Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity

Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity
Author: Sarah F. Derbew
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2022-05-12
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1108495281

A bold and brilliant new treatment of blackness in ancient Greek literature and visual culture as well as modern reception.

Blacks in Antiquity

Blacks in Antiquity
Author: Frank M. Snowden
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 1970
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674076266

Investigates the participation of black Africans, usually referred to as "Ethiopians," by the Greek and Romans, in classical civilization, concluding that they were accepted by pagans and Christians without prejudice.

The Art of Libation in Classical Athens

The Art of Libation in Classical Athens
Author: Milette Gaifman
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2018-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0300192274

This handsome volume presents an innovative look at the imagery of libations, the most commonly depicted ritual in ancient Greece, and how it engaged viewers in religious performance. In a libation, liquid--water, wine, milk, oil, or honey--was poured from a vessel such as a jug or a bowl onto the ground, an altar, or another surface. Libations were made on occasions like banquets, sacrifices, oath-taking, departures to war, and visitations to tombs, and their iconography provides essential insight into religious and social life in 5th-century BC Athens. Scenes depicting the ritual often involved beholders directly--a statue's gaze might establish the onlooker as a fellow participant, or painted vases could draw parallels between human practices and acts of gods or heroes. Beautifully illustrated with a broad range of examples, including the Caryatids at the Acropolis, the Parthenon Frieze, Attic red-figure pottery, and funerary sculpture, this important book demonstrates the power of Greek art to transcend the boundaries between visual representation and everyday experience.

Archaeology, Nation and Race

Archaeology, Nation and Race
Author: Raphael Greenberg
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2022-03-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1009160230

Grounded in decades of research, this book covers contemporary matters such as the entanglement of race and nationalism with archaeology.

Arguments with Silence

Arguments with Silence
Author: Amy Richlin
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2014-08-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472120131

Women in ancient Rome challenge the historian. Widely represented in literature and art, they rarely speak for themselves. Amy Richlin, among the foremost pioneers in ancient studies, gives voice to these women through scholarship that scours sources from high art to gutter invective. In Arguments with Silence, Richlin presents a linked selection of her essays on Roman women’s history, originally published between 1981 and 2001 as the field of “women in antiquity” took shape, and here substantially rewritten and updated. The new introduction to the volume lays out the historical methodologies these essays developed, places this process in its own historical setting, and reviews work on Roman women since 2001, along with persistent silences. Individual chapter introductions locate each piece in the social context of Second Wave feminism in Classics and the academy, explaining why each mattered as an intervention then and still does now. Inhabiting these pages are the women whose lives were shaped by great art, dirty jokes, slavery, and the definition of adultery as a wife’s crime; Julia, Augustus’ daughter, who died, as her daughter would, exiled to a desert island; women wearing makeup, safeguarding babies with amulets, practicing their religion at home and in public ceremonies; the satirist Sulpicia, flaunting her sexuality; and the praefica, leading the lament for the dead. Amy Richlin is one of a small handful of modern thinkers in a position to consider these questions, and this guided journey with her brings surprise, delight, and entertainment, as well as a fresh look at important questions.

A Companion to Aeschylus

A Companion to Aeschylus
Author: Peter Burian
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 596
Release: 2023-05-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1405188049

A COMPANION TO AESCHYLUS A COMPANION TO AESCHYLUS In A Companion to Aeschylus, a team of eminent Aeschyleans and brilliant younger scholars delivers an insightful and original multi-authored examination—the first comprehensive one in English—of the works of the earliest surviving Greek tragedian. This book explores Aeschylean drama, and its theatrical, historical, philosophical, religious, and socio-political contexts, as well as the receptions and influence of Aeschylus from antiquity to the present day. This companion offers readers thorough examinations of Aeschylus as a product of his time, including his place in the early years of the Athenian democracy and his immediate and ongoing impact on tragedy. It also provides comprehensive explorations of all the surviving plays, including Prometheus Bound, which many scholars have concluded is not by Aeschylus. A Companion to Aeschylus is an ideal resource for students encountering the work of Aeschylus for the first time as well as more advanced scholars seeking incisive treatment of his individual works, their cultural context and their enduring significance. Written in an accessible format, with the Greek translated into English and technical terminology avoided as much as possible, the book belongs in the library of anyone looking for a fresh and authoritative account of works of continuing interest and importance to readers and theatre-goers alike.

Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt 1876–Now

Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt 1876–Now
Author: Akili Tommasino
Publisher: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2024-11-11
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1588397858

From the late nineteenth century onward, Black Americans looked to ancient Egypt as evidence of a preeminent ancient culture from the African continent. Flight into Egypt traces ancient Egypt’s influence on artists, from Edmonia Lewis’s sculpture The Death of Cleopatra (1876) to the efflorescence of Afrocentric visual art during the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and artistic tendencies of the ensuing decades. This volume explores how Black artists, writers, and musicians—and modern and contemporary Egyptian artists—have employed ancient Egyptian imagery to craft a unifying identity. Authors bring to light the overlooked contributions of Black scholars to the study of ancient Egypt, while statements by contemporary Black and Egyptian artists illuminate ancient Egypt’s continued hold on the creative imagination.

Ethnicity in the Ancient World – Did it matter?

Ethnicity in the Ancient World – Did it matter?
Author: Erich S. Gruen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2020-09-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3110685655

This study raises that difficult and complicated question on a broad front, taking into account the expressions and attitudes of a wide variety of Greek, Roman, Jewish, and early Christian sources, including Herodotus, Polybius, Cicero, Philo, and Paul. It approaches the topic of ethnicity through the lenses of the ancients themselves rather than through the imposition of modern categories, labels, and frameworks. A central issue guides the course of the work: did ancient writers reflect upon collective identity as determined by common origins and lineage or by shared traditions and culture?

Seeing Color in Classical Art

Seeing Color in Classical Art
Author: Jennifer M. S. Stager
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 566
Release: 2022-12-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1009034669

The remains of ancient Mediterranean art and architecture that have survived over the centuries present the modern viewer with images of white, the color of the stone often used for sculpture. Antiquarian debates and recent scholarship, however, have challenged this aspect of ancient sculpture. There is now a consensus that sculpture produced in the ancient Mediterranean world, as well as art objects in other media, were, in fact, polychromatic. Color has consequently become one of the most important issues in the study of classical art. Jennifer Stager's landmark book makes a vital contribution to this discussion. Analyzing the dyes, pigments, stones, earth, and metals found in ancient art works, along with the language that writers in antiquity used to describe color, she examines the traces of color in a variety of media. Stager also discusses the significance of a reception history that has emphasized whiteness, revealing how ancient artistic practice and ancient philosophies of color significantly influenced one another.

A Cultural History of Race in Antiquity

A Cultural History of Race in Antiquity
Author: Denise Eileen McCoskey
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2023-06-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350299987

The era generally referred to as antiquity lasted for thousands of years and was characterized by a diverse range of peoples and cultural systems. This volume explores some of the specific ways race was defined and mobilized by different groups-including the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Persians, and Ethiopians- as they came into contact with one another during this period. Key to this inquiry is the examination of institutions, such as religion and politics, and forms of knowledge, such as science, that circumscribed the formation of ancient racial identities and helped determine their meanings and consequences. Drawing on a range of ancient evidence-literature, historical writing, documentary evidence, and ancient art and archaeology-this volume highlights both the complexity of ancient racial ideas and the often violent and asymmetrical power structures embedded in ancient racial representations and practices like war and the enslavement of other persons. The study of race in antiquity has long been clouded by modern assumptions, so this volume also seeks to outline a better method for apprehending race on its own terms in the ancient world, including its relationship to other forms of identity, such as ethnicity and gender, while also seeking to identify and debunk some of the racist methods and biases that have been promulgated by classical historians themselves over the last few centuries.