scholarly journals ROMAN PORTS IN THE LOWER TIBER VALLEY: COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO REASSESS ROME'S PORT SYSTEM

Author(s):  
Maria del Carmen Moreno Escobar

This paper presents an innovative study of the port system of Rome in Imperial times through the application of an integrated approach to both archaeological analysis and material evidence. Specifically, it seeks to provide a more complete contextualization and understanding of the port system of Rome by focusing on the exploration of the physical geography of the river Tiber and its transformations in connection with the organization of the port system between the late first century BC and early third century AD. Methodologically, this study is based on the compilation, re-evaluation and analysis of published archaeological and geoarchaeological data and on the application of modelling and simulations techniques within a GIS environment. These foundations and means allow us to reconstruct the development of the river Tiber's historical course in antiquity and its impact on specific organizational aspects of Rome's port system. In this sense, this study provides new insights and avenues of research (applicable to other geographical areas and periods of time) to evaluate the system's changing capacity for transport and the potential existence of a signalling system, in contrast to previous hypotheses on the organization of river traffic along the Tiber.

Author(s):  
Alla Kushnir-Stein

Thirty-Eight Palestinian Cities Minted coins at various times during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The vast majority of these coins bear dates, with the bulk of the dates involving individual city eras. During the third century BC, royal Ptolemaic silver was struck in several urban centres on the Palestinian coast. The coinage from Ptolemais, Joppe, and Gaza was fairly substantial and most of it was dated by the regnal years of the kings. One undated silver coin has also been attributed to Dora. On these Ptolemaic issues the cities are represented only by monograms. Palestine came under Seleucid control c.200 BC, after its final conquest by Antiochus III. From the reign of Antiochus IV (175–164) onwards, there are both royal and city coinages, the latter mostly of bronze. The dates which appear on many of these coins use the Seleucid era of 312 BC. As in the preceding century, only coastal cities were involved: Ptolemais, Ascalon, Gaza, and Demetrias. The location of the last city is not known for certain, but an identification with Strato’s Tower, later rebuilt by Herod as Caesarea, seems possible. There is more information about the cities themselves on these second-century coins. Royal issues often bear the names of cities as well as specific symbols, like the dove in Ascalon or the Phoenician mem in Gaza. City-coinage proper further mentions Seleucid dynastic names, like that of Seleucia for Gaza or Antioch for Ptolemais; we would not have known about these dynastic names if not for their appearance on these coins. In the last quarter of the second century, new titles, ‘sacred and inviolable’, appear on coins of Ptolemais, Ascalon, and Gaza. The first individual city eras were established in this region at the very end of the second century BC, with the earliest material evidence belonging to the beginning of the first century: Ascalon, coin of year 6 (99/98 BC); Gaza, coins of years 13 and 14 (96/95, 95/94 or slightly later); Ptolemais, coin of year 9 (apparently from the first decade of the first century BC). In Ascalon and Ptolemais the new era appears together with the addition of the title ‘autonomous’.


Author(s):  
Jan Moje

This chapter gives an overview of the history of recording and publishing epigraphic sources in Demotic language and script from the Late Period to Greco-Roman Egypt (seventh century bce to third century ce), for example, on stelae, offering tables, coffins, or votive gifts. The history of editing such texts and objects spans over two hundred years. Here, the important steps and pioneering publications on Demotic epigraphy are examined. They start from the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt found the Rosetta stone, until the twenty-first century.


2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512098224
Author(s):  
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad

The Caraka Saṃhitā (ca. first century BCE–third century CE), the first classical Indian medical compendium, covers a wide variety of pharmacological and therapeutic treatment, while also sketching out a philosophical anthropology of the human subject who is the patient of the physicians for whom this text was composed. In this article, I outline some of the relevant aspects of this anthropology – in particular, its understanding of ‘mind’ and other elements that constitute the subject – before exploring two ways in which it approaches ‘psychiatric’ disorder: one as ‘mental illness’ ( mānasa-roga), the other as ‘madness’ ( unmāda). I focus on two aspects of this approach. One concerns the moral relationship between the virtuous and the well life, or the moral and the medical dimensions of a patient’s subjectivity. The other is about the phenomenological relationship between the patient and the ecology within which the patient’s disturbance occurs. The aetiology of and responses to such disturbances helps us think more carefully about the very contours of subjectivity, about who we are and how we should understand ourselves. I locate this interpretation within a larger programme on the interpretation of the whole human being, which I have elsewhere called ‘ecological phenomenology’.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-191
Author(s):  
Simon H. Bickler

OverviewMachine learning (ML) is rapidly being adopted by archaeologists interested in analyzing a range of geospatial, material cultural, textual, natural, and artistic data. The algorithms are particularly suited toward rapid identification and classification of archaeological features and objects. The results of these new studies include identification of many new sites around the world and improved classification of large archaeological datasets. ML fits well with more traditional methods used in archaeological analysis, and it remains subject to both the benefits and difficulties of those approaches. Small datasets associated with archaeological work make ML vulnerable to hidden complexity, systemic bias, and high validation costs if not managed appropriately. ML's scalability, flexibility, and rapid development, however, make it an essential part of twenty-first-century archaeological practice. This review briefly describes what ML is, how it is being used in archaeology today, and where it might be used in the future for archaeological purposes.


1999 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 413-465 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noel Lenski

AbstractThis article investigates shifts in the scale and organization of violence in the region of Isauria during the period of Roman rule. In contrast with the fundamental paper of B. Shaw in JESHO, volume 33 (1990), which argues that Isaurian violence was a constant in all periods of history, this study attempts to show that major Isaurian uprisings were brought under control from the mid-first century to the mid-third century AD. In these centuries the Isaurians became increasingly sedentarized, adopted Hellenistic social and political structures, and cooperated with the Roman state actively, particularly as soldiers. Only after the midthird century did Isauria again turn against Rome, this time with increased strength built on the economic and social development it had experienced under Roman rule.


2019 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 139-167
Author(s):  
Marina Prusac

Portraits of a group of thirty kosmētai, public philosophy teachers in Athens, were found among the fill in the Valerian Wall by the Roman Agora in Athens in 1861. From the Hellenistic period onwards, the kosmētai had taught the philosophy or Aristotle, though, with time, the teaching became more varied. In the first century AD, the number of students had a peak of three hundred a year. In the third century, when the portraits were buried in the Valerian Wall, the number of students had decreased, much as it had in other pedagogic institutions. The activity of the kosmētai ended about AD 280 when the Valerian Wall was built. The dating of the Valerian Wall is based on coins with the portrait of emperor Probus (AD 276-282), which have been found among the building debris. What we know about the kosmētai from the written sources leads to several questions, such as why the kosmētai portraits were used as building material at a time when the identity of the sitters could sill be remembered. Why were some of the portraits recut into those of other individuals shortly before they were put into the wall? Some of the kosmētai portraits were produced recut and discarded during the span of a few decades. This paper discusses the portraits of the kosmētai and their significance in Roman Athens and explores questions related to the disposal of them, as well as to context, style, workshop, and patronage.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Detty Manongko

The research of exploring the Church History have not been many studies done in Indonesia. Though this field is related to the theology, especially the development of Christian Theology for centuries. One area of Church History that needs to be examined are the Christian Thought of the Church Fathers from first to third centuries. The field is often called “Patrology” which is the study of Church Fathers from first to third centuries. Who are they, what are the results of their work, why they have produced such theological thoughts, and what they thoughts are still influencing to the contemporary theologians in Indonesia?The main problem in this research is how does the perception of contemporary theologians in Indonesia to the Chruch Father’ s theological thoughts? Through a literature review of Soteriology, Christology, and Eschatology, then this research has yielded important principles concerning to the Church Fathers’s theological thoughts at the Early Church period. And then through the field research has proven that the majority of contemporary theologians in Indonesia have a positive perception to the Church Fathers’s theological thought from first to the third centuries. Therefore, the reasons of why this research is conducted and how it is done are described in the first chapter of these book. The second chapter of this writing contains a literature review of the theological thoughts of the church fathers from the first century to the third. There are four groups of Church Fathers from the first century to the third. There are four groups of Church Fathers that are described in this chapter, i.e., The Apostolic Fathers (from the first to the middle of second century), The Aplogists (second century), The Anti-Gnostic Fathers (second and third century), and The Alexandrian Fathers (third century). The third chapter discusses the quantitative methods used in this research including statistical models to prove the validity and reliability of the data acquisition method that is used in the field of this research. It desperately needs accuracy and diligence in order to display a quality and useful research reports for the development of Church History studies. Discussion of the results of this study, along with the evidence that reinforces the result of this research is presented in the fourth chapter. Finally, the fifth chapter of this study elaborates the main thoughts that are generated in this study, which also expected to be important principles in conducting futher research.The results obtained in this study are not yet maximal on account of various constraints, such as limited time, facilities, funding, and so forth. However, the writer wishes that the results achieved in this study will give a valuable contribution to all readers of this writing and that it will be a motivation for a further research in the field of Church History in the future.


Author(s):  
Robert Wiśniewski

Both textual and material evidence demonstrates that many Christians would go to great lengths to bury their kin ad sanctos, close to the tombs of saints. The beginnings of this practice are often dated to the late third century. This chapter argues that the basis for such an early dating is tenuous. It also deals with the character of physical proximity between the ordinary dead and the martyrs: how close were the bones of the former placed to those of the latter? Were the relics put inside their tombs? Also, this chapter seeks to explain the reasons why people buried their dead ad sanctos. While acknowledging their religious motivation it shows that some Christians simply desired to entomb their dead close to a famous hero rather than to the source of a beneficial power.


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