The hidden paintings of Angkor Wat

Antiquity ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 88 (340) ◽  
pp. 549-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noel Hidalgo Tan ◽  
Im Sokrithy ◽  
Heng Than ◽  
Khieu Chan

The temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia is one of the most famous monuments in the world and is noted for its spectacular bas-relief friezes depicting ceremonial and religious scenes. Recent work reported here has identified an entirely new series of images consisting of paintings of boats, animals, deities and buildings. Difficult to see with the naked eye, these can be enhanced by digital photography and decorrelation stretch analysis, a technique recently used with great success in rock art studies. The paintings found at Angkor Wat seem to belong to a specific phase of the temple's history in the sixteenth century AD when it was converted from a Vishnavaite Hindu use to Theravada Buddhist.

1975 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 203-222
Author(s):  
Robert M. Kingdon

The problem which I wish to consider is the problem of deciding whether the protestant reformation was a revolution. The problem should be of interest to a number of different scholars. There is no obvious reason, however, why it should interest those who define themselves primarily as ecclesiastical historians. I believe, however, that there is an ecclesiastical dimension to this problem and that earlier work upon it is flawed by a failure to recognize that fact. I see these flaws even in the work which has most stimulated my own recent thinking on the problem. This is the work of a number of modern english historians and above all a book published by that great english contribution to the american community of historians, Lawrence Stone, titled The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642. I found particularly useful Stone’s lengthy analysis of the phenomenon of revolution, borrowing extensively from the recent work of political scientists, sociologists, and other behavioral scientists. And I found persuasive his application of that analysis to the puritan revolution. I found his ultimate conclusion, however, ‘that the crisis in England in the seventeenth century is the first “Great Revolution” in the history of the world,’ to be nonsense. It is nonsense partly because he has ignored the illumination which can be shed on this topic by a consideration of ecclesiastical history. I shall argue that the protestant reformation of the early sixteenth century was also a revolution, anticipating Stone’s by more than a hundred years. And I shall seek to demonstrate this argument with evidence drawn from ecclesiastical history.


Author(s):  
Ita Mac Carthy

‘Grace’ emerges as a keyword in the culture and society of sixteenth-century Italy. This book explores how it conveys and connects the most pressing ethical, social and aesthetic concerns of an age concerned with the reactivation of ancient ideas in a changing world. The book reassesses artists such as Francesco del Cossa, Raphael, and Michelangelo and explores anew writers like Castiglione, Ariosto, Tullia d'Aragona, and Vittoria Colonna. It shows how these artists and writers put grace at the heart of their work. The book argues that grace came to be as contested as it was prized across a range of Renaissance Italian contexts. It characterised emerging styles in literature and the visual arts, shaped ideas about how best to behave at court and sparked controversy about social harmony and human salvation. For all these reasons, grace abounded in the Italian Renaissance, yet it remained hard to define. The book explores what grace meant to theologians, artists, writers, and philosophers, showing how it influenced their thinking about themselves, each other and the world. It portrays grace not as a stable formula of expression but as a web of interventions in culture and society.


Author(s):  
Anna Shapoval

Analysis of linguocultural aspect of temporal nominations is impossible without involving the problems of hrononymic lexics. Chrononyms is an important information resource of a certain linguaculture, some distinctive peculiarities of conceptual picture of the world. The aim of the experimental analysis is a complex examination of the linguacultural aspect of temporal nominations that function in Chinese and Turkish languages reflecting the concepts of the world. The research was based on the material of the novels “Imperial woman” by Pearl Buck and “Roxolana” by Pavlo Zagrebelniy. The analysis of recent scientific publications allowed us to come to the conclusion that the investigation of hrononymic lexics can involve different theoretical and practical principles. Being guided by the existing classifications of chrononyms (N. Podolskaya, M. Torchinsky, S. Remmer) the linguocultural features of the following types of temporal chrononymic lexical units were identified and studied in the research: georthonyms, dynastic chrononyms, tumultonyms, parsonyms and mensonyms. The results of the research demonstrate that not all lexical units of temporal denotation chosen from the above mentioned novels refer to the class of chrononyms. The group under investigation includes the following lexemes: nominations of the lunar calendar, nominations of the solar calendar, nominations of mixed calendar and temporal slots denoting day and night. The basic system of chronology in the linguiacultures under analysis is the dominance of the lunar calendar nominations (Chinese picture of the world — 51,0 %, Turkish — 40,4 %). In the analyzed works the nominations of the solar calendar are used less often in the Chinese picture of the world; the usage of this unit reaches 20 %, and this phenomenon is historically conditioned. Mixed calendar nominations (21 % of temporal units) are rather common, solar calendar nominations are refined by the monthly calendar; it can be explained by the fact that the Chinese mind is conservative towards the new temporal system. In the Turkish picture of the world 45 % of temporal vocabulary belongs to the solar calendar since in the sixteenth century only a lunar calendar operated in the Ottoman Empire. It should be mentioned that significant place in the temporal vocabulary of “Roxolana” is conditioned by the influence of the linguistic personality of the author, who was a Ukrainian.


Author(s):  
Anna-Maria Hartmann

Mythographies were books that collected, explained, and interpreted myth-related material. Extremely popular during the Renaissance, these works appealed to a wide range of readers. While the European mythographies of the sixteenth century have been utilized by scholars, the short, early English mythographies, written from 1577 to 1647, have puzzled critics. The first generation of English mythographers did not, as has been suggested, try to compete with their Italian predecessors. Instead, they made mythographies into rhetorical instruments designed to intervene in topical debates outside the world of classical learning. Because English mythographers brought mythology to bear on a variety of contemporary issues, they unfold a lively and historically well-defined picture of the roles myth was made to play in early modern England. Exploring these mythographies can contribute to previous insights into myth in the Renaissance offered by studies of iconography, literary history, allegory, and myth theory.


Cave art is a subject of perennial interest among archaeologists. Until recently it was assumed that it was largely restricted to southern France and northern Iberia, although in recent years new discoveries have demonstrated that it originally had a much wider distribution. The discovery in 2003 of the UK's first examples of cave art, in two caves at Creswell Crags on the Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire border, was the most surprising illustration of this. The discoverers (the editors of the book) brought together in 2004 a number of Palaeolithic archaeologists and rock art specialists from across the world to study the Creswell art and debate its significance, and its similarities and contrasts with contemporary Late Pleistocene ("Ice Age") art on the Continent. This comprehensively illustrated book presents the Creswell art itself, the archaeology of the caves and the region, and the wider context of the Upper Palaeolithic era in Britain, as well as a number of up-to-date studies of Palaeolithic cave art in Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy which serve to contextualize the British examples.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Carolyn E. Boyd ◽  
Ashley Busby

Archaic period hunter-gatherers of the Lower Pecos Canyonlands of southwest Texas and Coahuila, Mexico, created complex rock art murals containing elaborately painted anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures. These figures are frequently portrayed with dots or lines emanating out of or into their open mouths. In this article, we discuss patterns in shape, color, and arrangement of this pictographic element and propose that artists used this graphic device to denote speech, breath, and the soul. They communicated meaning through the image-making process, alternating brushstroke direction to indicate inhalation versus exhalation or using different paint application techniques to reflect measured versus forceful speech. The choices made by artists in the production of the imagery reflect their cosmology and the framework of ideas and beliefs through which they interpreted and interacted with the world. Bridging the iconographic data with ethnohistoric and ethnographic texts from Mesoamerica, we suggest that speech and breath expressed in the rock art of the Lower Pecos was tied to concepts of the soul, creation, and human origins.


2020 ◽  
Vol 132 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-107
Author(s):  
Gard Granerød
Keyword(s):  
The City ◽  

AbstractThe article discusses the lament over the Temple of YHW in Elephantine from three angles: from the perspective of the internal rhetoric or composition of the letter, from the perspective of the world of the Judaeans who wrote the petition, and from the perspective of the world of the intended recipient of the letter. In addition, the article explores how the mention of collective mourning and curse in the petition letter from Elephantine may provide a text of comparison – and context – for the laments over the destruction of the city of Zion and her temple found in the Book of Lamentations.


Rural History ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Heather Falvey

AbstractIn the early summer of 1588, twenty-seven inhabitants of the large parish of Rickmansworth (Hertfordshire) presented a petition to two local Justices of the Peace complaining about disorder in Mill End, on the outskirts of the main town, caused by those frequenting Richard Heyward’s alehouse. Most recent work on alehouse sociability has considered attitudes towards drinking and its regulation after the early Jacobean legislation; in contrast, this article considers attitudes towards drunkenness in late sixteenth-century England, including the views expressed in the official ‘homily against drunkenness’ and in the Sabbatarian pamphlet published in 1572 by Humfrey Roberts. Similarly, most work on early modern protest considers complaints against the activities of the protestors’ social superiors; in this instance petitioners complained about the conduct of their inferiors. Although, due to archival attrition, it is impossible to determine what action the authorities took against Heyward and his clientele, thanks to the chance survival of a personal letter it is possible to reconstruct the reactions of the JPs to whom the petition was addressed, thus shedding light on how JPs might act outside the Quarter Sessions.


2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (60) ◽  
pp. 253-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego Olstein

Abstract World history can be arranged into three major regional divergences: the 'Greatest Divergence' starting at the end of the last Ice Age (ca. 15,000 years ago) and isolating the Old and the New Worlds from one another till 1500; the 'Great Divergence' bifurcating the paths of Europe and Afro-Asia since 1500; and the 'American Divergence' which divided the fortunes of New World societies from 1500 onwards. Accordingly, all world regions have confronted two divergences: one disassociating the fates of the Old and New Worlds, and the other within either the Old or the New World. Latin America is in the uneasy position that in both divergences it ended up on the 'losing side.' As a result, a contentious historiography of Latin America evolved from the very moment that it was incorporated into the wider world. Three basic attitudes toward the place of Latin America in global history have since emerged and developed: admiration for the major impact that the emergence on Latin America on the world scene imprinted on global history; hostility and disdain over Latin America since it entered the world scene; direct rejection of and head on confrontation in reaction the former. This paper examines each of these three attitudes in five periods: the 'long sixteenth century' (1492-1650); the 'age of crisis' (1650-1780); 'the long nineteenth century' (1780-1914); 'the short twentieth century' (1914-1991); and 'contemporary globalization' (1991 onwards).


1988 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 593-606
Author(s):  
John Villiers

The numerous and voluminous reports and letters which the Jesuits wrote on the Moro mission, as on all their missions in Asia, are perhaps of less interest to us now for what they reveal of the methods adopted by the Society of Jesus in this remote corner of their mission field or the details they contain about the successes and failures of individual missionaries, than for the wealth of information they provide on the islands where the Jesuits lived and the indigenous societies with which they came into contact through their work of evangelization. In other words, it is not theprimary purpose of this essay to analyse the Jesuit documents with a view to reconstructing the history of the Moro mission in narrative form but rather to glean from them some of the informationthey contain about the social and political conditions in Moro during the forty years or so in the sixteenth century when both the Jesuit missionaries and the Portuguese were active in the regio Because the Jesuits were often in close touch with local rulers and notables, whether or not they succeeded in converting them to Christianity, and because they lived among their subjects for long periods, depending upon them for the necessities of life and sharing their hardships, their letters and reports often show a deeper understanding of the social, economic and political conditions of the indigenous societies and, one suspects, give a more accurate and measured account of events and personalities than do the official chroniclers and historians of the time, most of whom never ventured further east than Malacca and who in any case were chiefly concerned to glorify the deeds of the Portuguese and justify their actions to the world.


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