scholarly journals The earliest Buddhist shrine: excavating the birthplace of the Buddha, Lumbini (Nepal)

Antiquity ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 87 (338) ◽  
pp. 1104-1123 ◽  
Author(s):  
R.A.E. Coningham ◽  
K.P. Acharya ◽  
K.M. Strickland ◽  
C.E. Davis ◽  
M.J. Manuel ◽  
...  

Key locations identified with the lives of important religious founders have often been extensively remodelled in later periods, entraining the destruction of many of the earlier remains. Recent UNESCO-sponsored work at the major Buddhist centre of Lumbini in Nepal has sought to overcome these limitations, providing direct archaeological evidence of the nature of an early Buddhist shrine and a secure chronology. The excavations revealed a sequence of early structures preceding the major rebuilding by Asoka during the third century BC. The sequence of durable brick architecture supplanting non-durable timber was foreseen by British prehistorian Stuart Piggott when he was stationed in India over 70 years ago. Lumbini provides a rare and valuable insight into the structure and character of the earliest Buddhist shrines.

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-62
Author(s):  
José Antonio Molina Gómez ◽  
Héctor Uroz Rodríguez ◽  
José Ángel Munera Martínez

En el presente artículo los autores estudian las tradiciones hagiográficas sobre los mártires del siglo III Vicente y Leto, quienes murieron en Libisosa (Lezuza, Albacete). El estudio se centra en la relación entre tradiciones martirológicas, la evidencia arqueológica y las tradiciones locales. Escritores modernos como Higuera y Requena podrían haber usado fuentes antiguas para (re)escribir la historia de Vicente y Leto. De acuerdo con la tradición local ambos fueron ejecutados en un lugar llamado hoy en día Vallejo de los Santos, en las inmediaciones de Lezuza, donde habría sido levantado un templo para rendirles culto. In the following article, the authors study the hagiographic tradition of the Third Century Christian Martyrs Vicente and Leto, both of which died in Libisosa (Lezuza, Albacete). Said study shall focus upon the link between the matyrological tradition, archaeological evidence and local traditions. Modern writers such as Higuera or Requena may well have employed these ancient sources while (re)writing the history of Vicente and Leto. According to local tradition, both were executed in a place now called Vallejo de los Santos, in the outskirts of Lezuza, where a temple would have been built for their worship.


2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Matherne

AbstractIn theCritique of Pure Reason, Kant describes schematism as a ‘hidden art in the depths of the human soul’ (A141/B180–1). While most commentators treat this as Kant's metaphorical way of saying schematism is something too obscure to explain, I argue that we should follow up Kant's clue and treat schematism literally asKunst. By letting our interpretation of schematism be guided by Kant's theoretically exact ways of using the termKunstin theCritique of Judgmentwe gain valuable insight into the nature of schematism, as well as its connection to Kant's concerns in the thirdCritique.


Author(s):  
Andrew Wilson

This chapter summarizes the archaeological evidence currently known for Roman water-mills, tracing the development and spread of water-powered grain milling over time across the Roman Empire. Problems of quantification and evidence bias, both documentary and archaeological, are addressed. In particular, it is argued that large discoidal millstones, formerly thought to derive either from animal-powered or water-powered mills, must come from water-mills, and that the idea of Roman animal-driven mills with discoidal millstones is a myth. This dramatically increases the amount of evidence available for water-powered grain milling, although very unevenly spread across the empire, and heavily dependent on the intensity of research in particular regions—good for Britain, parts of France, and Switzerland; poor everywhere else. The chapter also summarizes the state of knowledge on other applications of water-power—for ore-crushing machines at hard-rock gold and silver mines (by the first century AD), trip-hammers, tanning and fulling mills, and marble sawing (by the third century AD). The picture is fast-changing and the body of evidence continues to grow with new archaeological discoveries. The chapter ends with some thoughts about the place of water-power in the overall economy of the Roman world, and on the transmission of water-powered technologies between the Roman and medieval periods.


Early China ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 301-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Riegel

The dispute over whether burial rites should be frugal or lavish is a prominent feature of late Zhou philosophical literature. It originated with Mozi's attack on ritual and then continued unabated as the Ru and Mo schools argued the issue and hurled epithets at each other. The two Lüshi chunqiu chapters “Jiesang” and “Ansi” represent the arguments in favor of moderation in the middle of the third century B.C. While the chapters clearly owe their overall position to their Mohist forebears, they nonetheless ignore or reject several arguments that are central to the Mozi. Nowhere in them do we see, for example, Mozi's urgent call for the conservation of resources. On the other hand, they embrace Ruist concepts, most prominently the innate feeling of loyalty and concern that the Mengzi claims mourners have for their deceased relatives. The Lüshi chunqiu justifies its arguments by pointing to changing social realities, most notably an uncontrollable epidemic of grave robbery. Other features of style of disputation in the Lüshi chunqiu can be traced to the text7s attempts to blend together harmoniously what were originally conflicting points of view. None of the sources in the debate provides much insight into ancient conceptions of death and the afterlife. The elaborate architecture and rich furnishings of tombs excavated in the last several decades are not so much a contradiction of arguments in favor of moderation as they are testimony of a system of religious belief not at all reflected in philosophical literature.


2008 ◽  
Vol 88 ◽  
pp. 37-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine Bayley ◽  
Andy Russel

Mercury gilding is a well-known decorative technique that was applied to both silver and a range of copper alloys from the third century AD until the introduction of electroplating in the nineteenth century. The process is well understood but, until recently, there has been no good archaeological evidence for it. Excavations in Southampton have discovered two rather different objects that were used to produce gold-mercury amalgam, the first stage in mercury gilding. One is a block of stone and the other a reused amphora sherd. The stone comes from a ninth-century context, while the amphora sherd's findspot is less well dated: it could have been reused in the late Roman or the Saxon period.


2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 183-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patryk Chudzik

The recent works in the 2017 season at the North Asasif Necropolis have led to the discovery of Middle Kingdom burial assemblages, as well as funerary equipment dated to the Third Intermediate Period. Besides the cleaning work conducted in the funerary complex of Meru revealed more materials from the Late Roman Era, which proves the existence of the coptic hermitage inside the tomb. This new archaeological evidence provides an important insight into the development of the North Asasif Necropolis during the Pharaonic era and in later periods. The fourth season of the archaeological fieldwork at the site focused on seven Middle Kingdom funerary complexes: tomb of Khety (TT 311), MMA 509, MMA 511, MMA 512, MMA 514, MMA 515 and tomb of Meru (TT 240).


2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-51
Author(s):  
Bryan Geoffrey Levman

The Buddha considered names of things and people to be arbitrary designations, with their meaning created by agreement. The early suttas show clearly that inter alia, names, perceptions, feelings, thinking, conceptions and mental proliferations were all conditioned dhammas which, when their nature is misunderstood, led to the creation of a sense of ‘I’, as well as craving, clinging and afflictions. Although names were potentially afflictive and ‘had everything under their power’ (N?ma Sutta), this did not mean that they were to be ignored or even neglected; words were to be penetrated and thoroughly understood, as an essential instrument for liberation. One of the problems of transmitting the Buddha’s teachings was the large number of disciples who did not speak an Indo-Aryan language as their first language or spoke a dialect different from that of the Teacher. This also led to altered transmission of the Vinaya and Suttas by disciples who could not hear certain phonological distinctions not present in their own language or dialect. Hundreds of these anomalies are preserved in the different editions of the canon, testifying to these transmission ambiguities. The passages dealing with this problem provide a valuable insight into the phonological issues that the early sa?gha had to deal with to try and preserve the integrity of the s?sana. At the same time the etymological practices of Brahmanism were imported into Buddhism very early, probably from the time of the Buddha himself, to demonstrate the intellectual superiority of the Buddha and his teachings. Despite the Buddha’s teachings on the arbitrary nature of language, the commentarial and grammatical traditions developed a sophisticated theoretical framework to analyse, explicate and reinforce some of the key Buddhist doctrinal terms. Also, an elaborate classification system of different types of names (n?man) was developed, to show that the language of the Buddha was firmly grounded in saccika??ha, the highest truth, and that some terms were spontaneously arisen (opap?tika), even though such a concept — that words by themselves could arise spontaneously and directly embody ultimate truth — was quite foreign to their Founder.


Ramus ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaś Elsner

The 20 poems collected together as thelithikaof Posidippus, the first surviving poems on a papyrus roll only published in 2001 and dating from the third century BCE, offer a range of spectacular new evidence for a series of issues in Hellenistic history, art and literature. The standard view is that Posidippus was probably author of all the epigrams in the roll known as P. Mil. Vogl. VIII 309, although this has been contested and by no means need certainly be the case. For my purposes here, I do assume that the interconnected poetics of the poems in thelithikado imply a single poet who is quite likely to be Posidippus, since poem 15—independently anthologised in antiquity and known through a manuscript tradition—was attributed to Posidippus in the twelfth century by the Byzantine poet and grammarian John Tzetzes. Historically speaking, the fact that so many of these poems focus on gems from the east gives remarkable insight into the interchange between Hellenistic and Achaemenid cultures: specifically, they signal the prestige of treasures from the east in the Hellenistic courts. In the history of collections, they represent a very early example of exoticism in elite collecting, of the accumulation of valuables in what we may assume was a royal and non-sacredSchatzkammer, of the need for an aesthetic response (in this case through short poems) to ‘label’ and valorise the precious items in the collection. In the history of ancientWissenschaft, the poems’ use of late Classical gem-lore (exemplified in texts like theOn Stonesof Theophrastus) offers a vivid instance of the ways theoretical knowledge circulated at least in elite contexts around the royal circle.


Antichthon ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 191-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Edwell

AbstractIt is generally agreed that during the first century BC the Euphrates River came to represent a negotiated boundary of Roman and Parthian power in the Near East, and that this remained the case until the overthrow of the Parthians by the Sassanians in the third century AD. It was during the first century BC that the term imperium began to be used in the context of expressions of corporate Roman power; this eventually saw an additional important usage of the term evolve to that of an expression of physical territory, that is, empire, by the end of the reign of Augustus. This paper argues that it is possible to link the development of the Euphrates as a boundary of Roman and Parthian power in the first century BC with developments and changes in the usage of the term imperium. It traces the history of Roman and Parthian agreements and conflicts throughout the first century BC in the context of the development of the Euphrates as a boundary. The paper also argues that only the upper section of the Euphrates came to play this role and that previous analyses of the middle Euphrates have produced a misleading understanding of Roman and Parthian activity on this section of the river. The analysis of archaeological evidence from the first centuries BC and AD from the middle Euphrates site of Dura Europos is employed to illuminate the analysis of the Euphrates as a boundary. We arrive at a better understanding of Dura's history during this period if we considert Dura in the broader context of the Euphrates’ role in dividing Roman and Parthian power.


Author(s):  
Joan E. Taylor

The first Christian archaeological evidence in Palestine dates from the third century, in the so-called Megiddo church. From 326 onward, Palestine was the focus of imperial funding, and grand basilicas were established by order of the emperor Constantine. Sacred places associated with Jesus’s ancient appearance to Abraham (Mamre), birth (Bethlehem), Crucifixion and Resurrection (Golgotha), and instruction and Ascension (the Mount of Olives) have all yielded monumental remains. There is ample material testifying to a boom in church building to service Christian pilgrimage and conversion of the population, with Christian building and rebuilding continuing through to the Persian invasion of 614 and subsequent Muslim conquest of Palestine in 638.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document