City Walls in Late Antiquity Intagliata, Emanuele; Barker, Simon J; Courault, Christopher
2020, 2020-06-30
eBook
The construction of urban defences was one of the hallmarks of the late Roman and late-antique periods (300-600 AD) throughout the western and eastern empire. City walls were the most significant ...construction projects of their time and they redefined the urban landscape. Their appearance and monumental scale, as well as the cost of labour and material, are easily comparable to projects from the High Empire; however, urban circuits provided late-antique towns with a new means of self-representation. While their final appearance and construction techniques varied greatly, the cost involved and the dramatic impact that such projects had on the urban topography of late-antique cities mark city walls as one of the most important urban initiatives of the period.To-date, research on city walls in the two halves of the empire has highlighted chronological and regional variations, enabling scholars to rethink how and why urban circuits were built and functioned in Late Antiquity. Although these developments have made a significant contribution to the understanding of late-antique city walls, studies are often concerned with one single monument/small group of monuments or a particular region, and the issues raised do not usually lead to a broader perspective, creating an artificial divide between east and west. It is this broader understanding that this book seeks to provide.The volume and its contributions arise from a conference held at the British School at Rome and the Swedish Institute of Classical Studies in Rome on June 20-21, 2018. It includes articles from world-leading experts in late-antique history and archaeology and is based around important themes that emerged at the conference, such as construction, spolia-use, late-antique architecture, culture and urbanism, empire-wide changes in Late Antiquity, and the perception of this practice by local inhabitants.
Sicily has been the fulcrum of the Mediterranean throughout history. The island’s central geographical position and its status as ancient Rome’s first overseas province make it key to understanding ...the development of the Roman Empire. Yet Sicily’s crucial role in the empire has been largely overlooked by scholars of classical antiquity, apart from a small number of specialists in its archaeology and material culture. Urbanism and Empire in Roman Sicily offers the first comprehensive English-language overview of the history and archaeology of Roman Sicily since R. J. A. Wilson’s Sicily under the Roman Empire (1990). Laura Pfuntner traces the development of cities and settlement networks in Sicily in order to understand the island’s political, economic, social, and cultural role in Rome’s evolving Mediterranean hegemony. She identifies and examines three main processes traceable in the archaeological record of settlement in Roman Sicily: urban disintegration, urban adaptation, and the development of alternatives to urban settlement. By expanding the scope of research on Roman Sicily beyond the bounds of the island itself, through comparative analysis of the settlement landscapes of Greece and southern Italy, and by utilizing exciting evidence from recent excavations and surveys, Pfuntner establishes a new empirical foundation for research on Roman Sicily and demonstrates the necessity of including Sicily in broader historical and archaeological studies of the Roman Empire.
Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography contains 11 articles on how the Ancient Roman historians used, and manipulated, the past. Key themes include the impact of autocracy, the nature of ...intertextuality, and the frontiers between history and other genres.
Principles of Decoration in the Roman World explores the manner in which architectural settings and action contexts influenced the perception of decorative elements in Roman culture. By examining the ...relationship between viewer, setting and medium through the lens of decor, the Roman concept of appropriateness, the papers in this volume shed new light on the decorative principles employed across Roman Italy and beyond.
Prevalent among classicists today is the notion that Greeks, Romans, and Jews enhanced their own self-perception by contrasting themselves with the so-called Other--Egyptians, Phoenicians, ...Ethiopians, Gauls, and other foreigners--frequently through hostile stereotypes, distortions, and caricature. In this provocative book, Erich Gruen demonstrates how the ancients found connections rather than contrasts, how they expressed admiration for the achievements and principles of other societies, and how they discerned--and even invented--kinship relations and shared roots with diverse peoples.
Gruen shows how the ancients incorporated the traditions of foreign nations, and imagined blood ties and associations with distant cultures through myth, legend, and fictive histories. He looks at a host of creative tales, including those describing the founding of Thebes by the Phoenician Cadmus, Rome's embrace of Trojan and Arcadian origins, and Abraham as ancestor to the Spartans. Gruen gives in-depth readings of major texts by Aeschylus, Herodotus, Xenophon, Plutarch, Julius Caesar, Tacitus, and others, in addition to portions of the Hebrew Bible, revealing how they offer richly nuanced portraits of the alien that go well beyond stereotypes and caricature.
Providing extraordinary insight into the ancient world, this controversial book explores how ancient attitudes toward the Other often expressed mutuality and connection, and not simply contrast and alienation.
Morality is one of the fundamental structures of any society, enabling complex groups to form, negotiate their internal differences and persist through time. In the first book-length study of Roman ...popular morality, Dr Morgan argues that we can recover much of the moral thinking of people across the Empire. Her study draws on proverbs, fables, exemplary stories and gnomic quotations, to explore how morality worked as a system for Roman society as a whole and in individual lives. She examines the range of ideas and practices and their relative importance, as well as questions of authority and the relationship with high philosophy and the ethical vocabulary of documents and inscriptions. The Roman Empire incorporated numerous overlapping groups, whose ideas varied according to social status, geography, gender and many other factors. Nevertheless it could and did hold together as an ethical community, which was a significant factor in its socio-political success.
Despite the effective National Immunization Programme of Slovakia, some population groups are incompletely vaccinated or unvaccinated. We aimed to describe the measles outbreak spread in Eastern ...Slovakia between May and October 2018, affecting the Roma communities in relation to the existing immunity gaps.
We defined a group of persons living in socially closed communities with low vaccination coverage.
Of 439 measles cases (median age: 10 years), 264 (60.1%) were vaccinated, 137 (31.2%) received two doses and 127 (28.9%) one dose of measles vaccines, 155 (35.3%) were unvaccinated and 20 (4.6%) had an unknown vaccination status. Samples from 102 patients (with two-dose vaccination status) were additionally tested for antibodies against rubella and mumps. Of 102 cases, 68 (66.7%) cases had a positive IgM and 23 (22.5 %) IgG antibodies against measles. For rubella, only 20 (19.6%) cases had seropositive IgG levels, for mumps higher positivity was detected in 60 persons (58.8%). We could detect only a small percentage with positive serology results of rubella IgG antibodies across all age groups. We have assumed that rubella antibodies had to be produced following the vaccination. Their absence in the cases with two doses of MMR suggests that these vaccines could not have been administrated despite the fact that this data was included in the medical records. Sequential analysis of two samples showed measles genotype B3.
This outbreak can outline the existence of a vulnerable group of the Roma. Low vaccinate coverage represents a serious public health threat.
U radu se nastoji prikazati dio povijesti Roma na početku 15. st., za vrijeme njihovih migracija s prostora Balkana u srednju i zapadnu Europu. Za vrijeme migriranja, odnosno naseljavanja šireg ...europskog prostora, Romi su se najčešće predstavljali kao hodočasnici, preobraćenici s islama ili vršitelji pokore. Razdoblje je to relativno tolerantnog odnosa domicilnog stanovništva prema Romima, koji su na svojim putovanjima dobivali pisma preporuke, a koja su im omogućavala slobodu kretanja na području pod vlašću vladara koji je izdao propusnicu. Jedan od vladara koji je izdavao propusnice Romima bio je i car Sigismund Luksemburški.
PDF
