Recent British Museum Excavations in Assyria

1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Curtis

It is a great honour for me to be asked to give the Richard Barnett memorial lecture. I knew Richard Barnett well, and had the privilege of working with him at the British Museum for three years before his retirement. He was a great source of inspiration, and I and many others owe him a considerable debt of gratitude. I have chosen as my subject recent British Museum excavations in Assyria, partly because I believe this would have been of some slight interest to Dr Barnett. Both the British Museum and Assyria were close to his heart. He worked in the Museum for more than 40 years, and from 1955 to 1974 was Keeper of the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities. Throughout this time Assyria was a special interest, and Dr Barnett did some of his most important work on Nimrud ivories, the Assyrian reliefs and the Balawat Gates. Inevitably, the role of the British Museum in making these pioneering discoveries in the nineteenth century held a particular fascination for him.

2021 ◽  
pp. 84-119
Author(s):  
Reed Gochberg

This chapter examines descriptions of the British Museum in travel narratives and diaries by American travelers to show how it informed broader conversations about the development of American museums. Visiting during the mid-nineteenth century, American tourists encountered a museum that was attempting to organize its collections and define its purpose as a public museum, and their descriptions highlight the anxieties raised by this process. Nathaniel Hawthorne lamented the museum’s vast quantities of objects, linking a fruitless search for meaningful artifacts to questions of genealogy. Other American travelers more explicitly considered the role of visitors in interpreting collections. The artist Orra White Hitchcock reflected on the place of women in the museum’s galleries, while the Black abolitionist William Wells Brown celebrated the opportunity to continue his education and to participate in critical discussions of the museum.


2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sławomir Godek

ROMAN LAW IN PRE-PARTITION POLAND IN THE LIGHT OF PRESENT RESEARCH Summary The question of the importance of Roman law in pre-partition Poland has been taxing Polish legal historians for more than two centuries. The achievements to date in this field are significant; however, the issue has not been completely exhausted. In ongoing studies, a number of lines of inquiry have been undertaken that constitute a continuation of earlier investigations, but there are also completely new lines. The great controversy about the role of Roman law in Poland prior to 1795 (viz. the Third Partition) that was initiated by historians in the nineteenth century continues to be of unflagging interest. Research into the Romanisation of the Chronicles of Wincenty Kadłubek is being continued. The attention of researchers is still drawn to the issue of the teaching of Roman law in pre-partition Poland, especially in Kraków, Wilno, and Zamość. Quite significant progress has been made in research on the impact of Roman law on the codification of Poland prior to 1795. Areas of special interest include the Sigismundina, the Lithuanian Statutes and King Stanisław August’s Code. Research on the influence of Roman law on the work of writers who were lawyers in the pre-partition era is less intense than it was in the past. However, there has been a revival in the study of criminal law, as evidenced by the work on crimen laesae maiestatis.


2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Mearns ◽  
Laurent Chevrier ◽  
Christophe Gouraud

In the early part of the nineteenth century the Dupont brothers ran separate natural history businesses in Paris. Relatively little is known about their early life but an investigation into the family history at Bayeux corrects Léonard Dupont's year of birth from 1795 to 1796. In 1818 Léonard joined Joseph Ritchie's expedition to North Africa to assist in collecting and preparing the discoveries but he did not get beyond Tripoli. After 15 months he came back to Paris with a small collection from Libya and Provence, and returned to Provence in 1821. While operating as a dealer-naturalist in Paris he published Traité de taxidermie (1823, 1827), developed a special interest in foreign birds and became well known for his anatomical models in coloured wax. Henry Dupont sold a range of natural history material and with his particular passion for beetles formed one of the finest collections in Europe; his best known publication is Monographie des Trachydérides (1836–1840). Because the brothers had overlapping interests and were rarely referred to by their forenames there has been confusion between them and the various eponyms that commemorate them. Although probably true, it would be an over-simplification to state that birds of this era named for Dupont refer to Léonard Dupont, insects to Henry Dupont, and molluscs to their mother.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.


Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.


Author(s):  
Marilyn Booth

This chapter demonstrates that inscriptions of female images in Cairo’s late nineteenth-century nationalist press were part of a discursive economy shaping debates on how gender roles and gendered expectations should shift as Egyptians struggled for independence. The chapter investigates content and placement of ‘news from the street’ in al-Mu’ayyad in the 1890s, examining how these terse local reports – equivalent to faits divers in the French press – contributed to the construction of an ideal national political trajectory with representations of women serving as the primary example in shaping a politics of newspaper intervention on the national scene. In this, an emerging advocacy role of newspaper correspondents makes the newspaper a mediator in the construction of activist reader-citizens.


1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Rodger

This article is the revised text of the first W A Wilson Memorial Lecture, given in the Playfair Library, Old College, in the University of Edinburgh, on 17 May 1995. It considers various visions of Scots law as a whole, arguing that it is now a system based as much upon case law and precedent as upon principle, and that its departure from the Civilian tradition in the nineteenth century was part of a general European trend. An additional factor shaping the attitudes of Scots lawyers from the later nineteenth century on was a tendency to see themselves as part of a larger Englishspeaking family of lawyers within the British Empire and the United States of America.


2015 ◽  
Vol 94 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catriona M. M. Macdonald

The career and posthumous reputation of Andrew Lang (1844–1912) call into question Scottish historiographical conventions of the era following the death of Sir Walter Scott which foreground the apparent triumph of scientific methods over Romance and the professionalisation of the discipline within a university setting. Taking issue with the premise of notions relating to the Strange Death of Scottish History in the mid-nineteenth century, it is proposed that perceptions of Scottish historiographical exceptionalism in a European context and presumptions of Scottish inferiorism stand in need of re-assessment. By offering alternative readings of the reformation, by uncoupling unionism from whiggism, by reaffirming the role of Romance in ‘serious’ Scottish history, and by disrupting distinctions between whig and Jacobite, the historical works and the surviving personal papers of Andrew Lang cast doubt on many conventional grand narratives and the paradigms conventionally used to make sense of Scottish historiography.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.


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