Ebooks de historia, página 16 de 2238

The old humanistic model, aiming at universalism, ecumenism, and the globalization of various Western systems of values and beliefs, is no longer adequate even if it pleads for an ever-wider inclusion of other cultural perspectives and for intercultural dialogue.In contrast, it would be wise to retain a number of its assumptions and practices which it incidentally shares with humanistic models outside the Western world. We must now reconsider and remap it in terms of a larger, global reference frame. This anthology does just that, thus contributing to a new field of study and practice that could be called intercultural humanism.

Scholars of ancient metallurgy gain insights from individual artifacts as well as from synthetic overviews because debates can turn on details of particular objects from particular contexts. Therefore, it is important for archaeometallurgical studies to provide comprehensive catalogs that specify the attributes of individual objects as well as contexts and the technical studies undertaken on those objects. This fourth volume in the series is devoted to presenting the metallurgical evidence from Ban Chiang, Ban Tong, Ban Phak Top, and Don Klang in northeast Thailand in the form of detailed catalogs organized by sites, periods, and artifact types. All metal artifacts, metallic by-products, and crucibles from the four-site study are included. A catalog of analyzed prills is also included. The catalogs summarize all the contextual, metric, and analytical data from metallographic, elemental, and microhardness analyses. Illustrations and photomicrographs provide visual evidence for the study collection. These kinds of detailed catalogs form the raw material of technical and archaeological interpretation, enabling comparisons with other collections as well as allowing scholars to form their own conclusions independently of the interpretations of the authors.

The foundation of archaeometallurgy is the study of excavated assemblages of metals and related remains. This volume presents in detail how the metals and such remains as crucibles excavated from four sites in northeast Thailand have been studied to understand the place of metal objects and technology in the ancient past of this region. In addition to typological examination, hundreds of technical analyses reveal the technological capabilities, preferences, and styles of metal artifact manufacturers in this part of Thailand. Detailed examination of contexts of recovery of metal remains employing a "life history" approach indicates that metal objects in those societies were used primarily in daily life and, only occasionally, as grave goods. The most surprising find is that casting of copper-base artifacts to final form took place at all these village sites during the metal age period, indicating a decentralized final production stage that may prove to be unusual for metal age societies. These insights are made possible by applying the methods and theories introduced in the first volume of the suite of volumes that study the metal remains from Ban Chiang in regional contest.

Continuing the work of publishing the the excavations at the site of Ayia Irini on the Cycladic island of Keos, this volume focuses on the architecture and stratigraphy of the site.

In commemoration of Lothar von Falkenhausens 60th birthday, this volume assembles eighteen scholarly essays that explore the intersection between art, economy, and ritual in ancient East Asia. The contributions are clustered into four themes: Ritual Economy, Ritual and Sacrifice, Technology, Community, Interaction, and Objects and Meaning, which collectively reflect the theoretical, methodological, and historical questions that Falkenhausen has been examining via his scholarship, research, and teaching throughout his career. Most of the chapters work with archaeological and textual data from China, but there are also studies of materials from Mongolia, Korea, Southeast Asia and even Egypt, showing the global impact of Falkenhausens work. The chronological range of studies extends from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age in China, into the early imperial, medieval, and early modern periods. The authors discuss art, economy, ritual, interaction, and technology in the broad context of East Asian archaeology and its connection to the world beyond.

During the Old Kingdom, the ancient Egyptians constructed elaborately decorated mortuary monuments for their pharaohs. By the late Old Kingdom (ca. 2435-2153 BCE), these pyramid complexes began to contain a new and unique type of statue, the so-called prisoner statues. Despite being known to Egyptologists for decades, these statues of kneeling, bound foreign captives have been only partially documented, and questions surrounding their use, treatment, and exact meaning have remained unanswered. Ancient Egyptian Prisoner Statues-the first comprehensive analysis of the prisoner statues-addresses this gap, demonstrating that the Egyptians conceived of and used the prisoner statues differently over time as a response to contemporary social, cultural, and historical changes. In the process, the author contributes new data and interpretations on topics as diverse as the purpose and function of the pyramid complex, the ways in which the Egyptians understood and depicted ethnicity, and the agency of artists in ancient Egypt. Ultimately, this volume provides a fuller understanding of not only the prisoner statues but also the Egyptian late Old Kingdom as a whole.

Area B, in the southeastern part of the Bronze Age town of Ayia Irini, Kea, preserves evidence for human activity from the mid-Early Bronze Age to the mid-Late Bronze Age, or Periods III-VII in the parlance of the site. This volume summarizes the results of excavation in the area and provides an overview of the stratigraphy, architecture, and artifacts found in it. Owing to its status as one of the best-excavated and best-documented sectors of the site, Area B also provides an excellent opportunity to consider diachronic changes in the ceramic assemblage through time. Analysis of macroscopic and petrographic fabrics and evaluation of how fabric, ware, and shape categories intersect enables a detailed, diachronic study of changes in pottery production, trade, and consumption patterns at the site in view of broader shifts in Aegean economy and society.

Our ideas about ancient Athens are constructed very largely from the writings of Athenian authors. Relatively rare are our sources for how others -- whether Greeks, Asiatics or Romans -- saw Athens from the outside. Yet we can see that not only did many across the Mediterranean world resist the political power of Athens in countless wars over several centuries, but that there existed an intriguing variety of anti-Athenian ideologies. The 12 new studies in this volume, by a distinguished international cast, trace negative thinking about Athens from the late archaic period to Roman times. They challenge the easy modern supposition that Athens was generally seen as the cultural emblem of Greece, and cast light on the thinking of ancient peoples who - nowadays - tend to exist in Athens shadow.

This volume builds bridges between usually-separate social groups, between different methodologies and even between disciplines. It is the result of an innovative conference held at Swansea University in 2010, which brought together leading craftspeople and academics to explore the all-too-often opposed practices of experimental and experiential archaeology. The focus is upon Egyptology, but the volume has a wider importance. The experimental method is privileged in academic institutions and thus perhaps is subject to clear definitions. It tends to be associated with the scientific and technological. In opposition, the experiential is more rarely defined and is usually associated with schoolchildren, museums and heritage centres; it is often criticised for being unscientific. The introductory chapter of this volume examines the development of these traditionally-assumed differences, giving for the first time a critical and careful definition of the experiential in relation to the experimental. The two are seen as points on a continuum with much common ground. This claim is borne out by succeeding chapters, which cover such topics as textiles, woodworking and stoneworking. And Salima Ikram, Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, here demonstrates remarkably that our understanding of the classic Egyptian funerary practice of mummification benefits from both scientific experimental and sensual experiential approaches. The volume, however, is important not only for Egyptology but for archaeological method more generally. The papers illuminate the pioneering of individuals who founded modern archaeological practice. Several papers are truly groundbreaking and deserve to circulate far beyond Egyptology. Thus the archaeologist Marquardt Lund tackles the problem of understanding the earliest known depictions of flint knife manufacture, those from an Egyptian tomb dated around 1900 BC. He shows the importance of thinking outside traditional, i.e. modern, knapping practice. Lunds knapping method, guided by the tomb depictions, is surprising but effective, and very different from that presented in manuals of lithic technology or taught in academic institutions.

This volume offers new research on an essential but often controversial aspect of life in Dynastic Egypt. Its originality lies in combining research which uses Egyptologys traditional strengths, philological and iconographic, with reflections on material culture and on the discipline of Egyptology itself. The authors are internationally-recognized authorities in their fields.

Augustus Memoirs, written probably in the mid 20s BC, might have been one of the most revealing texts of Roman history - had they survived. Far longer than his surviving Res Gestae, the Memoirs seem to date from a period at which the wounds of Romes civil wars were fresh, and the emperors partisan past might be recalled with discomfort. Existing fragments and testimonia have suggested that the work was apologetic in purpose. In this, the first ever comprehensive study of the subject, a cast of internationally-respected scholars reconstruct aspects of the work, its importance for historians, and its relation to Roman literary genre. The book also contains, by kind permission of Oxford University Press, the fragments and testimonia of the Memoirs as they will appear, newly edited by Christopher Smith, in The Fragmentary Roman Historians.

Magic, dreams and prophecy played important roles in ancient Egypt, as in other Mediterranean societies. Scholars are now approaching the whole topic of divination in antiquity with greatly enhanced attention. In this volume eminent international specialists come together to explore the practice, logic and psychology of divination among ancient Egyptians.

Plutarchs writings, for long treated in a fragmentary way as a source for earlier periods, are now increasingly studied in their own right. The thirteen original essays in this volume range over Plutarchs relations with his contemporaries and his engagement in philosophical debate, his views on social issues such as education and gender, his modes of expression and his construction of argument. Also treated here are Plutarchs understanding and use of his antecedents, literary and historical, and the sophisticated techniques with which he conveyed his own vision. It is a theme of the present book that the writings of Plutarch should be seen as the product of a single, extraordinarily capacious, intelligence.

This volume continues the systematic edition of the unpublished Bo-texts deposited in the Museum of Ancient Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara. As in previous volumes, the text fragments are presented in both photographs and transliterations, with succinct philological notes explaining particular forms and relevant text variants. Several direct joins with other fragments were observed during the preparation of this volume, and the combined texts are presented here either through new photographs taken of the physically joined fragments or, where the fragments are dispersed among different museums, through digital image processing. The fragments dealt with here are mostly of a religious nature-predominantly rituals, festivals, cult inventories, and oracular texts. Two fragments are additions to the corpus of important historical compositions. A Kamruepa myth with a description of a volcanic eruption, a magical ritual concerning the West Anatolian foe Kukkulli, and festival instructions or preparations of Au?ani are also worth mentioning. A ?edammu myth fragment and several non-Hittite compositions (vocabulary, medical text, omen) represent further text varieties. Each text edition is accompanied, wherever possible, by information about its assignment to a Hittite text or text genre, the date of the composition, the fragments measurements, and previous bibliography. The edition of these fragments has been long awaited by Hittitologists and has become an essential element in the history of Hittitology over the past thirty-five years.

The tombs and mortuary temples of Thebes have proved an enduring topic of interest thanks to a quickly expanding corpus of field materials and a series of conferences devoted to the subject. This volume, the fourth in a series of occasional proceedings from the ongoing Theban Workshop, presents new research on wall decoration in the Theban necropolis. Its thirteen essays, by an international array of leading scholars, attest to the wide and varied scope of the theme.

From 1923 to 1933, the Chicago Field Museum and the University of Oxford conducted archaeological excavations at the site of Kish, located on the floodplain of the Euphrates River in modern Iraq approximately 80 kilometers south of Baghdad. Over the course of ten years of work, the expedition explored seventeen different mounds both inside and outside the ancient boundaries of Kish. The finds were divided at the end of each season, with the Iraq Museum retaining half of the objects and any one-of-a-kind items and the two excavating institutions splitting the remainder. Beginning in 2004, the Field Museum undertook a reevaluation of its Kish holdings. To highlight new research and insights into the material culture from Kish and our understanding of the importance of the site to Mesopotamian archaeology, the Field Museum held a symposium in 2008 that brought together an international group of scholars who presented papers on various aspects of the ancient city. This volume, which grew out of that symposium, presents a wide array of studies on the excavated material remains from Kish, including cuneiform texts, animal figurines, human remains, lithics, figural stucco wall decorations, and more.

This volume honors Dennis G. Pardee, Henry Crown Professor of Hebrew Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago and one of the preeminent experts in Northwest Semitic languages and literatures, particularly Ugaritic studies. The thirty-seven essays by colleagues and former students reflect the wide range of Professor Pardees research interests and include, among other topics, new readings of inscriptions, studies of poetic structure, and investigations of Late Bronze Age society.

The Archive of Thotsutmis, Son of Panouphis presents for the first time one of the largest collections of Demotic ostraca to have been discovered intact by archaeologists in the twentieth century. Rarely have such deposits been found in situ. Excavated by Ambrose Lansing on behalf of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1915-16 at the site of Deir el-Bahari, the integrity and context of this find are critical to the proper understanding of the texts it contained. Through the publication and analysis of this archive of Demotic and Greek texts recorded on ostraca, Muhs, Scalf, and Jay reconstruct the microhistory of Thotsutmis, son of Panouphis, and his family, who worked in Egypt on the west bank of Thebes as priests in the mortuary industry during the early Ptolemaic Period in the third century BC. The forty-two ostraca published in this volume provide a rare opportunity to explore the intersections between an intact ancient archive of private administrative documents and the larger social and legal contexts into which they fit. What the reconstructed microhistory reveals is an ancient family striving to make it among the wealthy and connected social network of Theban choachytes and pastophoroi, while they simultaneously navigated the bureaucratic maze of taxes, fees, receipts, and legal procedures of the Ptolemaic state.

This volume honors McGuire Gibson and his years of service to archaeology of Mesopotamia, Yemen, and neighboring regions. Professor Gibson spent most of his career at the University of Chicagos Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department and the Oriental Institute. Many of his students, colleagues, and friends have contributed to this volume, reflecting Gibsons diverse interests. The volume presents new results in areas such as landscape archaeology, urbanism, the ancient languages of Mesopotamia, history of Mesopotamia, the archaeology of Iran and Yemen, prehistory, material culture, and wider archaeological topics.

Tel Maresha is located in the foothills of Israels Judaean Mountains. It was established in the Iron Age II (circa 700 BCE) and is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible (Josh 15:44; I Chron. 2:42). But it was mainly a Hellenistic-period town - a major Idumean political and administrative center. One of the unique and fascinating aspects of Maresha is its subterranean city - hundreds of underground galleries and chambers filled to the gills with artifacts. This volume is a report of the excavations of one of these rich subterranean complexes - SC 169 - which contained a full corpus of Hellenistic pottery forms - both local and exotic altars, figurines, amulets, seals and seal impressions, hundreds of inscriptions in Greek and Aramaic, coins, jewelry and much more. These finds tell the story of an affluent cosmopolitan society comprised of Idumeans, Phoenicians, Greeks, and Jews, who lived together in a vibrant urban setting until the city was destroyed, probably by the Jewish Hasmonean kingdom in 104 BCE.