These essays examine how various communities remembered and commemorated their shared past through the lens of utopia and its corollary, dystopia, providing a framework for the reinterpretation of ...rapidly changing religious, cultural, and political realities of the turbulent period from 300 to 750 CE. The common theme of the chapters is the utopian ideals of religious groups, whether these are inscribed on the body, on the landscape, in texts, or on other cultural objects. The volume is the first to apply this conceptual framework to Late Antiquity, when historically significant conflicts arose between the adherents of four major religious identities: Greaco-Roman 'pagans', newly dominant Christians; diaspora Jews, who were more or less persecuted, depending on the current regime; and the emerging religion and power of Islam. Late Antiquity was thus a period when dystopian realities competed with memories of a mythical Golden Age, variously conceived according to the religious identity of the group. The contributors come from a range of disciplines, including cultural studies, religious studies, ancient history, and art history, and employ both theoretical and empirical approaches. This volume is unique in the range of evidence it draws upon, both visual and textual, to support the basic argument that utopia in Late Antiquity, whether conceived spiritually, artistically, or politically, was a place of the past but also of the future, even of the afterlife. Memories of Utopia will be of interest to historians, archaeologists, and art historians of the later Roman Empire, and those working on religion in Late Antiquity and Byzantium.
Reseña: de Edward J. Watts, The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea, Oxford, Oxford University Press 2021, 301 pp. ISBN: 9780190076719
The aim of this paper is to provide new data on forest management and arboricultural practices in the Roman and Late Antique periods in the north-eastern Iberian Peninsula. In this study, the ...waterlogged branches found in three wells at the sites of Iesso and Vilauba in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula were analysed. To determine management practices the roundwood method, based on the correlation between age and diameter, has been applied. The study has revealed the presence of a wide range of species collected on surrounding forests, especially in riparian forest. Moreover, it is remarkable the abundance of fruit trees at both sites, being the most abundant Prunus sp. The comparison of the archaeological branches with a reference collection of modern twigs from cultivated and non-managed individuals of the Prunaceae family, Salix sp. and Sambucus nigra, has provided clear evidence of management practices in these taxa. In addition, direct evidence of pruning was observed on some branches of Vitis vinifera.
En el presente artículo se analizan las transformaciones que, a partir del siglo IV, experimentan los obispos cristianos por su estrecha vinculación con el poder imperial: si en un principio ...Constantino quiso ponerlos a su servicio como estrechos colaboradores en la administración del Imperio, pronto algunos de ellos, con gran personalidad, se sirvieron de los honores y privilegios adquiridos para reclamar una independencia allí donde — a diferencia de lo que sucederá en Constantinopla a partir de Teodosio I— su elección no dependía del emperador.
The last century of archaeological exploration has brought to light many late antique villae (mid-3rd – early-5th centuries CE), and much has been made of the ways these sites visually reinforce the ...increasingly fraught patron-client relations that characterize the late antique world in scholarship. My paper challenges these assumptions, using material evidence to illustrate a more complex, symbiotic relationship between late antique villae and the rus. The late Roman countryside was stratified, but to presume an especially oppressive relationship between estates and rural populations is to perpetuate synthesis of this period as synonymous with decline, and to disregard more nuanced evidence in the archaeological record. I discuss cult structures on three estates in the Ebro River Valley in ancient Tarraconensis (Spain) to argue that villae courted and catered to sub-elite rural population groups, who were themselves receptive to such offerings. By highlighting these interdependencies, this paper aims to bring greater contour to our understanding of the mechanisms animating the provincial countryside in late antiquity.
In this paper, I propose to explore the reasons why fourth and fifth century Neoplatonic philosophers visited shrines and manifested their traditional devotion in the face of the expansion of ...Christianity. I will focus on the role and significance of shrines and statues for Neoplatonist philosophers, trying to highlight the religious and philosophical response to the socio-cultural changes taking place.
"Written forms of Arabic composed during the era of the Ottoman Empire present an immensely fruitful linguistic topic. Extant texts display a proximity to the vernacular that cannot be encountered in ...any other surviving historical Arabic material, and thus provide unprecedented access to Arabic language history. This rich material remains very little explored. Traditionally, scholarship on Arabic has focussed overwhelmingly on the literature of the various Golden Ages between the 8th and 13th centuries, whereas texts from the 15th century onwards have often been viewed as corrupted and not worthy of study. The lack of interest in Ottoman Arabic culture and literacy left these sources almost completely neglected in university courses. This volume is the first linguistic work to focus exclusively on varieties of Christian, Jewish and Muslim Arabic in the Ottoman Empire of the 15th to the 20th centuries, and present Ottoman Arabic material in a didactic and easily accessible way. Split into a Handbook and a Reader section, the book provides a historical introduction to Ottoman literacy, translation studies, vernacularisation processes, language policy and linguistic pluralism. The second part contains excerpts from more than forty sources, edited and translated by a diverse network of scholars. The material presented includes a large number of yet unedited texts, such as Christian Arabic letters from the Prize Paper collections, mercantile correspondence and notebooks found in the Library of Gotha, and Garshuni texts from archives of Syriac patriarchs."
The paper deals with the study of roads in the region of Lim river valley ranging from late antiquity to the beginning of the Ottoman period. In late antiquity, the Lim valley did not have a primary ...hub for the transportation of people and goods. This changed in the Middle Ages when the Lim valley became a transit point through which roads and merchants from Primorje (Dubrovnik and Kotor) passed through to the centers of the Serbian medieval state (Ras and Novo Brdo). In this paper the continuity and discontinuity of this movement through the Lim river valley will be discussed.
La identificación de la muralla tardoantigua de Italica y de su trazado, en el tramo norte de la ciudad, se produjo a inicios de la década de los años noventa del siglo pasado, gracias a las ...prospecciones geofísicas que en ese momento se llevaron a cabo en la Nova Urbs italicense. Posteriormente, se han efectuado nuevas prospecciones geofísicas que han permitido ajustar los datos de las iniciales, en concreto en el ángulo noroeste del recinto amurallado. Finalmente, la excavación arqueológica de ese ángulo noroeste ha permitido conocer las características constructivas de la cerca y contar con indicios cronológicos en relación con el momento de su construcción.
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