Antioch in the Sixth Century: Resilience or Vulnerability?

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-41
Author(s):  
Lee Mordechai
Keyword(s):  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Scientific Data ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Civil Strife ◽  
Continuous Support ◽  
The City

Abstract Sixth century Antioch is perhaps the best example of state-city resilience in Late Antiquity. Over the century, the city suffered multiple natural disasters, civil strife and external conflict. Scholars have generally accepted that the city declined as a result. This study integrates historical, archaeological and scientific data to illuminate the city’s fate. It concludes that Antioch demonstrated remarkable resilience at the city level throughout the 6th c. The most important factor was the continuous support the city received from the central government.

scholarly journals From the Tombs into the City: Grave Robbing and the Reuse of Funerary Spolia in Late Antique Italy

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 115-137
Author(s):  
Cristina Murer
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

Archaeological evidence demonstrates that funerary spoil (e.g. sarcophagus lids, funerary altars, epitaphs, reliefs, and statues) were frequently reused to decorate the interiors of public and private buildings from the third to the sixth century. Therefore, the marble revetments of high imperial tombs must have been spoliated. Imperial edicts, which tried to stamp part the overly common practice of tomb plundering, confirm that the social practice of tomb plundering must have been far more frequent in late antiquity than in previous periods. This paper discusses the reuse of funerary spoil in privet and public buildings from Latium and Campania and contextualizes them by examining legal sources addressing tomb violation. Furthermore, this study considers the extent to which the social practice of tomb plundering and the reuse of funerary material in late antiquity can be connected with larger urbanist, sociohistorical, and political transformations of Italian cityscapes from the third to the sixth century.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Carlos Machado
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Comprehensive Understanding ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
The Third ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Developments ◽  
The City

Scholars have traditionally approached the history of Rome in late antiquity as a metaphor for the fate of the empire and the ancient world, focusing on the distancing of the imperial court or on the growing importance of the Christian church. However, as this introduction argues, it is by focusing on the Roman aristocracy and its relationship with the city and its spaces that we can form a comprehensive understanding of the physical and historical developments that redefined Rome during this period. After providing a brief overview of the developments that shaped the city and its elite, between the end of the third and the beginning of the sixth century, the introduction discusses the nature of the evidence available, as well as the approach adopted in the book.

Some Aspects of Identity Politics of Kharkiv Local Authorities After 2013

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-81
Author(s):  
Denys Kutsenko
Keyword(s):  
Development Strategy ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Interesting Case ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Local Authorities ◽  
New Policies ◽  
National Flag ◽  
The City

AbstractThe paper analyzes the transformation of identity politics of Kharkiv local authorities after the Euromaidan, or Revolution of Dignity, the annexation of Crimea, and the War in Donbass. Being the second largest city in Ukraine and becoming the frontline city in 2014, Kharkiv is an interesting case for research on how former pro-Russian local elites treat new policies of the central government in Kyiv, on whether earlier they tried to mobilize their electorate or to provoke political opponents with using soviet symbols, soviet memory, and copying Russian initiatives in the sphere of identity.To answer the research question of this article, an analysis of Kharkiv city and oblast programs and strategies and of communal media were made. Decommunisation, as one of the most important identity projects of Ukrainian central authorities after 2014, was analyzed through publications in Kharkiv’s city-owned media as well as reports from other scholars. Some conclusions are made from the analysis of these documents: Kharkiv development strategy until 2020, Complex program of cultural development in Kharkiv in 2011–2016 (and the same for 2017–2021), The regional program of military and patriotic training and participation of people in measures of defense work in 2015–2017, Program of supporting civil society in 2016–2020 in Kharkiv region and the city mayor’s orders about the celebration of Victory Day (9 May), the Day of the National Flag (23 August), the Day of the City (23 August) and Independence Day (24 August) in 2010–2015.

Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Machado
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Social ◽  
Traditional Elite ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.

scholarly journals THE HISTORY OF BILINGUAL DICTIONARIES RECONSIDERED: AN ANCIENT FRAGMENT RELATED TO PS.-PHILOXENUS (P.VARS. 6) AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Eleanor Dickey
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Alphabetical Order ◽  
Bilingual Dictionaries ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Republic

Abstract This article identifies a papyrus in Warsaw, P.Vars. 6, as a fragment of the large Latin–Greek glossary known as Ps.-Philoxenus. That glossary, published in volume II of G. Goetz's Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum on the basis of a ninth-century manuscript, is by far the most important of the bilingual glossaries surviving from antiquity, being derived from lost works of Roman scholarship and preserving valuable information about rare and archaic Latin words. It has long been considered a product of the sixth century a.d., but the papyrus dates to c.200, and internal evidence indicates that the glossary itself must be substantially older than that copy. The Ps.-Philoxenus glossary is therefore not a creation of Late Antiquity but of the Early Empire or perhaps even the Republic. Large bilingual glossaries in alphabetical order must have existed far earlier than has hitherto been believed.

The Chengba site in Quxian County, Sichuan Province

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-68
Keyword(s):  
Central Government ◽  
Local People ◽  
Archaeological Survey ◽  
History Museum ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Functional Zoning ◽  
The Social ◽  
Bamboo Slips ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City

AbstractIn 2014 through 2018, Sichuan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and History Museum of Quxian County conducted a systematic archaeological survey, detection, and excavation to the Chengba site in Quxian County. The excavation uncovered 4,000sq m in total, from which 444 various features were recovered and over 1,000 artifacts were unearthed. The functional zoning of this site has been roughly made clear; the excavations of the western gate and important building foundations of the Guojiatai city site are important archaeological discoveries of the city sites of the Han through Western Jin dynasties, and at the checkpoint site on the waterway of this period was uncovered for the first time in China. The large amounts of bamboo slips and wooden tablets unearthed in the excavation provided important materials for the explorations on the management of the central government of the Han and Jin empires to the administrative areas of commandery and district levels and the social lives of the local people at that time.

Re-examining Roman Death Pollution

2020 ◽  
Vol 110 ◽  
pp. 5-27
Author(s):  
Allison L. C. Emmerson
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fear Of Death ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Variable Combination ◽  
The City

AbstractThe idea that the dead were polluting — that is, that corpses posed a danger of making the living unclean, offensive both to their own communities and to the gods — has long occupied a fundamental position in Roman funerary studies. Nevertheless, what that pollution comprised, as well as how it affected living society, remain subject to debate. This article aims to clarify the issue by re-examining the evidence for Roman attitudes towards the dead. Focusing on the city of Rome itself, I conclude that we have little reason to reconstruct a fear of death pollution prior to Late Antiquity; in fact, the term itself has been detrimental to current understandings. No surviving text from the late republican or early imperial periods indicates that corpses were objects of metaphysical fear, and rather than polluted, mourners are better conceived as obligated, bound by a variable combination of emotions and conventions to behave in certain, if certainly changeable, ways following a death.

Environmental Change, the Acts of John, and Shifting Cultic Landscapes in Late Antique Ephesus

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-215
Author(s):  
Travis Proctor
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Deep Water ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Christian Identity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Cultural Shift ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The City

The city of Ephesus experienced a marked civic transformation in Late Antiquity. After having centered its settlements and economic fortunes on its proximity to a deep-water harbor for over a millenium, late antique Ephesus gradually shifted to an inland, fortified settlement on Ayasoluk Hill. While several factors undoubtedly informed this civic reorientation, the most commonly cited impetus for Ephesus’s late antique reorientation was the infilling of its deep-water harbor. This article argues that, in addition to this environmental cause, an important cultural shift correspondingly informed Ephesus’s late antique reconfigurations. Namely, the emergence and development of the tomb of John on Ayasoluk Hill, informed by an array of literary legends associating the apostle with the city, increasingly positioned this site as a cultic and economic focal point in Late Antiquity. This article argues that an important early strand in this cultural fabric was the Acts of John, a collection of apocryphal tales that narrate John’s exploits in Ephesus. Significantly, the Acts of John articulates a “counter-cartography” that disassociates Christian identity from prominent Ephesian cultic sites and accentuates the importance of spaces “outside the city” of Ephesus, including and especially the tomb of John. Through its own circulation as well as its influence on later Johannine narratives, the early Acts of John helped inform a shift in the cultural cartographies of Ephesus, where Greco-Roman polytheistic spaces were gradually devalued in favor of Christian sites, the tomb of John on Ayasoluk chief among them.

III. Villanovan Veii

1961 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 20-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. B. Ward-Perkins
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Central Italy ◽  
Early Iron Age ◽  
Long Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
Precise Relationship ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The City

The roads and gates described in the previous section are of very varied dates, and many of them were in use over a long period. They have been described first because they constitute the essential framework for any serious topographical study of Veii. Within this framework the city developed, and in this and the following sections will be found described, period by period, the evidence for that development, from the first establishment of Veii in Villanovan times down to its final abandonment in late antiquity.Whatever the precise relationship of the Villanovan to the succeeding phases of the Early Iron Age in central Italy in terms of politics, race or language, it is abundantly clear that it was within the Villanovan period that the main lines of the social and topographical framework of historical Etruria first took shape. Veii is no exception. Apart from sporadic material that may have been dropped by Neolithic or Bronze Age hunters, there is nothing from the Ager Veientanus to suggest that it was the scene of any substantial settlement before the occupation of Veii itself by groups of Early Iron Age farmers, a part of whose material equipment relates them unequivocally to the Villanovan peoples of coastal and central Etruria.

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