Ancient Greek Terracotta Sculpture

2022 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Southern Italy ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Greek Life ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Monumental Sculpture ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Terracotta Figurines ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Greek World ◽  
Material Form

The phrase “terracotta sculpture” refers to all figurative representations in fired clay produced in Greece and in the Greek world during the first millennium bce, (from the Geometric period to the end of the Hellenistic period), whatever their size (figurine, statuette, or statue), whatever their manufacturing technique (modeling, molding, mixed), whatever their material form (in-the-round, relief, etc.), whatever their representation (anthropomorphic, zoomorphic [real or imaginary], diverse objects), and whatever the limits of their representation: full figure (figurines, statuettes, groups), truncated or abbreviated representations, including protomai, masks, busts, half figures, and anatomical representations, among others. All these objects, with the possible exception of large statues, were the products of artisans who were referred to in ancient texts as “coroplasts,” or modelers of images in clay. Because of this, the term “coroplasty,” or “coroplathy,” has been used to refer to this craft, but also increasingly to all of its products, large and small, while research on this material falls under the rubric of coroplastic studies. Greek terracottas were known to antiquarians from the mid-17th century onward from archaeological explorations in both sanctuary and funerary sites, especially in southern Italy and Sicily. Yet serious scholarly interest in these important representatives of Greek sculpture developed only in the last quarter of the 19th century, when terracotta figurines of the Hellenistic period were unearthed from the cemeteries of Tanagra in Boeotia in the 1870s and Myrina in Asia Minor in the 1880s. These immediately entered the antiquities markets, where their cosmopolitan, secular imagery had a great appeal for collectors and fueled scholarly interest and debate. At the same time, sanctuary deposits containing terracottas also began to be explored, but scholarly attention privileged funerary terracottas because of their better state of preservation. For most of the 20th century, the study of figurative terracottas basically was an art-historical exercise based in iconography and style that remained in the shadow of monumental sculpture. It is only in the last four decades or so that coroplastic studies has developed into an autonomous field of research, with approaches specific to the discipline that consider modalities of production, as well as the religious, social, political, and economic roles that terracottas played in ancient Greek life by means of broad sociological and anthropological approaches. Consequently, this bibliography mainly comprises publications of the last forty years, although old titles that are still essential for research are also included.

Ancient water robotics and Abou-l Iz Al-Jazari

2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 699-709 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zekâi Şen
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Southeastern Part ◽  
Water Power ◽  
12Th Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century

Although water resources have been developed throughout the centuries for the service of different civilizations, at different scales and in different regions, their use in automation has been conceived only recently. Research into the history of water from an automation point of view has led to some unknown or hidden facts. Starting from the ancient Greek period before the prophet Christ and after about the 12th century, many researchers tried to make use of water power for working some simple but effective devices for the service of mankind. Among these are the haulage of water from a lower level to a higher elevation by water wheels in order to irrigate agricultural land. Hero during the Hellenistic period and Vitruvius of the Roman Empire were among the first who tried to make use of water power for use in different human activities, such as water haulage, watermills, water clocks, etc. The highlights of these works were achieved by a 12th century Muslim researcher, Abou-l Iz Al-Jazari, who lived in the southeastern part of modern day Turkey. He reviewed all the previous work from different civilizations and then suggested his own designs and devices for the use of water power in automation of excellent types. He even combined animals and water power through early designs of valves, pistons, cylinders and crank mills, as will be explained in this paper. His works were revealed by German historians and engineers in the first quarter of the 19th century. Later, an English engineer translated his book from Arabic into English, revealing the guidelines for modern automation and robotic designs originating from the 12th century. This paper gives a brief summary of the early workers' devices and Abou-l Iz Al-Jazari's much more developed designs with his original hand-drawn pictures.

scholarly journals Teaching Modern Greek to Classicists

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-139
Author(s):  
Jerneja Kavčič ◽  
Brian Daniel Joseph ◽  
Christopher Brown
Keyword(s):  
Teaching Practice ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Greek Language ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
History Of ◽  
Carry Over ◽  
The 19Th Century

The ideology of decline is a part of the history of the study and characterization of the Greek language from the Hellenistic period and the Roman Atticist movement right up to the emergence of katharevousa in the 19th century and the resulting modern diglossia. It is also clear, however, that there is an overwhelming presence of Ancient Greek vocabulary and forms in the modern language. Our position is that the recognition of such phenomena can provide a tool for introducing classicists to the modern language, a view that has various intellectual predecessors (e.g., Albert Thumb, Nicholas Bachtin, George Thomson, and Robert Browning). We thus propose a model for the teaching of Modern Greek to classicists that starts with words that we refer to as carry-overs. These are words that can be used in the modern language without requiring any explanation of pronunciation rules concerning Modern Greek spelling or of differences in meaning in comparison to their ancient predecessors (e.g., κακός ‘bad’, μικρός ‘small’, νέος ‘new’, μέλι ‘honey’, πίνετε ‘you drink’). Our data show that a beginners’ textbook of Ancient Greek may contain as many as a few hundred carry-over words, their exact number depending on the variety of the Erasmian pronunciation that is adopted in the teaching practice. However, the teaching of Modern Greek to classicists should also take into account lexical phenomena such as Ancient-Modern Greek false friends, as well as Modern Greek words that correspond to their ancient Greek predecessors only in terms of their written forms and meanings.

scholarly journals Logical and illogical exegeses of hydrometeorological phenomena in ancient Greece

2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Koutsoyiannis ◽  
N. Mamassi ◽  
A. Tegos
Keyword(s):  
Hydrological Cycle ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Natural Sources ◽  
Evaporation And Condensation ◽  
Ancient Civilizations ◽  
Greek World

Technological applications aiming at the exploitation of the natural sources appear in all ancient civilizations. The unique phenomenon in the ancient Greek civilization is that technological needs triggered physical explanations of natural phenomena, thus enabling the foundation of philosophy and science. Among these, the study of hydrometeorological phenomena had a major role. This study begins with the Ionian philosophers in the seventh century BC, continues in classical Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, and advances and expands through the entire Greek world up to the end of Hellenistic period. Many of the theories developed by ancient Greeks are erroneous according to modern views. However, many elements in Greek exegeses of hydrometeorological processes, such as evaporation and condensation of vapour, creation of clouds, hail, snow and rainfall, and evolution of hydrological cycle, are impressive even today.

scholarly journals (De)constructing Politeia: Reflections on Citizenship and the Bestowal of Privileges upon Foreigners in Hellenistic Democracies

2014 ◽  
Vol 69 (03) ◽  
pp. 533-554 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christel Müller
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Traditional Conception ◽  
Resident Aliens ◽  
The Right ◽  
Social Fluidity ◽  
Greek World ◽  
Legal Marriage

AbstractsThis article revisits the notion of citizenship (politeia) in the ancient Greek world, challenging the traditional conception, based principally on the works of Aristotle, that defines citizenship in terms of political participation. It considers the numerous decrees issued during the Hellenistic period bestowing legal privileges upon foreign benefactors (such as the right to own property, to trade, to enter into a legal marriage, to be exempted from certain taxes, and so on). If the Classical period’s tripartite division of status (citizens, resident aliens, and slaves) remained valid during the Hellenistic period and provided the “infrastructure” of civic societies, the system of privileges established by cities to honor deserving foreigners created a “concatenation” of different positions, which, without calling the hierarchy of legal statuses into question, introduced social fluidity into an interconnected world that was far removed from the Platonic and Aristotelian ideals of the autarchic city.

Social Ecology of the Ancient Greek World

1975 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 211-218
Author(s):  
Simon Cornelis Bakhuizen
Keyword(s):  
Social Ecology ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek World

Lykophron's Alexandra, Rome, and the Hellenistic World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Hornblower
Keyword(s):  
Turning Point ◽  
Roman History ◽  
Historical Document ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
South Italy ◽  
Hellenistic World ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Greek World ◽  
Area Of Origin

This book is an original, accessibly written, contribution to Roman and Hellenistic history. Its subject is a long (1474-line) ancient Greek poem, Lykophron’s Alexandra, probably written about 190 BC. The Trojan Kassandra foretells the conflicts between Europe and Asia from the Trojan Wars to the establishment of Roman ascendancy over the Greek world in the poet’s own time, including the founding of new cities by returning Greeks through the Mediterranean zone, and of Rome by the Trojan refugee Aineias, Kassandra’s kinsman. Simon Hornblower now follows his detailed commentary (OUP 2015, paperback 2017) with a monograph asserting the Alexandra’s importance as a historical document of interest to political, cultural, and religious historians and students of myths of identity. Part One explores Lykophron’s geopolitical world, especially south Italy (perhaps the poet’s area of origin), Sicily, and Rhodes, and argues that the recent (in the 190s) hostile presence of Hannibal in south Italy is a frequent if indirectly expressed concern of the poem. Part Two investigates the poem’s relation to Sibylline and other anti-Roman writings, and argues for its cultural and religious topicality. The Conclusion shows that the 190s BC were a turning-point in Roman history, and that Lykophron was aware of this.

Levantine Art in the “Orientalizing” Period

2019 ◽  
pp. 369-383
Author(s):  
Marian H. Feldman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The West ◽  
False Dichotomy ◽  
First Millennium

The “Orientalizing period” represents a scholarly designation used to describe the eighth and seventh centuries bce when regions in Greece, Italy, and farther west witnessed a flourishing of arts and cultures attributed to contact with cultural areas to the east—in particular that of the Phoenicians. This chapter surveys Orientalizing as an intellectual and historiographic concept and reconsiders the role of purportedly Phoenician arts within the existing scholarly narratives. The Orientalizing period should be understood as a construct of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship that was structured around a false dichotomy between the Orient (the East) and the West. The designation “Phoenician” has a similarly complex historiographic past rooted in ancient Greek stereotyping that has profoundly shaped modern scholarly interpretations. This chapter argues that the luxury arts most often credited as agents of Orientalization—most prominent among them being carved ivories, decorated metal bowls, and engraved tridacna shells—cannot be exclusively associated with a Phoenician cultural origin, thus calling into question the primacy of the Phoenicians in Orientalizing processes. Each of these types of objects appears to have a much broader production sphere than is indicated by the attribute as Phoenician. In addition, the notion of unidirectional influences flowing from east to west is challenged, and instead concepts of connectivity and networking are proposed as more useful frameworks for approaching the problem of cultural relations during the early part of the first millennium bce.

CONSTRUCTING THE ‘URBAN PROFILE’ OF AN ANCIENT GREEK CITY: EVIDENCE FROM THE OLYNTHOS PROJECT

2020 ◽  
Vol 115 ◽  
pp. 329-378
Author(s):  
Lisa C. Nevett ◽  
E. Bettina Tsigarida ◽  
Zosia H. Archibald ◽  
David L. Stone ◽  
Bradley A. Ault ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Infrastructure ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek City ◽  
Classical Greece ◽  
Relevant Evidence ◽  
Classical Studies ◽  
Legacy Data ◽  
Greek World

This article argues that a holistic approach to documenting and understanding the physical evidence for individual cities would enhance our ability to address major questions about urbanisation, urbanism, cultural identities and economic processes. At the same time we suggest that providing more comprehensive data-sets concerning Greek cities would represent an important contribution to cross-cultural studies of urban development and urbanism, which have often overlooked relevant evidence from Classical Greece. As an example of the approach we are advocating, we offer detailed discussion of data from the Archaic and Classical city of Olynthos, in the Halkidiki. Six seasons of fieldwork here by the Olynthos Project, together with legacy data from earlier projects by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and by the Greek Archaeological Service, combine to make this one of the best-documented urban centres surviving from the Greek world. We suggest that the material from the site offers the potential to build up a detailed ‘urban profile’, consisting of an overview of the early development of the community as well as an in-depth picture of the organisation of the Classical settlement. Some aspects of the urban infrastructure can also be quantified, allowing a new assessment of (for example) its demography. This article offers a sample of the kinds of data available and the sorts of questions that can be addressed in constructing such a profile, based on a brief summary of the interim results of fieldwork and data analysis carried out by the Olynthos Project, with a focus on research undertaken during the 2017, 2018 and 2019 seasons.

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