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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.

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.

Movement and mobility represent intertwined concepts that have persisted throughout human history. The act of moving from one place to another is, however, intricately tied to the challenges that hinder it. These obstacles can either be natural in origin or the product of human design aimed at constraining the movement of individuals or groups. Furthermore, movement and mobility can also manifest themselves within society, encompassing the fluid shifts of people within the social hierarchy and the transitions between various social groups. The transfer of words, technologies, and religious ideologies often accompanies these human movements. The region of ancient Western Asia and northeast Africa serves as a rich repository of evidence for these forms of movement and mobility, extensively documented through written sources and material culture. The essays collected in this volume variously examine the political dimensions of movement and mobility; how ideas, concepts, and languages move across boundaries; and the material evidence for cultural interactions.

The Jeu dAdam is an Anglo-Norman mid-twelfth-century representation of several biblical stories, including the temptation of Adam and Eve and the subsequent fall, Cain and Abel, and the prophets Isaiah and Daniel. Its framework builds on the Latin responses of the mass during the liturgical season of Septuagesima, from before Lent to Easter. This collection of essays explores whether this early play was monastic or secular, its Anglo-Norman character, and the texts musical provenance.

Focusing on languages political power, these essays discuss how representation, through language norms, plays and court spectacles, manipulations and adaptations of texts and images, both constitutes and reflects a cultural milieu. The volume brings together various disciplinary approaches, offering a complex appreciation of these questions. While a core of the essays focuses on France, the contributions engage a broad range of geographical contexts, from Byzantium to eastern Germany and England from the early centuries of the Common Era to the seventeenth century, revealing the prevalence and persistence of the key interconnected issues of images and authority. Contributors: Carla Bozzolo; Philippe Caron; Robert L. A. Clark; Paul Cohen; Thomas Conley; Jean-Philippe Genet; Douglas Kibbee; Gillette Labory; Nicole Pons; Mara R. Wade.

Eric Bohme analyses two processes of conquest which are generally considered prime examples of the expansion of Latin-Christian powers into the Islamicate Mediterranean. The Norman conquest of Sicily 10611091 put a close to more than two hundred years of Muslim rule over the island. Two centuries later, the Catalan-Aragonese conquest of eastern al-Andalus (c. 12291245) and its transformation into the Kingdom of Valencia constituted a major advance in the Christian expansion on the Iberian Peninsula. The striking parallels between both changes of rulership are now analysed indepth for the first time. At the centre of the analysis is the perspective of the conquered Muslim communities: With what motivation and strategies did they participate in processes of interaction and negotiation with the new rulers and other immigrant groups?

The civil wars of the first century BCE disrupted Roman society, which in turn was a major cause of the destabilisation of the political system. While this has of course long been recognised, the cultural dimension of the disintegration of the res publica demands equal attention. The present volume aims for an analysis of the more implicit, yet fundamental effects which the increasingly militarised conflict had on Roman society, starting with the assumption that the radical dynamics and intrinsic brutality constituted a completely new experience for contemporaries. To solve this problem, Romans of the late Republican period devised multiple strategies for coping with the phenomenon of civil war. While some turned to narrative patterns deployed by the Greeks who had been accustomed to civil conflict for centuries, the bella civilia also influenced many other aspects of cultural life. The latent fear of permanent civil strife thus became a source of innovation on multiple levels which (re-)shaped Roman collective imaginary. The resulting structures and developments constituted a highly elaborate and comprehensive "culture of civil war".

Recent scholarship has seen a general turn from separate entities to relations and inclusivity, from static and systemic views to a focus on historical processes and fluidity. Dialectical thinking fundamentally builds on the entwinement of social interactions, inclusivity, contradictory relations, and historical movement. Yet, it is underrepresented in current research of Roman society and religion. Therefore, this volume intends to foreground dialectical thinking as a critical and constructive way to expose and analyse the dynamism, diversity, and discrepancies of religion in the Roman world. Based on critical theories and archaeological, epigraphic, and literary sources, the authors discuss cults, ranging from Mars Thincsus and Mithras to Magna Mater and the deified emperors, in diverse contexts across the Mediterranean from East to West (the Hauran, Asia Minor, Jerusalem, Dalmatia, Gaul, Britain, and Rome). Together, they give a taste of the potential of dialectical approaches for enhancing our understanding of Roman society and religion.

Starting from 135 manuscripts that were once part of the library of the late Mamluk sultan Qniawh al-Ghawr (r. 15011516), this book challenges the dominant narrative of a "post-court era", in which courts were increasingly marginalized in the field of adab. Rather than being the literary barren field that much of the Arabic and Arabic-centred sources, produced extra muros, would have us believe, it re-cognizes Qniawhs court as a rich and vibrant literary site and a cosmopolitan hub in a burgeoning Turkic literary ecumene. It also re-centres the ruler himself within this court. No longer the passive object of panegyric or the source of patronage alone, Qniawh has an authorial voice in his own right, one that is idiosyncratic yet in conversation with other voices. As such, while this book is first and foremost a book about books, it is one that consciously aspires to be more than that: a book about a library, and, ultimately, a book about the man behind the library, Qniawh al-Ghawr.

How did British officers, geographers, and adventurers use the motif of travelling in Alexanders footsteps during their respective missions in Central Asia? Christopher Schliephake shows how the reception of Alexander the Great became an integral part of imperial self-representation and colonial identity in the nineteenth century. As Schliephake argues, the experiential framework of the exploration and conquest of regions like the Punjab or Afghanistan turned the abstract notion of following in Alexanders tracks into a highly relevant category for negotiating the relationship between the present and the past, Europe and Asia. However, the further the British explorers advanced, they realized that Alexander had already been waiting for them he came in the guise of Sikander or Iskander and some local indigenous tribes even claimed direct descent from him. The way the writings of the travelers reacted to the cultural confrontation between a Western and an Eastern Alexander will be one of the main themes of this e-book.

This study is the first comprehensive treatment of the provincial allocations system in the late Roman Republic, between the provincial law carried by Gaius Gracchus in 123 BCE and that carried by Pompeius Magnus in 52 BCE. It considers the actual process of allocations, from the Senates decree of consular and praetorian provinces through to the transfer of command on the ground. Different chapters address the system of allotment (sortitio), the authorisation of troops and funds (ornatio), and the ritual prerequisites for departure, all based solidly on the surviving evidence. An appendix recording the Senates year-by-year decisions supports this and allows us to see trends in the data.Since provincial questions were of central importance to the senatorial class, they were the source of many of the political contests which dominate our source record. And at every stage, the institutions shaped the politics. A new picture emerges, of structural conflicts revolving around the relationship between consuls and tribunes. As Rafferty argues, this made the provincial allocations system one of the central causes of Romes growing political dysfunction in the late Republic.

The Munich Security Conference, founded as "Wehrkundetagung" in 1963, has evolved into the leading independent forum for security policy. Traditionally seen as a kind of transatlantic family meeting for debating NATO strategy during the Cold War, the conference has increasingly broadened its agenda and today attracts participants from across the globe. Each year, dozens of heads of state and government, ministers, and experts from different fields of security policy gather in Munich for an open exchange of ideas and policies on the most pressing international security issues ranging from regional conflicts, international peace operations and nuclear disarmament to cyber security and environmental challenges. On the occasion of the conferences 50th anniversary in 2014, a number of prominent participants, including former and current foreign and defense ministers, reflect on the conferences history and significance, some of the major issues debated, and on key security challenges facing the international community.

To those who study the physical culture of arms in medieval Europe, the German Fechtbucher - treatises on combat arts - are among the most important surviving documentary sources: no other region in Europe produced such an extensive body of writings on the techniques of medieval combat. Among these, and indeed among the martial-arts treatises produced by any culture, the massive compendia commissioned by the scholar-swordsman Paulus Hector Mair (1517-1579) stands out as uniquely ambitious and monumental. The text survives in three manuscript copies, each consisting of two volumes, with each manuscript running to approximately 1200 pages, and includes about 17 weapon-forms (depending on how one counts them) from two-handed sword to rapier, armoured combat to sickle and scythe; each form consists of anywhere from 8 to 136 lavishly illustrated techniques, in many cases followed by one or more seminal texts on the form. The various weapon-forms are mutually integrated with each other in techniques and vocabulary, and collectively offer an enormous volume of interpretable material. The combination of text and image in the illustrated techniques offers obvious advantages to the understanding of a physical practice, and Mair is unique among the German masters in systematically giving instructions to both combatants, so that as one learns how to perform a technique, they also learn how to counter it. Lastly, one of the most important features of the Ars Athletica is the Latin translation, which serves as something of a Rosetta stone for interpreting the vocabulary of these long-lost martial arts. In this series, Dr. Jeffrey Forgeng, translator of the equally seminal Fechtbucher of Joachim Meyer and Hans Leckuchner has compiled a team of translator-practitioners to tackle Mairs opus. Over a decade of work has gone into transcribing, translating and annotating the Ars Athletica (Treatise on the Martial Arts) presenting both the original German and Latin, as well as a modern English translation. Volume Two of this series presents the Dusack, a sporting version of the older Langesmesser (long-knife) a single-edged utility sword characteristic of the German-speaking areas of Europe. Made sometimes of wood, sometimes of leather, occasionally of steel, the Dusack was the training weapon for all single-handed swords. Mairs 44 Dusack sequences contained herein represent one of the earliest surviving treatises on this weapon: previous texts tend to focus on the Messer, and readers will find Mair ends this section by including his own redaction and treatment of some of the most famous Messer texts of the previous century.

This Memorial volume honors the life and work of Prof. Lanny David Bell (April 30, 1941-August 26, 2019), a leading scholar in Egyptology and a beloved teacher and colleague to so many. It includes a biography of Dr. Bell along with contributions from eminent scholars on the topics of ancient art, archaeology, religion, and philology.

The Tiber has been joined by the Orontes. So wrote the Roman satirist Juvenal, in a complaint about immigration to the Empires capital. Rome was constantly sustained by immigrants. Some were voluntary - craftworkers, soldiers, teachers and intellectuals. Countless others came as slaves. What happened to them after arrival? Did they try to keep contact with their homelands? Did they form distinctive communities within Rome? This book is the first comprehensive study of Romes foreign-born element. The author uses inscriptions and literature to explore the experiences of newcomers to the capital. The results are compared with the colourful Roman stereotypes of different immigrant groups.

In 1950, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology began excavations at the ancient Phrygian capital of Gordion in central Turkey. The Museums Gordion Project continues today, with researchers from many disciplines and with many specializations contributing to a growing-and sometimes changing-body of information and understanding about this complex and multifaceted site, inhabited by peoples and diverse civilizations for millennia. In this volume of Gordion Special Studies, Lynn E. Roller focuses on a series of stone blocks with incised figural and abstract drawings recovered from early Phrygian structures at Gordion. The great majority of the incised stones come from a single structure within the Early Phrygian citadel at Gordion known as Megaron 2, a stone building with several remarkable features and a likely candidate for the citadels temple. The volume begins with a description of the excavation of the stones and a discussion of Megaron 2. Next is an analysis of the subject matter of the drawings by type, describing scenes of human figures, animals, architectural drawings, geometric patterns, and formless marks. A discussion follows of the sources from which the drawings could have been taken and of parallels with similar scenes and designs on objects in other media from Gordion and other contemporary sites in Anatolia. The fourth section proposes an explanatory hypothesis on the origin of the drawings, and considers who could have made them and why. Parallels with comparable drawings from Anatolia and the Near East are discussed here. The final section summarizes the contribution of the drawings to our understanding of the development of the Early Phrygian material at Gordion.

This integration of earlier and new scholarship reconceptualizes the origins of civilization, challenging the received view that the ancient Near East spawned the spread of civilization outward from Mesopotamia to all other neighboring cultures. Central Asia is here shown to have been a major player in the development of cities. Skillfully documenting the different phases of both Soviet and earlier Western external analyses along with recent excavation results, this new interpretation reveals Central Asias role in the socioeconomic and political processes linked to both the Iranian Plateau and the Indus Valley, showing how it contributed substantively to the origins of urbanism in the Old World. Hieberts research at Anau and his focus on the Chalcolithic levels provide an essential starting point for understanding both the nature of village life and the historical trajectories that resulted in Bronze Age urbanism.

The objective of this inaugural volume on Upper Silesia is to present an area of considerable cultural, historical, social and natural diversity from a transdisciplinary perspective. The common denominator of the works collected in this volume is the reflection on the multiple perspectives, identity, and diversity of this region. The legal, sociological, historical, cultural, geographic-economic, hydrological, climatological, and natural aspects of Upper Silesia from the past to the present are the focus of the works. The selection of texts has been curated to underscore the intricacies and contemporary relevance of the subject of Upper Silesia, thereby highlighting its originality. The present volume is the outcome of a comparative research project, in which researchers from various scientific disciplines discuss selected aspects of the diversity of Upper Silesia.

The reformation of the Western Church was a series of momentous events that uprooted many things previously taken for granted. In the wake of these dramatic changes, adherents to the various emerging confessional cultures in the sixteenth century sought assurance with the help of historiography. They created specific narratives of the events surrounding the Reformation and a historical continuity from early Christianity to legitimize their own religious teaching and practice. Subsequently, the Reformation, as a process of reform, renewal, or upheaval of church and society, shaped the way contemporary actors and the following generations dealt with history in the pre-modern era. The authors of the present volume pursue inquiries into these and other related developments, taking a wide range of denominational perspectives in various European contexts into account, until well into the eighteenth century.