The Sun and the Throne.

Numen ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-152
Author(s):  
Russell Kirkland

AbstractIn this study, I seek to elucidate the process by which the Japanese royal descent myth evolved into the form with which the modern world is familiar. I analyze and compare the forms of the myth found in the Nihongi and the Kojiki, and explicate their evolution through historical and textual analysis. By examining the interplay of the internal dynamics of the myth itself and the external factors that worked to shape it, I reconstruct the mythographical process, and suggest key factors that may have molded the myth. In particular, I argue that it was the introduction of Buddhism at the Yamato court that stimulated the establishment of an imperial cult at Ise and the reconfiguration of key mythic traditions. According to my analysis, the myth itself originated during the reign of king Keitai (early 6th century). In the original myth, the ancestor of the ruling house was not the sun-goddess Amaterasu, but rather the heavenly ruler Takami-musubi. In the mid-sixth century, a sun-goddess named Ō-hirume was introduced in an effort to combat the rising influence of Buddhism. The artificial figure of Amaterasu was introduced only during the reign of Temmu, late in the seventh century.

2018 ◽  
pp. 125-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. M. Drobyshevsky ◽  
P. V. Trunin ◽  
A. V. Bozhechkova

The paper studies the factors of secular stagnation. Key factors of long-term slowdown in economic growth include the slowdown of technological development, aging population, human capital accumulation limits, high public debt, creative destruction process violation etc. The authors analyze key theoretical aspects of long-term stagnation and study the impact of these factors on Japanies economy. The authors conclude that most of the factors have significant influence on the Japanese economy for recent decades, but they cannot explain all dynamics. For Russia, on the contrary, we do not see any grounds for considering the decline in the economy since 2013 as an episode of secular stagnation.


Author(s):  
Ildar Garipzanov

This chapter examines the use of monograms as graphic signs of imperial authority in the late Roman and early Byzantine empire, from its appropriation on imperial coinage in the mid-fifth century to its employment in other material media in the following centuries. It also overviews the use of monograms by imperial officials and aristocrats as visible signs of social power and noble identity on mass-produced objects, dress accessories, and luxury items. The concluding section discusses a new social function for late antique monograms as visible tokens of a new Christian paideia and of elevated social status, related to ennobling calligraphic skills. This transformation of monograms into an attribute of visual Christian culture became especially apparent in sixth-century Byzantium, with the cruciform monograms appearing in the second quarter of the sixth century and becoming a default monogrammatic form from the seventh century onwards.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Rubenstein

Abstract The apocalyptic belief systems from early modernity discussed in this series of articles to varying degrees have precursors in the Middle Ages. The drive to map the globe for purposes both geographic and symbolic, finds expression in explicitly apocalyptic manuscripts produced throughout the Middle Ages. An apocalyptic political discourse, especially centered on themes of empire and Islam, developed in the seventh century and reached extraordinary popularity during the Crusades. Speculation about the end of world history among medieval intellectuals led them not to reject the natural world but to study it more closely, in ways that set the stage for the later Age of Discovery. These broad continuities between the medieval and early modern, and indeed into modernity, demonstrate the imperative of viewing apocalypticism not as an esoteric fringe movement but as a constructive force in cultural creation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-308
Author(s):  
Oriol Olesti Vila ◽  
Ricard Andreu Expósito ◽  
Jamie Wood

AbstractThe Discriptio Hispaniae is a passage from the Geometry of Gisemundus, also entitled Ars Gromatica Gisemundi (AGG), a medieval treatise of agrimensura written by an unknown author, probably a monk known as Gisemundus who had some agrimensorial experience. The work was compiled around AD 800 by collecting passages of a range of sizes, from just a few words to several pages, extracted from ancient and medieval sources. Although modern research into Roman agrimensorial texts has admitted the importance of the AGG, its corrupt condition has not invited sustained analysis. The passage now known as the Discriptio Hispaniae, a short section from chapter three of the second book of the AGG entitled III De segregatione provinciarum ab Augustalibus terminis, is particularly interesting for the information that it provides concerning the territorial division of Hispania in Late Antiquity. This article presents an edition and English translation of the Discriptio Hispaniae and argues that the most likely point of origin for the Discriptio Hispaniae is during the Byzantine occupation of parts of southern Spain during the second half of the sixth century and the first quarter of the seventh century. We suggest that the Discriptio Hispaniae was preserved because the Byzantine authorities were keen to keep on record information about the borders of the province of Carthaginensis, perhaps the main theme in the text.


PEDIATRICS ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-313
Author(s):  
Jack H. T. Chang ◽  
John D. Burrington

In the recent literature there appears to be a revival of interest in the use of Foley catheters in removing foreign objects from both orifices of the alimentary canal.1-3 During the peak of the Byzantine period, foreign bodies were extracted from the esophagus by having the patient swallow a small, dry sponge on a string, allowing it to expand in the stomach and then withdrawing the sponge. Paulus Aegineta (seventh century) wrote in Book Six of his Epitome of Medicine:


Author(s):  
John Wilkes

If you were training to be an athlete you would not spend all your time doing exercises: you would also have to learn when and how to relax, for relaxation is generally regarded as one of the most important elements in physical training. To my mind it is equally important for scholars. When you have been doing a lot of serious reading, it is a good idea to give your mind a rest and so build up energy for another bout of hard labour. For this purpose the best sort of book to read is not merely one that is witty and entertaining but also has something interesting to say. This advice from the satirist Lucian, sometime itinerant lecturer and at other times a minor government official, seems as valid today as it was in the second century AD. For students engaged in the history and archaeology of Europe in the first millennia BC and ad, I can currently think of no better respite from the structures, models and databases, that are the currencies of modern research, than Barry Cunliffie’s monograph on the explorer Pytheas published in 2001. Unencumbered with footnotes and with minimal bibliography, a text of barely 170 pages introduces one of the great mysteries of antiquity, the fantastic voyage of exploration by a citizen of Massalia, the Greek ancestor of modern Marseilles, to the British Isles and beyond to Iceland and the Arctic Circle and then in the direction of the Baltic (Cunliffe 2001). Nothing is known of Pytheas himself and the only reasonably certain fact we have concerning the voyage is that it was undertaken around the time of Alexander the Great (d. 323 BC). No less remarkable is that all we know of Pytheas’ own account of his travels is preserved in later writers, who at the least denigrated his achievement and often branded him a downright liar with considerable vehemence, while still exploiting his detailed account of the lands and seas he saw. Despite this the value of his astronomical observations was recognized by some of the greatest minds of antiquity and as a result his place in the development of the geographical sciences is assured.


Author(s):  
Steven D. Smith

This final chapter demonstrates the importance of contextualizing epigrams into the sociohistorical circumstances of their era if we want to achieve a deeper comprehension of the transformations that various motifs undergo through space and time. The chapter analyses a cluster of epigrams on imperial gardens that date from the first to the seventh century CE, and shows how these poems reflect diverse views about imperial power, aesthetics, pagan culture, and Christianity. The chapter discusses first an epigram from the Neronian era, then moves forward to late antiquity to consider a sequence of garden epigrams from the age of the Emperor Justinian (sixth century CE). The chapter concludes with an explicitly Christian garden epigram from the reign of the Emperor Heraclius (seventh century CE).


Author(s):  
Barbara Graziosi

‘Material clues’ considers the archaeological evidence for when the Iliad and Odyssey were composed, including Heinrich Schliemann’s quest to find Troy on the basis of clues in the texts. The Iliad and the Odyssey refer to material circumstances not found before the later eighth or early seventh century BCE. They describe a distant, mythical past, but are set in a real and recognisable landscape. No interpretation leads to a single original audience, historical context, or specific political agenda, but earliest quotations from, and references to, Homer in other poets’ work prove that by the late sixth century BCE, the poems were well known throughout the Greek world.


2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-258 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guillermo Rodríguez

Levin and Rappaport (1995) have proposed a binary classification for change of state verbs that revolves around the locus of cause for these changes: whether the cause is internal or external to the entity undergoing change. They claim this distinction is crosslinguistically viable and explains the syntactic behavior of these predicates. Based on work done by Smith (1970) and Wright (2001), this paper argues for an extension of Levin and Rappaport’s binary classification. Instead, I propose a continuum resulting from the analysis of corpora in English and Spanish for verbs that would enter the binary categories advanced by Levin and Rappaport. One of the problematic pairs of verbs for their classification when applied to Spanish, florecer ‘to bloom’ and marchitar(se) ‘to wilt’ is analyzed in detail. The continuum proposed here extends Levin and Rappaport’s categories and takes into account the locus of control of the change and whether external factors may be necessary conditions for the change to occur. In particular, this new focus can account for the presence or absence of the clitic se with some of the predicates in Spanish.


2000 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 153-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Coatsworth

In the nineteenth century, John Romilly Allen confidently claimed that the iconography of the Crucifixion with the robed or ‘fully draped’ Christ was a phenomenon of Celtic art, found in Scotland, Ireland and Wales, distinguishable from the ‘Saxon’ type in which Christ wore a loin-cloth. Other features of the Saxon type were the presence of the sun and moon above the arms of the cross, instead of angels as in Ireland; and the figures of the Virgin and St John at the foot of the cross, without the spear- and sponge-bearers, the latter pair appearing only exceptionally at Alnmouth, Northumberland; Aycliffe, County Durham; and Bradbourne, Derbyshire. Clearly two different versions were identified in this analysis, but no attempt was made to clarify the chronological relationship between the examples cited, and only the geographical distribution of a small number of examples was considered. Romilly Allen's confidence in distinguishing ‘Celt’ from ‘Saxon’ on the basis of art styles, even for the pre-Viking period, is not always shared today, as the continuing discussion of the origins of several important manuscripts shows. The terms ‘Insular’ and ‘Hiberno-Saxon’ used to describe much of the art from the sixth century to the eighth underline die perceived difficulties.


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