You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The purpose of this volume is to identify and analyze the mechanisms and processes through which concepts and institutions of transcultural phenomena gain and are given momentum. Applied to a range of cases, including examples drawn from ancient Greece and modern India, the early modern Portuguese presence in China and politics of elite-mass dynamics in the People’s Republic of China, the book provides a template for the study of transcultural dynamics over time. Besides the epochal range, the papers in this volume illustrate the thematic diversity assembled under the umbrella of the Heidelberg Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context.” Drawing from both the humanities and social sciences, stretching across several world areas and centuries, the book is an interdisciplinary work, aptly reflected in the collaboration of its editors: a historian and political scientist.
Examine the ancient Greek world through expertly designed maps and site drawings, bringing history to life.
From about 2000 BCE onward, Egypt served as an important nexus for cultural exchange in the eastern Mediterranean, importing and exporting not just wares but also new artistic techniques and styles. Egyptian, Greek, and Roman craftsmen imitated one another’s work, creating cultural and artistic hybrids that transcended a single tradition. Yet in spite of the remarkable artistic production that resulted from these interchanges, the complex vicissitudes of exchange between Egypt and the Classical world over the course of nearly 2500 years have not been comprehensively explored in a major exhibition or publication in the United States. It is precisely this aspect of Egypt’s history, however...
In The Egyptian Elite as Roman Citizens Giorgia Cafici offers the analysis of private, male portrait sculptures as attested in Egypt between the end of the Ptolemaic and the beginning of the Roman Period. Ptolemaic/Early Roman portraits are examined using a combination of detailed stylistic evaluation, philological analysis of the inscriptions and historical and prosopographical investigation of the individuals portrayed. The emergence of this type of sculpture has been contextualised, both geographically and chronologically, as it belongs to a wider Mediterranean horizon. The analysis has revealed that eminent members of the Egyptian elite decided to be represented in an innovative way, echoing the portraits of eminent Romans of the Late Republic, whose identity was surely known in Egypt.
In Individuals and Materials in the Greco-Roman Cults of Isis Valentino Gasparini and Richard Veymiers present a collection of reflections on the individuals and groups which animated one of Antiquity’s most dynamic, significant and popular religious phenomena: the reception of the cults of Isis and other Egyptian gods throughout the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. These communities, whose members seem to share the same religious identity, for a long time have been studied in a monolithic way through the prism of the Cumontian category of the “Oriental religions”. The 26 contributions of this book, divided into three sections devoted to the “agents”, their “images” and their “practices”, shed new light on this religious movement that appears much more heterogeneous and colorful than previously recognized.
This volume consists consists of forty contributions written by an internationally renowned selection of scholars. The authors adopt an interdisciplinary methodology, examining both literary and archaeological sources, and a comparative perspective that transgresses national, chronological, and cultural boundaries, in order to investigate the nature of the links between text and image. This multifaceted approach to the study of ancient artifacts enables the authors to treat art and artistic production as activities that do not merely mirror social or cultural relationships but rather, and more significantly, as activities that create social and cultural relationships. The essays in this book are motivated by their authors' belief that there is no simple direct link between art and myths, art and text, or art and ritual, and that art should not be delegated to the role of a by-product of a literate culture. Instead, the contextual and symbolic analyses of artifacts and representations offered in this volume elucidate how art actively shaped myth, how it changed texts, how it transformed ritual, and how it altered the course of local, regional, and Mediterranean histories.
Presenting dynamic research, this publication explores two millennia of cultural interactions between Egypt, Greece, and Rome. From Mycenaean weaponry found among the cargo of a Bronze Age shipwreck off the Turkish coast to the Egyptian-inspired domestic interiors of a luxury villa built in Greece during the Roman Empire, Egypt and the Classical World documents two millennia of cultural and artistic interconnectedness in the ancient Mediterranean. This volume gathers pioneering research from the Getty scholars' symposium that helped shape the major international loan exhibition Beyond the Nile: Egypt and the Classical World (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018). Generously illustrated essays consider...
Abundantly illustrated, this essential volume examines depictions of the Underworld in southern Italian vase painting and explores the religious and cultural beliefs behind them. What happens to us when we die? What might the afterlife look like? For the ancient Greeks, the dead lived on, overseen by Hades in the Underworld. We read of famous sinners, such as Sisyphus, forever rolling his rock, and the fierce guard dog Kerberos, who was captured by Herakles. For mere mortals, ritual and religion offered possibilities for ensuring a happy existence in the beyond, and some of the richest evidence for beliefs about death comes from southern Italy, where the local Italic peoples engaged with Gre...
"This volume investigates the integral role of heroes in ancient Greek art and culture. More than a hundred statues, reliefs, vases, bronzes, coins, and gems drawn from European and American collections, illustrate the ways in which heroes were represented, why they were important in Greek culture, and what encouraged individuals to seek them out." --Book Jacket.