scholarly journals The Discourses of Identity in Hellenistic Erythrai: Institutions, Rhetoric, Honour and Reciprocity

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-107
Author(s):  
Peter Liddel
Keyword(s):  
Classical Period ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Weak State

Abstract Recent research in the field of New Institutionalist analysis has developed the view that institutions are grounded not only upon authoritative rules but also upon accepted practices and narratives. In this paper I am interested in the ways in which honorific practices and accounts of identity set out in ancient Greek inscriptions contribute towards the persistence of polis institutions in the Hellenistic period. A diachronic survey of Erythraian inscriptions of the classical and Hellenistic periods gives an impression of the adaptation and proliferation of forms of discourse established in the classical period. It demonstrates the ongoing prominence of the rhetoric of identity in conversations that went on not only between peer polities and within real or imagined kinship groups but also in negotiations between powerful and weak state entities and in inward-facing discourses on euergetism.

The Living Art of Greek Tragedy. By Marianne McDonald. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003; pp. 224. $15.95 paper.

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-168
Author(s):  
Edmund P. Cueva
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Indiana University

Marianne McDonald's book provides a solid introduction to ancient tragedy and theatre. The author examines the works by the three major ancient Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and supplies for each playwright biographies, synopses of their works, and modern and ancient translations and adaptations of their plays. The listing of the translations and adaptations is selective and spans from the classical period up to the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Mysticism and/in the Old Testament: Methodological orientation and a textual example

2015 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christo Lombaard
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Specific Aspect ◽  
The Other ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Mission History ◽  
The One ◽  
Interpretative Framework

This contribution is the second in a series on methodology and Biblical Spirituality. In the first article, ‘Biblical spirituality and interdisciplinarity: The discipline at cross-methodological intersection’, the matter was explored in relationship to the broader academic discipline of Spirituality. In this contribution, the focus is narrowed to the more specific aspect of mysticism within Spirituality Studies. It is not rare for Old Testament texts to be understood in relationship to mystical contexts. One the one hand, when Old Testament texts are interpreted from a mystical perspective, the methods with which such interpretations are studied are familiar. The same holds true, on the other hand, if texts in the Old Testament, dating from the Hellenistic period, are identified as mystic. However, African mission history has taught us that the Western interpretative framework, based on ancient Greek philosophical suppositions (most directly the concepts rendered by Plato and Aristotle) and rhetorical orientations, is so strong that it transposes that which it encounters in other cultures into its terms, thus rendering the initial cultural understandings inaccessible. This is precisely the case too with Old Testament texts dating from pre-Hellenistic times, identified as mystic. What are the methodological parameters required to understand such texts on their own terms? In fact, is such an understanding even possible?

Ancient Greek Terracotta Sculpture

2022 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Southern Italy ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Greek Life ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Monumental Sculpture ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Terracotta Figurines ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Greek World ◽  
Material Form

The phrase “terracotta sculpture” refers to all figurative representations in fired clay produced in Greece and in the Greek world during the first millennium bce, (from the Geometric period to the end of the Hellenistic period), whatever their size (figurine, statuette, or statue), whatever their manufacturing technique (modeling, molding, mixed), whatever their material form (in-the-round, relief, etc.), whatever their representation (anthropomorphic, zoomorphic [real or imaginary], diverse objects), and whatever the limits of their representation: full figure (figurines, statuettes, groups), truncated or abbreviated representations, including protomai, masks, busts, half figures, and anatomical representations, among others. All these objects, with the possible exception of large statues, were the products of artisans who were referred to in ancient texts as “coroplasts,” or modelers of images in clay. Because of this, the term “coroplasty,” or “coroplathy,” has been used to refer to this craft, but also increasingly to all of its products, large and small, while research on this material falls under the rubric of coroplastic studies. Greek terracottas were known to antiquarians from the mid-17th century onward from archaeological explorations in both sanctuary and funerary sites, especially in southern Italy and Sicily. Yet serious scholarly interest in these important representatives of Greek sculpture developed only in the last quarter of the 19th century, when terracotta figurines of the Hellenistic period were unearthed from the cemeteries of Tanagra in Boeotia in the 1870s and Myrina in Asia Minor in the 1880s. These immediately entered the antiquities markets, where their cosmopolitan, secular imagery had a great appeal for collectors and fueled scholarly interest and debate. At the same time, sanctuary deposits containing terracottas also began to be explored, but scholarly attention privileged funerary terracottas because of their better state of preservation. For most of the 20th century, the study of figurative terracottas basically was an art-historical exercise based in iconography and style that remained in the shadow of monumental sculpture. It is only in the last four decades or so that coroplastic studies has developed into an autonomous field of research, with approaches specific to the discipline that consider modalities of production, as well as the religious, social, political, and economic roles that terracottas played in ancient Greek life by means of broad sociological and anthropological approaches. Consequently, this bibliography mainly comprises publications of the last forty years, although old titles that are still essential for research are also included.

Language, ancient philosophy of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Shields
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Natural Languages ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Singular Terms ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Philosophical Argumentation ◽  
Semantic Values ◽  
Independent Inquiry

The earliest interest in language during the ancient Greek period was largely instrumental: presumed facts about language and its features were pressed into service for the purpose of philosophical argumentation. Perhaps inevitably, this activity gave way to the analysis of language for its own sake. Claims, for example, about the relation between the semantic values of general terms and the existence of universals invited independent inquiry into the nature of the meanings of those general terms themselves. Language thus became an object of philosophical inquiry in its own right. Accordingly, philosophers at least from the time of Plato conducted inquiries proper to philosophy of language. They investigated: - how words acquire their semantic values; - how proper names and other singular terms refer; - how words combine to form larger semantic units; - the compositional principles necessary for language understanding; - how sentences, statements, or propositions come to be truth-evaluable; and, among later figures of the classical period, - (6) how propositions, as abstract, mind- and language-independent entities, are to be (a) characterized in terms of their constituents, (b) related to minds and the natural languages used to express them, and (c) related to the language-independent world.

Assisting Pottery Restoration Procedures with Digital Technologies

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ioannis Kalasarinis ◽  
Anestis Koutsoudis
Keyword(s):  
Data Analysis ◽  
Open Source Software ◽  
Shape Matching ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
3D Data ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
3D Digitisation

The fragmentary nature of pottery is considered a common place. Conservators are requested to apply a proper restoration solution by taking under consideration a wide range of morphological features and physicochemical properties that derive from the artefact itself. In this work, the authors discuss on a low-cost pottery-oriented restoration pipeline that is based on the exploitation of technologies such as 3D digitisation, data analysis, processing and printing. The pipeline uses low-cost commercial and open source software tools and on the authors' previously published 3D pose normalisation algorithm that was initially designed for 3D vessel shape matching. The authors objectively evaluate the pipeline by applying it on two ancient Greek vessels of the Hellenistic period. The authors describe in detail the involved procedures such as the photogrammetric 3D digitisation, the 3D data analysis and processing, the 3D printing procedures and the synthetic shreds post processing. They quantify the pipeline's applicability and efficiency in terms of cost, knowledge overhead and other aspects related to restoration tasks.

euergetism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arjan Zuiderhoek
Keyword(s):  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Public Buildings ◽  
Civic Society ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
East And West

Euergetism is the modern scholarly term, derived from the ancient Greek euergetes (benefactor), to denote the phenomenon of elite gift-giving to cities (or to groups within them) in Greek and Roman societies. The term encompasses benefactions by Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors, but is mostly used to refer to the munificence of local civic elites. Recent scholarship stresses the transactional character of euergetism: benefactors donated or contributed to public buildings (including temples), festivals, and games, or they gave distributions of food or money or organized public banquets in exchange for publicly awarded honours: usually including an honorific inscription recording the benefaction and the accolades awarded to the donor in return, often accompanied by a statue of him or her. In Archaic and 5th-century bce Greece, cities mostly honoured foreign benefactors in this way, but from the 4th century bce onward, it became more and more normal for wealthy citizens to donate to their own city in exchange for public honours awarded by their fellow-citizens. Civic euergetism of this type became increasingly common in Greek cities during the Hellenistic period. Its greatest proliferation, however, was under Roman imperial rule during the 1st, 2nd and early 3rd centuries ce, when we have more inscriptions for benefactors in cities in both East and West than ever before. From the mid-3rd century ce onward, civic munificence starts to decline, though benefactions by the wealthy remain an aspect of late antique civic society.

The Greek Kitchen

1962 ◽  
Vol 82 ◽  
pp. 121-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. A. Sparkes
Keyword(s):  
Complete Picture ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek History

The utensils which I am going to describe and discuss in the following pages are the ordinary utensils of Greek, mainly Athenian, households in the classical period; they have been found in abundance, are not special articles and may therefore serve to furnish a fairly complete picture of the classical batterie de cuisine. It is only in the last generation that material has come to hand which enables us to venture some way to understanding the methods of ancient Greek cooking. The Excavations of the Athenian Agora, in which the majority of the cooking pots on plates IV–VIII have been found, have produced evidence for the contents of Greek kitchens in most periods of Greek history, objects for the most part thrown away when broken as the result either of public or of private sacrifices. Rarely, in contrast with Pompeii, are the contents of the kitchen found in the places where they were used. Thus other evidence must be brought forward to supplement the archaeological, and this evidence is of two kinds: literary and artistic. Our literary knowledge of Greek cookery is derived in the main from the quotations preserved by Athenaeus; other authors refer to cookery incidentally and rarely provide a straight description.

Ancient water robotics and Abou-l Iz Al-Jazari

2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 699-709 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zekâi Şen
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Southeastern Part ◽  
Water Power ◽  
12Th Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

Although water resources have been developed throughout the centuries for the service of different civilizations, at different scales and in different regions, their use in automation has been conceived only recently. Research into the history of water from an automation point of view has led to some unknown or hidden facts. Starting from the ancient Greek period before the prophet Christ and after about the 12th century, many researchers tried to make use of water power for working some simple but effective devices for the service of mankind. Among these are the haulage of water from a lower level to a higher elevation by water wheels in order to irrigate agricultural land. Hero during the Hellenistic period and Vitruvius of the Roman Empire were among the first who tried to make use of water power for use in different human activities, such as water haulage, watermills, water clocks, etc. The highlights of these works were achieved by a 12th century Muslim researcher, Abou-l Iz Al-Jazari, who lived in the southeastern part of modern day Turkey. He reviewed all the previous work from different civilizations and then suggested his own designs and devices for the use of water power in automation of excellent types. He even combined animals and water power through early designs of valves, pistons, cylinders and crank mills, as will be explained in this paper. His works were revealed by German historians and engineers in the first quarter of the 19th century. Later, an English engineer translated his book from Arabic into English, revealing the guidelines for modern automation and robotic designs originating from the 12th century. This paper gives a brief summary of the early workers' devices and Abou-l Iz Al-Jazari's much more developed designs with his original hand-drawn pictures.

scholarly journals The Formation of Greek Place-nouns in -εών/-ών

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Emily Barth
Keyword(s):  
Early Stage ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Derivatives Of

This paper sets forth a new theory for the origin of the ancient Greek class of place-noun derivatives characterized by a stem formant that appears as either -ών- or -εών- depending on the dialect. In the classical period and afterward, the stem formant acts as a simple productive suffix that derives place-nouns from noun bases. I propose that these place-nouns were originally formed as further derivatives of derived adjectival bases. Later, but still at a relatively early stage of Greek, the combination of the genitival suffix -ε(ι)ο- and the substantivizing ‘Strabon suffix’ -ō̆n- was reanalyzed as monomorphemic and propagated as a productive unitary formant.

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