The Palace of Minos

Antiquity ◽  
1931 ◽  
Vol 5 (19) ◽  
pp. 315-321
Author(s):  
Percy Gardner

When I acceded to the suggestion of the Editor of ANTIQUITY that I should write a review of the third volume of Sir Arthur Evans’ great work on the palace at Cnossus I was aware of the difficulty of the task I was undertaking. It would of course be quite impossible in a brief article to give any notion of the vast operations which the author has carried through with infinite skill and patience, revealing to us the character of a most curious civilization in Crete, the very existence of which was not suspected until the excavations of Schliemann at Mycenae gave us data. In 1877 I was so much interested by these revelations of the spade that I went to Greece to investigate them, and at Athens Sir Charles Newton and I were shown all the treasures of Mycenae. Newton’s article on them in the Edinburgh Review; and mine in the Quarterly Review, introduced them to English archaeologists, greatly to Schliemann’s satisfaction, as he was openly accused at that centre of scandal, Athens, of having had the rich treasures made by local goldsmiths. And Stephani, perhaps the most learned archaeologist living, was claiming them as the buried spoil of the barbarian invaders of the Roman Empire.Look on this picture and on that! By slow degrees Evans has succeeded in recovering in a great measure the architecture, the art, the manners and customs, the physical type, the religion, of the great civilization of which that revealed at Mycenae was but a late offshoot, a civilization contemporary with the mighty empires of the East, and in some ways more interesting than any of them, since it is more European, more in the line of our civilization and progress.

1967 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 12-22
Author(s):  
Nancy L. Hirschland

Sardis, most famous as the capital of Lydia in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., was also a major Roman city under the Roman empire. The wealth of Croesus had dissipated, but the Roman inhabitants of Sardis again had the good fortune to live in a prosperous time. The fertility of the Hermus plain and its strategic inland position on the road to the Roman east stood the city in good stead. Nowhere among the ruins of Sardis is the opulence of the third century better to be seen than in the rich and elaborate Marble Court of the Roman gymnasium.The Marble Court was first built, along with the gymnasium proper, under Lucius Verus in A.D. 165. At that time it served as an independent unit which was connected with—but did not lead directly into—the gymnasium. It was architecturally a part of the palaestra in front. Then in the early third century (212–213) elaborate additions were made : pavilions adorned three sides of the court, a monumental pedimented gate led into the gymnasium, and on the fourth side a screen colonnade was erected between the Marble Court and the palaestra. From this colonnade have come most of the head-capitals at Sardis (fig. 1).


Author(s):  
Alejandro Nava

This book explores the meaning of “soul” in sacred and profane incarnations, from its biblical origins to its central place in the rich traditions of black and Latin history. Surveying the work of writers, artists, poets, musicians, philosophers, and theologians, the book shows how their understandings of the “soul” revolve around narratives of justice, liberation, and spiritual redemption. The book contends that biblical traditions and hip-hop emerged out of experiences of dispossession and oppression. Whether born in the ghettos of America or of the Roman Empire, hip-hop and Christianity have endured by giving voice to the persecuted. This book offers a view of soul in living color, as a breathing, suffering, dreaming thing.


1985 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-82
Author(s):  
Zia Ul Haq

Amiya Kumar Bagchi, an eminent economist of the modern Cambridge tradition, has produced a timely treatise, in a condensed form, on the development problems of the Third World countries. The author's general thesis is that economic development in the developing societies necessarily requires a radical transformation in the economic, social and political structures. As economic development is actually a social process, economic growth should not be narrowly defined as the growth of the stock of rich capitalists. Neither can their savings be equated to capital formation whose impact on income will presumably 'trickle down' to the working classes. Economic growth strategies must not aim at creating rich elites, because, according to the author, "maximizing the surplus in the hands of the rich in the Third World is not, however, necessarily a way of maximizing the rate of growth".


Author(s):  
James Whitehead

This chapter shows how contemporary reviews of Romantic poetry, and the hostile rhetoric of insanity they used, both stigmatized and popularized the Romantic mad poet. A forensic rhetoric, drawing directly on medical ideas of partial insanity and critical ‘moral management’, was deployed by the periodical press in the first quarter of the nineteenth century—first the quarterlies like the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review, then later new capricious and aggressive magazines such as Blackwood’s, and more quotidian or staid journals—against all of the major Romantic poets. The chapter shows, moreover, how the polemical terms in which Romantic poets were dismissed also held the seeds of their later canonization. The periodical critics, while they used slurs of meaningless insanity to dismiss poetry for political and reactionary ends, also spread the fame of ‘mad genius’, turning a marginalized opinion on the link between creativity and disorder into a cultural phenomenon.


1990 ◽  
Vol 80 ◽  
pp. 74-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Meyer

It is now notorious that the production of inscriptions in the Roman Empire was not constant over time, but rose over the first and second centuries A.D. and fell in the third. Ramsay MacMullen pointed this out more than five years ago, with conclusions more cautionary than explanatory: ‘history is not being written in the right way’, he said, for historians have deduced Rome's decline from evidence that–since it appears only epigraphically–has merely disappeared for its own reasons, or have sought general explanations of decline in theories political, economic, or even demographic in nature, none of which can, in turn, explain the disappearance of epigraphy itself. Why this epigraphic habit rose and fell MacMullen left open to question, although he did postulate control by a ‘sense of audience’. The purpose of this paper is to propose that this ‘sense of audience’ was not generalized or generic, but depended on a belief in the value of romanization, of which (as noted but not explained by MacMullen's article) the epigraphic habit is also a rough indicator. Epitaphs constitute the bulk of all provincial inscriptions and in form and number are (generally speaking) the consequence of a provincial imitation of characteristically Roman practices, an imitation that depended on the belief that Roman legal status and style were important, and that may indeed have ultimately depended, at least in North Africa, on the acquisition or prior possession of that status. Such status-based motivations for erecting an epitaph help to explain not only the chronological distribution of epitaphs but also the differences in the type and distribution of epitaphs in the western and eastern halves of the empire. They will be used here moreover to suggest an explanation for the epigraphic habit as a whole.


1975 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 515-522
Author(s):  
György Adam

The author argues that the so-called oil crisis may open out a new perspective on development aid to the Third World if the oil-producing countries, instead of allowing the giant Western banks and corporations to make a grab for their petro dollars (as the Western nations had so far made a grab for incredibly cheap oil energy), decide to pool the surplus oil revenues for self-help among the Third World countries. He suggests the setting up of an interregional Third World Bank, which, unlike the existing World Bank group (typecast as the instrument of the rich market economies), would be the instrument of the developing countries, thus breaking the monopoly of the West in international financing.


Traditio ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Gillett

Olympiodorus of Thebes is an important figure for the history of late antiquity. The few details of his life preserved as anecdotes in hisHistorygive glimpses of a career which embraced the skills of poet, philosopher, and diplomat. A native of Egypt, he had influence at the imperial court of Constantinople, among the sophists of Athens, and even outside the borders of the empire. HisHistory(more correctly, his “materials for history”) is lost, surviving only as fragments in the narratives of Zosimus, Sozomen, and Philostorgius, and in the rich summary given by the ninth-century Byzantine patriarch Photius. These remains comprise the most substantial narrative sources for events in the western Roman Empire in the early fifth century. Besides its value as a source, theHistoryis important as a monument to the vitality of the belief in the unity of the Roman Empire under the Theodosian dynasty. Olympiodorus wrote in Greek, and knowledge of his work is attested only in Constantinople, yet his political narrative, from 407 to 425, concerns only events in the western half of the empire. To understand the significance of these facts, it is necessary to set the composition of Olympiodorus's work in its proper context. Clarifying the date of publication is the first step toward this goal. Internal and external evidence suggests that the work was written in 440 or soon after, more than a decade later than the date of composition usually accepted. Taken with thematic emphases evident in the structure of theHistory, this revised dating explains why an eastern writer should have written a detailed account of western events in the early part of the century. Olympiodorus's account is a characteristic product of the highly literate class of eastern imperial civil servants, and of their genuine preoccupation with the relationship between the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire at a time when both were threatened by the rise of the new Carthaginian power of the Vandals.


Author(s):  
Kwaku Boamah

The formation of the Christian canon was not a one day venture. Some scholars maintain it spanned from the first up to about the fourth centuries. This paper has three main parts: the first draws a linear process of canon generation, beginning from text to scripture and possibly becoming canonical. The second focuses on the creation of the Christian canon by exploring the stages and the implications of naming the canon as `Testaments`. At the heart of the study is a consideration of the use and inclusion or exclusion of the Jewish scripture by Christians as discussed by a heretic (Marcion) and three Anti-heretics (Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Tertullian) in the 2nd and/or 3rd centuries of the Roman Empire. The third part takes an example of a modern church (Church of Christ) whose reception to the Old Testament is one of skepticism. Furthermore, the level of usage of the Old Testament by the Church of Christ is key for the thesis of this paper. It is, therefore, important to assess a possible relationship between Marcion and the Church of Christ. Historical, theological and an interview are employed to explore these developments. The paper concludes that by the naming of the Christian canon and inclusion of the Jewish scriptures, the Christian identity can be described as Judeo-Christian. This description has impacted Christian formation and development a great deal from antiquity to the modern era. Marcion and his followers did not take this lightly in the first four centuries of the Christian history. On the other hand, in the nineteenth century the Church of Christ seemingly follows this example in antiquity on including the Old Testament as part of the Christian canon.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 127
Author(s):  
Jan-Erik Lane

The new theme of abrupt climate change (“Hawking tipping point”) must be taken up by global coordination – the UNFCCC, IPCC and the G20. The only policy response is to reinforce the COP21 project, and start managing its quick implementation of decarbonisation. A more decisive climate change policy – no coal or charcoal, solar power parks, and possibly carbon capture – may not guarantee the goal of + 2 degrees Celsius, but it may help avoid climate chaos. Only global coordination can break through the resistance of markets in the rich countries and governments in the Third World together with vibrant civil society. The large COP21 Secretariat must become a management agency for rapid decarbonisation with support from other global bodies (WB, IMF) and the G20.


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