The 1996 Excavations at Lepcis Magna

1997 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 43-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hafed Walda ◽  
Sally-Ann Ashton ◽  
Paul Reynolds ◽  
Jane Sidell ◽  
Isabella Welsby Sjöström ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
North Africa ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Virtual Museum ◽  
Domestic Waste ◽  
Ground Plan ◽  
Animal Bone ◽  
Lecture Theatre

AbstractThe third season of excavation of a Roman town house adjacent to the theatre of Lepcis Magna took place in September 1996. The whole ground plan of the house had not previously been exposed and this was the primary task of the 1996 fieldwork. It appeared that the first building was constructed of well-dressed stone with interior mud-brick walls in the first half of the first century AD and continued in use until either the later first or the beginning of the second century AD. The site was then abandoned until the fourth century when the building was reoccupied, and the interior layout changed. Final abandonment seems to have taken place in the fifth century. The cisterns and well of the house were also examined, and probably what are the first waterlogged archaeological deposits from North Africa were sampled. They include large amounts of organic domestic waste.Ceramic assemblages of late coarseware and first-century coarse and fineware were studied by Isabella Welsby Sjöström and Paul Reynolds. Sally-Ann Ashton worked on the wall-plaster, architectural marble fragments, and other finds, including ivory and bone, bronzes, and sculpture. The animal bone of all three seasons was examined by Jane Sidell, and included much butchered material. Sheep/goat were the most common animal found, and cattle and pig were a great deal more common than had been expected for North Africa. Keith Wilkinson discusses the palaeoenvironmental material and future hopes for its scientific examination.During 1997 a Lepcis Magna web site has been opened to provide up to date news of the project. A virtual museum provides illustrations of many of the important finds, and an illustrated account of the excavation can be heard in the virtual lecture theatre. Its address is: www.alnpete.co.uk/lepcis/.

Zooming In Rome, the Middle Euphrates, and Dura

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon James
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Its Region ◽  
Second Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Persian Empire ◽  
Spheres Of Influence ◽  
The Military

Dura-Europos was a product and ultimately a victim of the interaction of Mediterranean- and Iranian-centred imperial powers in the Middle East which began with Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Achaemenid Persian empire in the later fourth century BC. Its nucleus was established as part of the military infrastructure and communications network of the Seleucid successor-state. It was expanding into a Greekstyle polis during the second century BC, as Seleucid control was being eroded from the east by expanding Arsacid Parthian power, and threatened from the west by the emergent imperial Roman republic. From the early first century BC, the Roman and Parthian empires formally established the Upper Euphrates as the boundary between their spheres of influence, and the last remnants of the Seleucid regime in Syria were soon eliminated. Crassus’ attempt to conquer Parthia ended in disaster at Carrhae in 53 BC, halting Roman ambitions to imitate Alexander for generations. The nominal boundary on the Upper Euphrates remained, although the political situation in the Middle East remained fluid. Rome long controlled the Levant largely indirectly, through client rulers of small states, only slowly establishing directly ruled provinces with Roman governors, a process mostly following establishment of the imperial regime around the turn of the millennia. However, some client states like Nabataea still existed in AD 100 (for overviews see Millar 1993; Ball 2000; Butcher 2003; Sartre 2005). The Middle Euphrates, in what is now eastern Syria, lay outside Roman control, although it is unclear to what extent Dura and its region—part of Mesopotamia, and Parapotamia on the west bank of the river—were effectively under Arsacid control before the later first century AD. For some decades, Armenia may have been the dominant regional power (Edwell 2013, 192–5; Kaizer 2017, 70). As the Roman empire increasingly crystallized into clearly defined, directly ruled provinces, the contrast with the very different Arsacid system became starker. The ‘Parthian empire’, the core of which comprised Iran and Mesopotamia with a western royal capital at Ctesiphon on the Tigris, was a much looser entity (Hauser 2012).

Greco-Roman Surgical Instruments

2018 ◽  
pp. 554-590
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Bliquez
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Surgical Instruments ◽  
First Century ◽  
Bladder Stones ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Fourth Century Bce

The chapter looks at Greek and Roman surgical instruments. The survival of Greco-Roman surgical instruments falls into two divisions: tools available in Hippocratic times (fifth to fourth century bce), and instruments at the disposal of surgeons, mostly Greek, from the late Republic through the Empire (first century bce to fifth century ce). From the former, most survivals are cupping vessels from graves. The texts suggest the Hippocratic physician often created his tool on the spot or had a tool prepared for an immediate need, whereas most of an Imperial surgeon’s repertoire consisted of instruments professionally made and sold by smiths. The various kinds of instruments are described, explained, and illustrated: cupping vessels, scalpels, phlebotomes (for phlebotomy), lithotomes (for bladder stones), needles, probes, cauteries, hooks, forceps, saws, drills, chisels, files, levers, tubes, douches, specula, and abortives.

The Archaeology of Beirut: A Report on Work in the Insula of the House of the Fountains

2003 ◽  
Vol 83 ◽  
pp. 195-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Perring ◽  
Paul Reynolds ◽  
Reuben Thorpe
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Interim Report ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western Margin ◽  
Post War

This insula, which lay on the western margin of the earlier Iron Age city, was uncovered during post-war reconstruction work carried out in Beirut during 1994–6. Laid out in the Hellenistic period, the insula was filled out with a series of small courtyard houses after the Roman annexation. A public portico was added along a main street in the second quarter of the second century, before a period of relative inactivity. The district was revived and rebuilt in the middle of the fourth century and was home to a series of handsome town houses in the fifth century, before being devastated by earthquake in AD 551. The site was then left derelict until the early nineteenth century. This interim report sets these findings within their broader historical and archaeological context, as well as summarizing the results of recent work on the site's ceramics and stratigraphy.

Long-lived Samian?

Britannia ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 259-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Roman Britain ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Closed Groups

ABSTRACTIn order to study the possibility that some samian (terra sigillata) vessels remained available and/or in circulation for quite some time, a review has been made of closed groups (especially grave-assemblages), as a useful starting point. This paper argues that it is reasonable to expect some complete first-century samian vessels to have survived into the second century; also that some second-century vessels had survived into the fourth century at least throughout Roman Britain.

scholarly journals Brooches from the Cemetery of Opushki and Their Role in Costume (According to the 2003–2020 Excavation Materials)

2021 ◽  
pp. 22-39
Author(s):  
Anastasia А. Stoianova
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cervical Vertebrae ◽  
General Pattern ◽  
Central Area ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
Second Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Archaeological Cultures

This paper presents a review of the brooches from the cemetery of Opushki located in the central area of the Crimean foothills. The cemetery was used from the first century BC to the fourth century AD by peoples of various archaeological cultures. 72 of 318 graves excavated there contained brooches. The total number of complete and fragmented brooches discovered there is 190. The largest group comprises one-piece bow-shaped brooches with returned foot and the brooches with flattened catch-plate from the first to the first half of the third century AD. There is a series of brooches made in the Roman Empire, with the most numerous group of plate brooches. There are a few violin-bow-shaped brooches, highly-profiled brooches of the Northern Black Sea type, two-piece violin-bow-shaped brooches with returned foot, and brooches with curved arched bow (P-shaped): great many pieces of these types occurred at other sites from the Roman Period in the Crimean foothill area. In Opushki, brooches appeared in all types of burial constructions, and mostly in the Late Scythian vaults from the first century BC to the second century AD. They accompanied graves of women, men, and children. In the overwhelming majority of cases, one burial was accompanied with one and rarely two brooches; there is only one burial of a child with three clasps. Most often brooches occurred at the chest, in rare cases on the shoulder, near the cervical vertebrae, pelvic bones, or outside the skeleton. It is noteworthy that a great number of brooches was found in the burials of children of different ages, from 1- to 8-12-year-old. Apparently, brooches as a part of the child’s costume were used throughout the child’s life from the very infancy. Generally, the brooch types from the cemetery of Opushki, their distribution in the assemblages and location on the skeletons correspond to the general pattern typical of barbarian cemeteries in the Crimean foothill area dated to the Roman Period.

Corinna

1970 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. L. West
Keyword(s):  
Good Reason ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Made In

In the controversy over the date of Corinna, the following points may be taken as agreed:1. An edition was made in Boeotia about the end of the third or beginning of the second century B.C.2. The texts of Corinna current in the late Hellenistic and Roman periods were all descended from that Boeotian edition.3. Before its dissemination, Corinna was unknown in Greece at large. If she wrote at an earlier period, she must have been remembered only locally.The difference between Boeotian spelling of the fifth century and that of the fourth is very great: but the difference in this respect between the mid-fourth century and the late third or early second is comparatively slight. It is therefore tenable that whereas there would be a good reason for the re-spelling of fifth-century Boeotian into the later convention of any period, there would be no obvious or adequate reason for re-spelling Boeotian of the fourth century into the orthography of the third, or that of the third into that of the second. Even those features of fourth-century spelling which have ceased to preponderate are by no means unknown or even uncommon at the end of the third century.

Traffic in the Roman World

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric E. Poehler
Keyword(s):  
Urban Design ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Second Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Traffic System ◽  
Roman World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean

Where Pompeii’s traffic system fits in the history of Roman infrastructure and urbanism is addressed in Chapter 8. To do this, the method for studying traffic developed at Pompeii is exported to Roman cities around the Mediterranean to answer two primary questions: were there two-way streets organized by driving on a particular side, and were there streets restricted to a single direction? The comparison with Timgad in particular offers an important window onto how Romans at the end of first century BCE in Italy and at the beginning of the second century CE in North Africa approached issues of urban design and infrastructural management.

The Aftermath of Paracomedy

Paracomedy ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 248-264
Author(s):  
Craig Jendza
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Fourth Century Bce

This chapter explores three cases where authors engage with paracomedy after the fifth century BCE. It proposes that the anonymous fourth-century BCE tragedy Rhesus employs paracomedy and that it does so either because the author was indiscriminately copying from fifth-century drama or because he wanted to imitate Euripides’s penchant for paracomedy. It investigates the highly fragmentary evidence for Rhinthon’s third-century BCE hilarotragedies, normally thought to be theatrical farces, and posits that Rhinthon was utilizing a more explicit type of paracomedy than in the fifth century. It also provides an explanation for the surprising assertion from the second-century CE scholar Pollux that Euripides and Sophocles frequently employed a comic parabasis. The chapter argues that these cases of reception highlight paracomedy’s importance in antiquity and indicate that paracomedy was a noted hallmark of Euripidean stagecraft that had an indelible effect on the genre of tragedy.

Excavations at Winchester, 1971: Tenth and Final Interim Report: Part II

1975 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 295-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Biddle
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Main Emphasis ◽  
The Town ◽  
Important Evidence ◽  
Late Roman

SummaryThe excavations of 1971 concluded the eleven-year programme begun in 1961. Eight sites were investigated in a season whose main emphasis was on the Roman and Anglo-Saxon periods down to about A. D. 1000. The Iron Age defences were examined at Assize Courts North and shown to date to the mid first century B.C. The Roman defences were sectioned at Castle Yard. The Roman south gate was discovered and its development followed from c. A.D. 70. Inside the Roman city extensive areas were examined at Lower Brook Street and Wolvesey Palace. At the former a possible military phase of the mid first century A.D. was followed by urban development c. A.D. 70 which continued down into the fifth century and included a Romano-Celtic temple and a large late third- or fourth-century workshop. At Wolvesey one house was entirely excavated and parts of two others examined. At Lankhills the excavation of the late Roman cemetery was concluded with a further season in 1972. A total of about 450 graves, many of them furnished and ranging in date from c. A.D. 310 to the early fifth century, was examined in 1967–72. A small fourth-century cemetery was excavated at Winnall. Information about the defence of the late Roman town was provided by the discovery of a bastion added to the town wall at South Gate, and by the implications of structures and objects from Lower Brook Street, Wolvesey, and Lankhills. Important evidence for the state of Winchester in the fifth to ninth centuries was recovered from South Gate, Lower Brook Street, and Wolvesey. At South Gate the gate was blocked first by a ditch and then by a wall, probably in the eighth century.

Mary in Patristics

2019 ◽  
pp. 53-66
Author(s):  
Andrew Louth
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
Ephrem The Syrian ◽  
Protevangelium Of James ◽  
The Church ◽  
Apocryphal Texts

Mariological reflection in some second-century Fathers is introduced, especially the parallel with Eve; this explicit reflection on Mary is set beside second-century reflection on the Church as Virgin Mother, a tradition only later explicitly related to Mary as Virgin Mother. Attention is paid to the second-century Protevangelium of James with its remarkably developed Mariology; the nature of its esotericism is discussed, and later apocryphal texts introduced. Other tantalizing hints of devotion to Mary are mentioned, not least the use of the title Theotokos in a prayer belonging, possibly, to the third century. Mary’s virginity as an ascetic model in the fourth-century ascetic movement is briefly discussed. The first elaborate celebration of Mary is found in the liturgical poetry of the fourth-century Ephrem the Syrian. Mariology developed dramatically from the fifth century, witnessed in Proklos’ homilies, Romanos’ Kontakia, and the Akathist Hymn.

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