"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 subject of this book is the discourse of persecution used by Christians in Late Antiquity (c. 300-700 CE).
Through a series of detailed case studies covering the full chronological and ...geographical span of the period, this book investigates how the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity changed the way that Christians and para-Christians perceived the hostile treatments they received, either by fellow Christians or by people of other religions. A closely related second goal of this volume is to encourage scholars to think more precisely about the terminological difficulties related to the study of persecution. Indeed, despite sustained interest in the subject, few scholars have sought to distinguish between such closely related concepts as punishment, coercion, physical violence, and persecution. Often, these terms are used interchangeably. Although there are no easy answers, an emphatic conclusion of the studies assembled in this volume is that "persecution" was a malleable rhetorical label in late antique discourse, whose meaning shifted depending on the viewpoint of the authors who used it.
This leads to our third objective: to analyze the role and function played by rhetoric and polemic in late antique claims to be persecuted. Late antique Christian writers who cast their present as a repetition of past persecutions often aimed to attack the legitimacy of the dominant Christian faction through a process of othering. This discourse also expressed a polarizing worldview in order to strengthen the group identity of the writers' community in the midst of ideological conflicts and to encourage steadfastness against the temptation to collaborate with the other side.
•First isotopic study on North African late antique mobility; Bulla Regia case study.•7 out of 22 late antique individuals nonlocal; 4 out of 5 comparative Romans local.•Nonlocals could have ...originated in northern Tunisia, hence regional mobility.•Inter-regional mobility from warmer areas possible for some individuals.•First published values for bioavailable 87Sr/86Sr in northern Tunisia.
This paper represents the first isotopic study on late antique human mobility in North Africa, using the urban site of Bulla Regia in Tunisia as a case study. We also present the first values for bioavailable 87Sr/86Sr in northern Tunisia, analysing 63 plant and snail samples, as well as a simple method for the pre-processing of plants in the field to facilitate their export. Bulla Regia was a prominent Roman and late antique town situated on an important axis of transport and communication in North Africa and is therefore an ideal site to explore mobility in the region during this time period. Strontium (87Sr/86Sr) and oxygen (δ18OCarb) isotopic analysis of 22 late antique individuals from a Christian church and cemetery identified at least seven or eight non-locals, while comparative analysis of five Roman individuals from a funerary enclosure on the same site classified all but one of them as potential locals. Most non-local individuals exhibit 87Sr/86Sr values that match various areas of northern Tunisia, which supports regional mobility rather than long-distance migration, although when combined with the oxygen results, inter-regional mobility from an area with a warmer climate may be hypothesised for some individuals. Examination of the spatial distribution of non-local individuals in their cemetery setting reveals that they were privileged individuals, thus they may reflect the mobility of wealthier town-dwellers in late antiquity, particularly perhaps along the Carthage-Hippo route.
This volume is the fruit of a highly productive international research gathering academic and professional (field- and museum) colleagues to discuss new results and approaches, recent finds and ...alternative theoretical assessments of the period of transition and transformation of classical towns in Late Antiquity. Experts from an array of modern countries attended and presented to help compare and contrast critically archaeologies of diverse regions and to debate the qualities of the archaeology and the current modes of study. While a number of papers inevitably focused on evidence available for both Spain and Portugal, we were delighted to have a spread of contributions that extended the picture to other territories in the Late Roman West and Mediterranean. The emphasis was very much on the images presented by archaeology (rescue and research works, recent and past), but textual data were also brought into play by various contributors.
Drawing on a letter from Late Antiquity explaining the difficulties experienced by a performer who recently converted to Christianity, the article explores the religious, juridical, and literary ...perspectives required to read this kind of source. By analysing the Christian polemic against theatrical performance and the Christian anthropology of choreutic gesture, it underlines that the connotation attributed to the profession of actor/dancer/performer inevitably conflicted with the entire Christian theoretical framework of performance, which only allowed forms of exhibition in which men acted on the world’s stage before God. Consequently, anyone who converted to Christianity had to stop practising the profession forthwith because members of the vita scaenica belonged to another reality excluded from the Christianised Platonic framework of the choreia.
This article analyses the ways in which portraits were associated with religious and sacred ideas and concepts in late antique Rome. Rather than straightforward, the identification of a visual ...representation of an individual as sacred was subject to discussion and controversy, as the definition of these categories shifted and different agents became involved in the process. Portraits show that rather than immanent to an image, categories such as sacred or religious could be appropriated through portraits, influencing the standing of the person commemorated as well as the relationship between sacred and profane.
In early Christian art, the image of the cross only began appearing on sarcophagi or in the monumental decoration of Roman churches in the mid-fourth century. After having been considered a sign of ...infamy, it became a symbol of victory, a “trophy cross” during the reign of Emperor Constantine. In the fifth century, the instrument of torture was clearly represented and often covered with a splendid decoration of precious stones. In the Early Middle Ages, it continued to occupy a predominant place in iconography and was one of the most popular motifs in the decoration of sarcophagi from the late fifth to the early eighth century in Gaul. It is sculpted alone or as part of more complex compositions on the coffins or lids. In order to understand the choices that governed the elaboration of the various compositions of the cross depicted on these tombs, it is necessary to refer to the formulas proposed in the iconography of the Constantinian period. The study of the crosses on Merovingian sarcophagi will make it possible to highlight the legacy of the models of Late Antiquity and the contribution of the Merovingian patrons themselves.
(a) Ensemble of 15 slightly different Northern Hemisphere summer temperature reconstructions from 0 to 2016 CE, together with their mean and median (orange and red), and a closer look into ...temperature changes at the onset of the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA) between 530 and 550 CE. (b) Location of 23 sampling sites of 20 different species from ten genera in both hemispheres (see Table 1 for details), separated into 12 high-latitude sites <580 m asl and 11 high-elevation sites between 1900 and 3800 m asl (triangles and circles), with individual symbol sizes referring to 1–16 core or disc samples per site. (c) The three main wood anatomical responses to abrupt summer cooling: a Blue Ring (lack of cell wall lignification), Frost Ring (cell deformation) and Light Ring (reduced cell formation), formed in 536 CE by larch (Larix sibirica), pine (Pinus balfouriana) and larch (Larix sibirica) trees in the Altai, Arizona, and Yamal, respectively. (d) Temporal distribution of Blue Rings (BRs), Frost Rings (FRs) and Light Rings (LRs) between 530 and 550 CE.
Display omitted
Linked to major volcanic eruptions around 536 and 540 CE, the onset of the Late Antique Little Ice Age has been described as the coldest period of the past two millennia. The exact timing and spatial extent of this exceptional cold phase are, however, still under debate because of the limited resolution and geographical distribution of the available proxy archives. Here, we use 106 wood anatomical thin sections from 23 forest sites and 20 tree species in both hemispheres to search for cell-level fingerprints of ephemeral summer cooling between 530 and 550 CE. After cross-dating and double-staining, we identified 89 Blue Rings (lack of cell wall lignification), nine Frost Rings (cell deformation and collapse), and 93 Light Rings (reduced cell wall thickening) in the Northern Hemisphere. Our network reveals evidence for the strongest temperature depression between mid-July and early-August 536 CE across North America and Eurasia, whereas more localised cold spells occurred in the summers of 532, 540–43, and 548 CE. The lack of anatomical signatures in the austral trees suggests limited incursion of stratospheric volcanic aerosol into the Southern Hemisphere extra-tropics, that any forcing was mitigated by atmosphere-ocean dynamical responses and/or concentrated outside the growing season, or a combination of factors. Our findings demonstrate the advantage of wood anatomical investigations over traditional dendrochronological measurements, provide a benchmark for Earth system models, support cross-disciplinary studies into the entanglements of climate and history, and question the relevance of global climate averages.
The article aims to analyze some historiographical and methodological aspects of the study of polytheisms in Late Antiquity. Recent research has somewhat neglected the internal mechanisms of late ...antique polytheisms. Interpreted simply as residual in an Empire watching the “triumph of Christianity”, studies have continued to project on the polytheistic cults of the fourth and fifth centuries CE the new conception of religion that Christian authors were constructing as an autonomous sphere from the political and social life of the ancient city. Against this backdrop, we focus on some historiographical tendencies that have contributed to the interpretation of late antique polytheisms. Such tendencies include the alleged spread of a soteriological anxiety due to the crises that would have crossed the empire, the individualization of religious practices, the spiritualization of the cult, and the ritualization of philosophical activity. The analysis of the different cases encourages a change of paradigm, which takes into account the plurality of rites, agents, and historical contexts without homologizing them all into an alleged “paganism” that would have eventually been defeated by Christianity.
Textual practices in pre-modern societies cover a great range of representations, from the literary to the pictorial. Among the most intriguing are synopses and lists. While lists provide a complete ...enumeration of ideas, people, events, or terms, synopses juxtapose one against the other. To understand how they were planned, produced, and consumed, is to gain insight into the practices of what one can call management of knowledge in a time before our own. The present volume is the product of two workshops held in 2019 and 2021 as part of the research focus Textual Practices in the Pre-Modern World: Texts and Ideas between Aksum, Constantinople, and Baghdad, which was generously supported and funded by the Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU), Munich. Aiming to understand how synopses and lists function in the literatures of the great intellectual traditions of late antiquity—the ancient Near East, ancient philosophy, and the three monotheistic religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the volume offers a historical and transcultural perspective on synopses and lists, highlighting the centrality of these textual practices to allow storing, retrieving, selecting, and organising this knowledge. Both make deliberate – yet not always explicit – choices as to what is included and excluded, thereby creating lasting hierarchies and canons.
PDF
