Armenia

2021 ◽  
pp. 176-188
Author(s):  
Christina Maranci

A study of medieval Armenian painting, church architecture, bas-relief sculpture, and other media demonstrates close attention to, and reception of, the art and culture of the Byzantine Empire. Historic Armenia (including the present-day Armenian Republic and territories in eastern Anatolia, southern Georgia, northwest Iran, and Azerbaijan) and the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia (1199–1375, southwestern Anatolia) had close relations with neighboring powers throughout the medieval era, and scholars, most prominently Sirarpie Der Nersessian, have long studied the presence of Byzantine ideas in Armenian art and architecture. The early medieval period, the “Age of the Kingdoms” (ninth to eleventh centuries), and twelfth- to fourteenth-century Cilicia demonstrate strong evidence for contact and familiarity with Byzantine culture. An examination of select cases demonstrates the diverse and dynamic nature of such appropriations, reflecting the complex and changing nature of political, social, religious, and cultural relations between empire and locality.

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 78
Author(s):  
Aysel KAMAL ◽  
Sinem ATIS

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (1901-1962) is one of the most controversial authors in the 20th century Turkish literature. Literature critics find it difficult to place him in a school of literature and thought. There are many reasons that they have caused Tanpinar to give the impression of ambiguity in his thoughts through his literary works. One of them is that he is always open to (even admires) the "other" thought to a certain age, and he considers synthesis thinking at later ages. Tanpinar states in the letter that he wrote to a young lady from Antalya that he composed the foundations of his first period aesthetics due to the contributions from western (French) writers. The influence of the western writers on him has also inspired his interest in the materialist culture of the West. In 1953 and 1959 he organized two tours to Europe in order to see places where Western thought and culture were produced. He shared his impressions that he gained in European countries in his literary works. In the literary works of Tanpinar, Europe comes out as an aesthetic object. The most dominant facts of this aesthetic are music, painting, etc. In this work, in the writings of Tanpinar about the countries that he travelled in Europe, some factors were detected like European culture, lifestyle, socio-cultural relations, art and architecture, political and social history and so on. And the effects of European countries were compared with Tanpinar’s thought and aesthetics. Keywords: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, Europe, poetry, music, painting, culture, life


Author(s):  
Giovanna Bianchi

In 1994, an article appeared in the Italian journal Archeologia Medievale, written by Chris Wickham and Riccardo Francovich, entitled ‘Uno scavo archeologico ed il problema dello sviluppo della signoria territoriale: Rocca San Silvestro e i rapporti di produzione minerari’. It marked a breakthrough in the study of the exploitation of mineral resources (especially silver) in relation to forms of power, and the associated economic structure, and control of production between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. On the basis of the data available to archeological research at the time, the article ended with a series of open questions, especially relating to the early medieval period. The new campaign of field research, focused on the mining landscape of the Colline Metallifere in southern Tuscany, has made it possible to gather more information. While the data that has now been gathered are not yet sufficient to give definite and complete answers to those questions, they nevertheless allow us to now formulate some hypotheses which may serve as the foundations for broader considerations as regards the relationship between the exploitation of a fundamental resource for the economy of the time, and the main players and agents in that system of exploitation, within a landscape that was undergoing transformation in the period between the early medieval period and the middle centuries of the Middle Ages.


Author(s):  
Ross Balzaretti

This chapter responds to a point which Chris Wickham raised in his recent review of my book on Dark Age Liguria: did chestnut cultivation show any economic specialization in this region in the early medieval period? Chestnuts figured a great deal in that book, which drew briefly on the surviving charter documentation for the region. In this chapter a more detailed analysis of charters from the tenth and eleventh centuries develops an answer to the question of specialized production with a comparative study in which the Genoese evidence is set alongside similar charter evidence from Milan and its region, where chestnuts were also cultivated for food. The Genoa–Milan comparison puts into practice Wickham’s advocacy of comparative method at the micro as well as at the macro scale, for regions where comparison has not historically been the norm. The comparison suggests that chestnuts were more important to the Genoese than the Milanese economy, in part for local climatic reasons but also, perhaps, because of fundamental political and social differences between these two cities. It will be shown that some charters show that the production of chestnuts was to some degree specialized, how it was specialized and what the consequences of that specialization were for each economic system.


Antiquity ◽  
1955 ◽  
Vol 29 (114) ◽  
pp. 77-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Jackson

The archaeological background of the people of what is now Scotland south of the Forth and Clyde in the Roman period was a La Téne one, and specifically chiefly Iron Age B. This links them intimately with the Britons of southern Britain in the conglomeration of Celtic tribes who called themselves Brittones and spoke what we call the Brittonic or Ancient British form of Celtic, from which are descended the three modern languages of Welsh, Cornish and Breton. To the north of the Forth was a different people, the Picts. They too were Celts or partly Celts; probably not Brittones however, but a different branch of the Celtic race, though more closely related to the Brittones than to the Goidels of Ireland and (in later times) of the west of Scotland. Not being Brittonic, the Picts may be ignored here. Our southern Scottish Brittones are nothing but the northern portion of a common Brittonic population, from the southern portion of which come the people of Wales and Cornwall. Some historians speak of the northern Brittones as Welsh, following good Anglo-Saxon precedent, but this is apt to lead to confusion. The best term for them, in the Dark Ages and early Medieval period, as long as they survived, is ‘Cumbrians’, and for their language, ‘Cumbric’. They called themselves in Latin Cumbri and Cumbrenses, which is a Latinization of the native word Cymry, meaning ‘fellow-countrymen’, which both they and the Welsh used of themselves in common, and is still the Welsh name for the Welsh to the present day. The centre of their power was Strathclyde, the Clyde valley, with their capital at Dumbarton.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-187
Author(s):  
Massimo Iovane

Abstract This review essay analyses a very interesting collection of essays providing a fresh examination of international law schools operating in Italy from the early medieval period to current times. The Essay will show that the book adopts a completely new presentation of this subject, offering thus an unbiased assessment of the doctrinal debate developed in between the two World Wars.


Author(s):  
Yu-yu Cheng

In classical Chinese tradition, writing a commentary is a basic way of interpreting texts and teaching classics. A commentator not only speculates on an author’s intent but also cites from various oral or written accounts to annotate a text. Commentary thus becomes a core text for converging knowledge and conserving culture, and sometimes it is many times longer than the original text. This chapter focuses on a series of commentaries on literary texts in the early medieval period and shows that, instead of being secondary to the original text, a commentary constitutes a new text on a par with the urtext in many ways.


Author(s):  
David R. Knechtges

In China from ancient times the anthology has occupied an important place in literary culture. During the early medieval period the purely literary anthology comes into its own. The emergence of a large number of anthologies in this period is related to changing conceptions of writing as well as attempts to define genres and to establish an independent category for belles lettres. Only a few of the anthologies from this period have survived, the most famous being the Wen xuan, compiled around 526. Another extant single-genre anthology is the Yutai xinyong. The Wen xuan eventually became the Chinese anthology par excellence, and for several centuries was the primary source from which scholars and writers obtained their literary education; it was also important in Japan and Korea.


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