Hellenistic Culture

2009 ◽  
pp. 85-97
Author(s):  
Susan Stephens
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
The West ◽  
Native Languages ◽  
Political Dominance

This article suggests an appeal to a broader cultural contextualization, calling on scholars to look at the interactions between Greek and non-Greek cultures in the Hellenistic period, which followed the reign of Alexander, and in which he continued to enjoy cult status. It emphasizes contrasting trends that emerge in relation to ethnic identity: non-Greeks learn Greek and adopt Greek customs; while Greeks often marry into local non-Greek populations, speak native languages, and practise native manners and rituals. In the West, however, the centre of power is Rome, and, as indicated by contemporary literature and art, both Greeks and non-Greeks find themselves responding and adapting to its growing cultural and political dominance.

A Pleasing Odour for Yahweh

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
Anne Katrine De Hemmer Gudme
Keyword(s):  
Hebrew Bible ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
The Sun ◽  
The West ◽  
Sense Of Smell ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Crucial Part

This article investigates the importance of smell in the sacrificial cults of the ancient Mediterranean, using the Yahweh temple on Mount Gerizim and the Hebrew Bible as a case-study. The material shows that smell was an important factor in delineating sacred space in the ancient world and that the sense of smell was a crucial part of the conceptualization of the meeting between the human and the divine.  In the Hebrew Bible, the temple cult is pervaded by smell. There is the sacred oil laced with spices and aromatics with which the sanctuary and the priests are anointed. There is the fragrant and luxurious incense, which is burnt every day in front of Yahweh and finally there are the sacrifices and offerings that are burnt on the altar as ‘gifts of fire’ and as ‘pleasing odors’ to Yahweh. The gifts that are given to Yahweh are explicitly described as pleasing to the deity’s sense of smell. On Mount Gerizim, which is close to present-day Nablus on the west bank, there once stood a temple dedicated to the god Yahweh, whom we also know from the Hebrew Bible. The temple was in use from the Persian to the Hellenistic period (ca. 450 – 110 BCE) and during this time thousands of animals (mostly goats, sheep, pigeons and cows) were slaughtered and burnt on the altar as gifts to Yahweh. The worshippers who came to the sanctuary – and we know some of them by name because they left inscriptions commemorating their visit to the temple – would have experienced an overwhelming combination of smells: the smell of spicy herbs baked by the sun that is carried by the wind, the smell of humans standing close together and the smell of animals, of dung and blood, and behind it all as a backdrop of scent the constant smell of the sacrificial smoke that rises to the sky.

Diocletian's Price-Edict at Ptolemais (Cyrenaica)

1955 ◽  
Vol 45 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 106-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giacomo Caputo ◽  
Richard Goodchild
Keyword(s):  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
The West ◽  
Italian Government ◽  
Systematic Exploration ◽  
Roman Age ◽  
The City ◽  
Made In ◽  
Late Roman

Introduction.—The systematic exploration of Ptolemais (modern Tolmeita), in Cyrenaica, began in 1935 under the auspices of the Italian Government, and under the direction of the first-named writer. The general programme of excavation took into consideration not only the important Hellenistic period, which gave the city its name and saw its first development as an autonomous trading-centre, but also the late-Roman age when, upon Diocletian's reforms, Ptolemais became capital of the new province of Libya Pentapolis and a Metropolitan See, later occupied by Bishop Synesius.As one of several starting-points for the study of this later period, there was selected the area first noted by the Beecheys as containing ‘heaps of columns’, which later yielded the monumental inscriptions of Valentinian, Arcadius, and Honorius, published by Oliverio. Here excavation soon brought to light a decumanus, running from the major cardo on the west towards the great Byzantine fortress on the east. Architectural and other discoveries made in 1935–36 justified the provisional title ‘Monumental Street’ assigned to this ancient thoroughfare. In terms of the general town-plan, which is extremely regular, this street may be called ‘Decumanus II North’, since two rows of long rectangular insulae separate it from the Decumanus Maximus leading to the West Gate, still erect. The clearing of the Monumental Street and its frontages revealed the well-known Maenad reliefs, attributed to the sculptor Callimachus, a late-Roman triple Triumphal Arch, and fragments of monumental inscriptions similar in character to those previously published from the same area.

THE HERO OF THE NOVEL BY I. MALYSHEV “NOMAKH” AND THE YEGOR LETOV’S POETICS

2021 ◽  
pp. 92-101
Author(s):  
Denis L. Karpov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
Difficult Situation ◽  
Literary Life ◽  
Civil War Era

Contemporary literature is being formed in a difficult situation of polyphony of the modern consumer culture. Mainstream discourses are mixed with subcultural ones, the authors are influenced not only by the literary tradition itself, but also, for example, by rock culture. Thus, the countercultural, subcultural experience, which until recently was considered as peripheral, is actively being introduced into the socio-cultural discourse of modern Russia through the assimilation by authors claiming a place in the center of the country’s literary life. The novel by I. Malyshev “Nomakh” may be considered as an example of such influence. It became a finalist of the literary prize contest “Big Book” in 2017. The novel is clearly influenced by countercultural ideology, in particular by E. Letov, one of the most popular and reputable representatives of the West Siberian counterculture. At the same time, there are no direct references or quotations from the poetry of the Omsk musician in the novel. Rather, one can see some stylistic likenesses, similar figurative complexes. The reception of a historical character from the civil war era is based on the learned principles of poetics and Letov’s worldview. In addition, adopting the intellectual experience of the counterculture, I. Malyshev’s novel not only relays a certain ideology, but also, with the help of artistic means, recreates or completes the images of its hero, historical character, and cultural heroes, which he focuses on.

Metaphors of Ethnic Identity: Projective Life History Narratives of Trinidadians of Indian Descent

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael V. Angrosino
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Life History ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
West Indies ◽  
West Indian ◽  
The West ◽  
Pluralistic Society ◽  
History Narratives ◽  
Secure Place ◽  
Formal Properties

Abstract Indentured laborers from India were brought to the West Indies beginning in the 1840s. They form upwards of 40% of the population of several West Indian territories, including Trinidad (part of the nation of Trinidad and Tobago). Despite considerable assimilation to West Indian norms, these peo-ple of Indian descent feel strongly about retaining a separate and distinctive cultural identity. There is no overall consensus, however, as to what these people and their distinctive culture should be called. I argue that the quest for an appropriate label of ethnic identity is not a matter of arcane academic interest, but is at the heart of these people's construction of a secure place in a pluralistic society. The technique of projective life-history narrative is explored as a means to uncover the dynamic of the discourse of ethnic self-identification in modern Trinidad. Four widely used labels of ethnic identity are seen as master meta-phors to which individual life accounts are assimilated. Analysis of the formal properties of those accounts facilitates an understanding of how people of Indian descent think of themselves and present themselves in social interaction with members of other groups. (Anthropology)

SCHWEITZER AND AFRICA

2016 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 1107-1132 ◽  
Author(s):  
RUTH HARRIS
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Protection ◽  
First World War ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Native Languages ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Reverence For Life ◽  
The Village ◽  
First World

AbstractThis work analyses Albert Schweitzer's complex relationship to Africa, and places him within the context of medical missionizing. Although he worked in Africa for over fifty years, Schweitzer was strangely indifferent to the continent's culture. Unlike his fellow missionaries, he never learned native languages, and his service was primarily grounded in a Nietzschean rejection of European conventionalities and a desire to develop his unique ‘ethical personality’. Schweitzer's self-belief enabled him to create a village-hospital where the sick could come with their families for treatment and refuge, and contributed to his idea of the ‘reverence for life’, a secularized ethics of compassion and environmental protection that made him famous in the West. The village-hospital enabled him to tend the sick more effectively, but after the First World War it became more hierarchical and de-personalized. Schweitzer's missionary experiment in Lambaréné was simultaneously radical and conformist, daring and self-protectively conservative. His desire to serve was as profound as any of his clerical colleagues, but it was built, as will be seen, upon rebellious ethical foundations. Schweitzer stands out not so much for his therapeutic innovations (though these were important), as for his later formulation of a neo-Christian ecologism that assured his fame in Europe and America.

scholarly journals The modern Invention of Barbarians: Ethnicity and the Transmission of Form

October ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 161 ◽  
pp. 11-22
Author(s):  
Eric Michaud
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
The West ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Native Populations ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of

The history of art started with the myth of Barbarian invasions. Countering the timelessness of Classical art as affirmed by Winckelmann in the middle of the eighteenth century, a new argument arose: The West was propelled into modernity by the Barbarian invasions of the fourth and fifth centuries, as it was converted from paganism to Christianity. The infusion of the new blood of the northern races was seen to have engendered a new art, anti-Roman and anti-Classical, whose legacy was still apparent in Europe. This was a fantasmatic narrative, inseparable from the formation of nation-states and the rise of nationalism in Europe. Based on the dual assumption of the homogeneity and the continuity of their native populations, it assumed that styles depend on both blood and race; the “tactile” or “optical” qualities of an object became the unequivocal signs of its “Latin” or “Germanic” provenance, and museums organized their objects according to the “ethnic” identity of their creators.

scholarly journals ZIMBABWE : A Country Profile

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Knocks Tapiwa Zengeni
Keyword(s):  
National Language ◽  
Official Language ◽  
Small Country ◽  
The West ◽  
Native Languages ◽  
Independent State ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
British Colony ◽  
Set Up ◽  
One Year

Zimbabwe is a relatively small country situated in the southern part of Africa between South Africa and Zambia. It is also bounded by Mozambique in the east and Botswana in the West. This land-locked country occupies about 390,757 sq km of land and its population is about 12.4 million (CIA World Fact Book, 2011). Zimbabwe was a British colony for almost a century and was one of a few countries which belatedly achieved independence after waging a protracted liberation war. Several racial and ethnic groups reside in the county. English is the official language with two dominating native languages, that is, Shona and Sindebele being accorded national language status. Since 2000, Zimbabwe has been embroiled in the worst political and socio-economic crisis of its thirty-one year history as an independent state. Unfortunately, this unprecedented crisis has negatively affected every aspect of the country and every segment of the population. However, in February, 2009, after almost a year of uncertainty following controversial elections in 2008, a semblance of normality seems to have emerged after the main political actors agreed to set up an inclusive government. Despite these promising signs the country is still not out of the woods yet.    

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