Prolegomena to the Study of Meroitic Art

Author(s):  
Janice W. Yellin

The history of Kush is a complex one in which the polities of Egypt, Kerma, Napata, and Meroe shaped the culture and historical trajectory of the Middle Nile Valley. During the Meroitic Period appropriations and adaptations of art from pharaonic and Greco-Roman Egypt and to a lesser extent from the Mediterranean world obscure its art’s fundamental qualities. Because Meroitic artists enjoyed a degree of autonomy, different visual styles and standards of quality coexisted without following particular paths of stylistic development. Michel Baud aptly described Meroitic art as multivalent in nature. Examples of art and architecture have typically been studied and published as individual artifacts without systematically contextualizing them within broader study of Meroitic aesthetics, exploring the nature of Meroe’s appropriations of Egyptian and classical styles and iconography, creating a history of their stylistic development, or considering how the circumstances of their manufacture impacted their appearance. This entry offers a preliminary examination of these as prolegomena to the development of a history of Meroitic art.

Author(s):  
Элеонора Кормышева ◽  
Eleonora Kormysheva

The diachronic trends in socio-economic and cultural development of the societies in the Nile valley are revealed based on the materials from Giza necropolis (the 3rd millennium BC) and the settlement of Abu Erteila (1st century AD). The research made it possible to trace the typological similarities in the evolution of the studied societies in cultural and historical contexts. The main fields of the research were epigraphy, iconography, social history, and material culture. Many previously unknown monuments discovered by Russian archaeologists in Egypt and Sudan were introduced into scientific discourse. The basis was created for studying the Nile valley as a contact zone between the Mediterranean world and Africa.


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.


Author(s):  
Karen C. Britt

This chapter provides an introduction to early Christian mosaics that emphasizes the important role played by archaeology in improving our understanding of their geographical and architectural contexts. After a short discussion of the position of early Christian mosaics in the history of the medium, a brief review of the most productive methodologies used in research on mosaics is undertaken, followed by a survey of mosaic technology that includes the workshops and artists involved in mosaic production. In the rest of the chapter, a selection of mosaics in churches, martyria, chapels, and Christian mausolea located in various parts of the Mediterranean world is examined. The evidence from archaeology demonstrates that although early Christian mosaics share universal themes, the diversity reflected in their iconography and the presence of secondary themes rooted in local traditions necessitate a regional approach to their interpretation.


Rough Waters ◽  
2010 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Silvia Marzagalli ◽  
James R. Sofka ◽  
John J. McCusker

In his path-breaking study of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean world, Fernand Braudel identified the “invasion” by Atlantic ships and merchants as one of the major, long-lasting events in the history of the Mediterranean Sea in early modern times.2 According to Braudel, the arrival of English, Flemish and French Atlantic vessels and their captains began discretely in the early sixteenth century as a result of an increased Mediterranean demand for cheap transport services. Within a few decades, however, northern Europeans evolved from a complementary to a commanding position in the region. Atlantic shipping and trade came to dominate the most lucrative Mediterranean trades, and the Atlantic powers steadily imposed their rules and politics on Mediterranean countries, progressively subordinating the region to Atlantic interests. Their ...


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamar Rotman

Gregory of Tours, the sixth-century Merovingian bishop, composed extensive historiographical and hagiographical corpora during the twenty years of his episcopacy in Tours. These works serve as important sources for the cultural, social, political and religious history of Merovingian Gaul. This book focuses on Gregory’s hagiographical collections, especially the Glory of the Martyrs, Glory of the Confessors, and Life of the Fathers, which contain accounts of saints and their miracles from across the Mediterranean world. It analyses these accounts from literary and historical perspectives, examining them through the lens of relations between the Merovingians and their Mediterranean counterparts, and contextualizing them within the identity crisis that followed the disintegration of the Roman world. This approach leads to groundbreaking conclusions about Gregory’s hagiographies, which this study argues were designed as an “ecclesiastical history” (of the Merovingian Church) that enabled him to craft a specific Gallo-Christian identity for his audience.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 378-406
Author(s):  
Dennis Mizzi

Abstract The time when Qumran was studied in splendid isolation is long gone, but much work remains to be done when it comes to situating the site in its wider context. In this paper, Qumran is contextualized, on the one hand, within the larger ecological history of the Mediterranean and, on the other, within the Mediterranean world of classical antiquity. Questions regarding the functions of the Qumran settlement are addressed from the perspective of “marginal zones” in the Mediterranean, which provides an ideal backdrop through which to illumine aspects of daily life at Qumran. Furthermore, it is shown how comparative case studies from the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean help us to nuance the discussion concerning “Hellenization” or “Romanization” with regard to Qumran. Finally, a new understanding of L4, which is here interpreted primarily as a dining room, is proposed on the basis of archaeological parallels from the Graeco-Roman world. A pan-Mediterranean perspective, therefore, allows us to generate new insights on old questions and novel interpretations.


1950 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melvin M. Knight

Any historian feels free to shift, enlarge, or contract his spatial or temporal field of attention, but the building of formal conceptions of time and space as flexible is something else. Fernand Braudel's recent book contains many revisions of judgment concerning the economic history of the centuries it treats, and also a way of handling space and time that gives the volume theoretical as well as historical interest. In his title, “the Mediterranean” refers to the region as well as to the sea. His “Mediterranean world” includes various outside areas, some remote, that have been related to the region by the activities of man in society. Peripheral mountains and deserts, for example, are considered in much detail, and four historic corridors (he calls them isthmuses) to northern waters are formally discussed. His “Epoch of Philip II” is in the first third of the book hardly a temporal “home port”; it is touched more frequently in Part II and is much used in the final section.


1941 ◽  
Vol 31 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 82-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. W. Walbank

Fifty years separated the Declaration of Corinth in 196 and the destruction of Corinth in 146, two milestones in the history of Graeco-Roman relations. Exactly midway between these two events comes the embassy of Q. Marcius Philippus, notorious for a piece of sharp practice which aroused the compunction of a section of the Roman Senate itself, and as the prelude to a war regarded by many in Greece as the first step in a policy which was to end in the ruin of two of the greatest cities of the Mediterranean world. The object of the following note is to examine in some detail the date and purpose of this embassy.


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