa and Dura-Europos, the exhibit presents material chronologically and geographically distant from imperial Rome. This focus encourages better characterization and understanding of the local responses and multiple identities in the provinces as they were expressed through material culture. Contributors to this publication offer new scholarship on a wide range of subjects, including religious practices, military customs, and epigraphy, with the common aim of ascertaining what the Roman Empire was actually like and how scholars should approach its study today. "

The Maeander Valley

The Maeander Valley
Author: Peter Thonemann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2011-09-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1139499351

This book is a study of the long-term historical geography of Asia Minor, from the fourth century BC to the thirteenth century AD. Using an astonishing breadth of sources, ranging from Byzantine monastic archives to Latin poetic texts, ancient land records to hagiographic biographies, Peter Thonemann reveals the complex and fascinating interplay between the natural environment and human activities in the Maeander valley. Both a large-scale regional history and a profound meditation on the role played by geography in human history, this book is an essential contribution to the history of the Eastern Mediterranean in Graeco-Roman antiquity and the Byzantine Middle Ages.

The Minor Objects

The Minor Objects
Author: Gladys R. Davidson
Publisher: Amer School of Classical
Total Pages: 366
Release: 1952
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780876611227

This catalogue of over 3,000 items presents a huge variety of ephemera from ancient Corinth, fascinating for the glimpses of daily life in an ancient city which they offer us. The book presents a miscellany of figurines, vessels and furniture, jewelry and dress accessories, seals and stamps, keys and locks, glass panes and inlay, loomweights, writing implements, surgical tools, musical instruments, religious paraphernalia, military accoutrements, and tools. The chronological range of the material is from the 8th century B.C. to the Turkish period. The largest group of objects belong to the Byzantine period and the next largest to the centuries of Roman rule. Of special interest are the sections on glass vessels, on loomweights, on finger rings, and on lead seals.

The Indian System of Human Marks

The Indian System of Human Marks
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 970
Release: 2015-12-22
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9004299823

In The Indian System of Human Marks, Zysk offers a literary history of the Indian system of knowledge, which details divination by means of the marks on the bodies of both men and women. In addition to a historical analysis, the work includes texts and translations of the earliest treatises in Sanskrit. This is followed by a detailed philological analysis of the texts and annotations to the translations. The history follows the Indian system’s evolution from its roots in ancient Mesopotamian collections of omen on the human body to modern-day practice in Rajasthan in the north and Tamilnadu in the south. A special feature of the book is Zysk’s edition and translation of the earliest textual collection of the system in the Gargīyajyotiṣa from the 1st century CE. The system of human marks is one of the few Indian textual sources that links ancient India with the antique cultures of Mesopotamia and Greece.