scholarly journals The collapse of empire at Gordion in the transition from the Achaemenid to the Hellenistic world

2019 ◽  
Vol 69 ◽  
pp. 109-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elspeth R.M. Dusinberre

AbstractGordion, ancient capital of Phrygia, was a large and thriving city of secondary importance during the period of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (ca 550–333 BC). Recent work makes possible a reconsideration of the site: evaluating its architecture, finds and use of landscape within and after the socio-economic and administrative context of the Achaemenid imperial system enables the following new overview. During the Achaemenid period, Gordion’s populace participated in the broad cultural exchanges enabled by the imperial system and may have emphasised animal husbandry. When Alexander’s conquest led to the collapse of the Achaemenid administrative infrastructure, the impact on Gordion’s economy and cultural circumstance was profound. Its population plummeted, the architectural and spatial organisation of the site changed dramatically and new directions and means of trade and cultural interaction developed. Gordion’s archaeological remains reflect and emphasise the tremendous historical and political changes attending the end of the Empire and the beginning of the Hellenistic period.

Author(s):  
Stephen Mitchell

Until the end of the fourth century BCE the impact of Greek culture in Asia Minor was limited. Lykians, Karians, and Lydians offered alternatives to Hellenism and preserved their own languages until the end of the fourth century BCE. However, by 250 BCE these Anatolian languages ceased to be used in public or private documents, and polis organization became normative. After the overthrow of the Persian Empire the autonomy of Greek cities became the highest political objective. Greek civic decrees in the early Hellenistic period emphasized that democratic legitimacy depended on quorate citizen votes, the Greek language became the only medium for official public communication, and the native populations maintained their identity and independence by adopting polis organization. Between 400 and 250 BCE these populations did not merely absorb Greek cultural influence but underwent the encompassing experience of becoming Greek.


Author(s):  
Matthew Canepa

This chapter deals with West–Asian cross-cultural interaction that developed during the Hellenistic period in the aftermath of Alexander’s conquest of the Persian Empire as the land and sea routes between the Mediterranean and India opened up. Despite their constant warfare, the kings that dominated this region established diplomatic ties influenced by a rich range of linguistic, visual, spatial, and ritual idioms. Canepa views Mauryan pillars and inscribed edicts issued by the emperor Aśoka as responses both to local South Asian traditions of religion and empire, and also to those of the Achaemenids and Seleucids. The cross-cultural interaction of this period not only transformed contemporary worldviews and traditions, but also formed the basis for future exchanges among the Romans, Arsacids, Kuṣāṇas, and Sasanians.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yong Zhang ◽  
Lu-yu Liu ◽  
Yi Liu ◽  
Man Zhang ◽  
Cheng-bang An

AbstractWithin the mountain altitudinal vegetation belts, the shift of forest tree lines and subalpine steppe belts to high altitudes constitutes an obvious response to global climate change. However, whether or not similar changes occur in steppe belts (low altitude) and nival belts in different areas within mountain systems remain undetermined. It is also unknown if these, responses to climate change are consistent. Here, using Landsat remote sensing images from 1989 to 2015, we obtained the spatial distribution of altitudinal vegetation belts in different periods of the Tianshan Mountains in Northwestern China. We suggest that the responses from different altitudinal vegetation belts to global climate change are different. The changes in the vegetation belts at low altitudes are spatially different. In high-altitude regions (higher than the forest belts), however, the trend of different altitudinal belts is consistent. Specifically, we focused on analyses of the impact of changes in temperature and precipitation on the nival belts, desert steppe belts, and montane steppe belts. The results demonstrated that the temperature in the study area exhibited an increasing trend, and is the main factor of altitudinal vegetation belts change in the Tianshan Mountains. In the context of a significant increase in temperature, the upper limit of the montane steppe in the eastern and central parts will shift to lower altitudes, which may limit the development of local animal husbandry. The montane steppe in the west, however, exhibits the opposite trend, which may augment the carrying capacity of pastures and promote the development of local animal husbandry. The lower limit of the nival belt will further increase in all studied areas, which may lead to an increase in surface runoff in the central and western regions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 75-81
Author(s):  
Ahad Mirza Baig ◽  
Alkida Balliu ◽  
Peter Davies ◽  
Michal Dory

Rachid Guerraoui was the rst keynote speaker, and he got things o to a great start by discussing the broad relevance of the research done in our community relative to both industry and academia. He rst argued that, in some sense, the fact that distributed computing is so pervasive nowadays could end up sti ing progress in our community by inducing people to work on marginal problems, and becoming isolated. His rst suggestion was to try to understand and incorporate new ideas coming from applied elds into our research, and argued that this has been historically very successful. He illustrated this point via the distributed payment problem, which appears in the context of blockchains, in particular Bitcoin, but then turned out to be very theoretically interesting; furthermore, the theoretical understanding of the problem inspired new practical protocols. He then went further to discuss new directions in distributed computing, such as the COVID tracing problem, and new challenges in Byzantine-resilient distributed machine learning. Another source of innovation Rachid suggested was hardware innovations, which he illustrated with work studying the impact of RDMA-based primitives on fundamental problems in distributed computing. The talk concluded with a very lively discussion.


Author(s):  
Jinah Kim

Abstract Cross-cultural exchanges between India and China during the first millennium are often understood through a Buddhist lens; by investigating the impact of Indian Buddhist sources, be they literary, doctrinal, or artistic, to receiving Chinese communities. In these cultural transactions, instigated by traveling pilgrim-monks and enacted by imperial power players in China, India emerges as a remote, idealized, and perhaps “hollow” center. Imagined or real, the importance of images of India in medieval Chinese Buddhist landscape has been established beyond doubt. What seems to be missing in this unidirectional looking is the impact of these cultural communications in India. What were the Indian responses to Chinese Buddhists' demands and their physical presence? How was China imagined and translated in medieval India? This essay proposes to locate the activities of Chinese monks in India and the iconographies of China-inspired Indian Buddhist images within the larger historical context of shifting cultural and political geography of the medieval Buddhist world. By exploring different types of evidence from borderlands, vis-à-vis the monolithic concepts of China and India, the essay also complicates the China–India studies' comparative model.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 297
Author(s):  
Jarosław Konior ◽  
Marek Sawicki ◽  
Mariusz Szóstak

The research presented in the article, which includes methods, models, and conclusions, contains synthetic and analytical model solutions concerning the problems of the technical maintenance and wear of residential buildings with a traditional construction. The cause and effect relationships between the occurrence of damage in the elements of tenement houses (treated as proof of their maintenance conditions), and the size of the technical wear of these elements were determined using a representative and purposefully selected sample of 102 residential buildings erected during the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Wroclaw’s “Downtown” district. Quantitative damage analysis, which was carried out using empirical (visual) methods of assessing the technical condition of a building, indicates the type and size of damage to the building’s elements that are characteristic for the relevant maintenance conditions. Research concerning the cause–effect relationships (“damage–technical wear”) in observed states allows for a numerical approach to the impact of building maintenance conditions on the degree of the technical wear of its components. The maintenance and exploitation conditions determine the degree of the technical wear of the elements of an old residential building. The exploitation condition of these buildings is manifested by damage to elements caused by water and moisture penetration, which is especially important for poorly maintained buildings. The article shows that the age of the elements of an old residential building with a traditional construction is of secondary importance in the process of the intensity of losing its serviceability value. It was calculated that no more than 30% of the damage of building components is explained by the passage of time, and it is therefore not age that determines the course of the technical wear of the elements of the analyzed tenement houses.


2008 ◽  
Vol 42 (22) ◽  
pp. 5728-5730 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew T. Woodhouse ◽  
Graham W. Mann ◽  
Kenneth S. Carslaw ◽  
Olivier Boucher

2003 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-82
Author(s):  
Colin Durrant

This article focuses on young musicians' perceptions of their musical and cultural experiences while on a tour of South Africa during the summer of 2000. The young musicians were asked to keep journals throughout the tour in order to be able to recall their reactions and feelings about their various experiences. The comments, particularly the written ones from the young musicians, vividly display the impact of such experiences on their musical and emotional life. While conclusions are incomplete, some implications for the nature of cultural exchange and understanding and music education in general are put forward.


2012 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 467-481 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Brázdil ◽  
K. Chromá ◽  
H. Valášek ◽  
L. Dolák

Abstract. Historical written records associated with tax relief at ten estates located in south-eastern Moravia (Czech Republic) are used for the study of hydrometeorological extremes and their impacts during the period 1751–1900 AD. At the time, the taxation system in Moravia allowed farmers to request tax relief if their crop yields had been negatively affected by hydrological and meteorological extremes. The documentation involved contains information about the type of extreme event and the date of its occurrence, while the impact on crops may often be derived. A total of 175 extreme events resulting in some kind of damage are documented for 1751–1900, with the highest concentration between 1811 and 1860 (74.9% of all events analysed). The nature of events leading to damage (of a possible 272 types) include hailstorm (25.7%), torrential rain (21.7%), flood (21.0%), followed by thunderstorm, flash flood, late frost and windstorm. The four most outstanding events, affecting the highest number of settlements, were thunderstorms with hailstorms (25 June 1825, 20 May 1847 and 29 June 1890) and flooding of the River Morava (mid-June 1847). Hydrometeorological extremes in the 1816–1855 period are compared with those occurring during the recent 1961–2000 period. The results obtained are inevitably influenced by uncertainties related to taxation records, such as their temporal and spatial incompleteness, the limits of the period of outside agricultural work (i.e. mainly May–August) and the purpose for which they were originally collected (primarily tax alleviation, i.e. information about hydrometeorological extremes was of secondary importance). Taxation records constitute an important source of data for historical climatology and historical hydrology and have a great potential for use in many European countries.


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