scholarly journals Carved Stone Fragment of Sanidine Trachyte from the Viljandi Castle

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 75
Author(s):  
Aivar Kriiska ◽  
Juho Kirs ◽  
Kaur Alttoa ◽  
Lennart Maala

This article examines the medieval carved stone fragment found in the course of archaeological excavations from a stable boys’ house in the third bailey of the Castle of the Teutonic Order in Viljandi (Estonia), which was built during the Middle Ages. It is likely that the piece of carved stone ended up in the layer of ruins when the buildings in the third bailey were demolished. Based thereon, no conclusions can be drawn about the original location of the carved stone – it may have been brought from somewhere in the vicinity. However, based on the place it was buried it is clear that the stone was carved before the second half of the 16th century.The carved stone fragment is a wedge-shaped piece of light grey limestone-like stone, which is few centimetres thick, 6–9 cm long and 5–8 cm wide, with carved profiling still visible on its sides. This mineralogicalpetrographical picture of carved stone fragment is characteristic of alkali volcanic rock trachyte, and considering the relationships of main minerals, it is more precisely characteristic of porphyritic sanidine trachyte from the Drachenfels Hill in Germany.Carved stone fragment is extremely small and seriously damaged, but the fine profiling is clearly visible. It is more likely that it comes from a small form. Since, in the Estonian context, this is a rare material, it is more believable that was a precious, rather than a mundane, object. First off, one would assume that it was a sacrament niche, but naturally there are other possibilities.

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 295-296
Author(s):  
Peter Pabisch

Abstract The three scholarly works of recent years illuminate the versatility of their main editor Albrecht Classen in the interdisciplinary world of comparative studies, in literature and language studies. Together with his colleague Eva Parra-Membrives he offers insights on trivial literature also in view of bestsellers concerning the first two works under discussion here. The third work on multilingualism in the middle ages he edited alone. For all the works he found an impressive number of contributors who fill the chalice of offerings in a most versatile canon of topics.


Traditio ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 271-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Teresa Tavormina

A few histories of the middle ages mention mathematics, and a few histories of mathematics mention the middle ages.In his discussion of the Third Commandment, the author ofDives and Pauperraises the question, “Why wolde God makyn þe world mor in þe numbre of sexe dayys þan in ony oþer numbre of dayys?” Like many commentators in the hexameral tradition, he answers the question by referring to one of the mathematical properties of the number six:PAUPER. For, as Salomon seith, God made alle þinge in numbre, whyte & in mesure [Wisdom 11:21]. He made no þing to mychil, no þing to lytil, but he made eueryþing perfyth in his kende and endyd al hys warkys in perfythnesse; and for þat þe numbre of sexe is þe firste numbre efne þat is perfyth, þerfor he mad al þe world in þe numbre of sexe dayys.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (33) ◽  
pp. 96
Author(s):  
Hatmansyah Hatmansyah

The Umayyah dynasty became a major force in the development of propaganda spread throughout the world as well as being one of the first centers of political, cultural and scientific studies in the world since the Middle Ages. At the height of its greatness, its success in expanding Islamic power was far greater than that of the Roman empire. The history of Islamic preaching in the Umayyah Dynasty can be divided into two periods in the dynasty era in Damascus and in Cordoba. Islamic da'wah at this time was carried out in three stages, first the expansion of the da'wah area, the second was the development of science and the third was economic thought.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rainer Kühne

Adolf Schulten suggested that Tartessos-Tarshish was the model for Plato's Atlantis. I argued that its capital was situated in what is now the Marisma de Hinojos within the central part of the Andalucian Donana National Park in south-west Spain. This article reports about the preliminary results of an archaeological expedition to test this theory. The preliminary results of the expedition include evidence of either a tsunami or a storm flood during the third millenium BC and evidence of human settlements from the Neolithic Age to the Middle Ages.


Author(s):  
Svetlana Babkina

This article deals with the idea that the bed should be placed north to south and not from west to east formulated in B. Berakhot 5b. As the later tradition says, this rule stays actual during the middle ages and till these days. According to the commentators this rule is based on the idea, that the Shekhinah lays from west to east, so this direction became sacred. There are three reasons to avoid this position during the sleep. All of them are connected to the ritual impurity. The first is nocturnal emission, which can happen to a man or a woman and which make that person impure. The second reason is the connection of sleep to death, which is the «father of fathers of impurities». The third is the vulnerability of the human being from the side of the different kind of night demonic creatures, who can kill the people (and make them ritually impure). All the ideas have deep biblical roots, but were combined only in rabbinical period when the prescription to put the bed form north to south first appeared. The problem is, that the practice could be very much older than the rabbinic tradition. This the rule formulated in Talmud can serve as a good example of adaptation of popular beliefs toward the official religion. From the other side this example shows that inside the monotheistic tradition there always was a place for ideas rooted in archaic societies: here we can see the clearly formulated idea, that by the manipulation sleeping space one can influence prosperity.


Author(s):  
Marek Jedliński

The article analyzes the historical perspective of the formation of the opposition “friend or foe” in the Russian culture from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. Binary thinking has a universal dimension: it is present in every culture, particularly in traditional societies (in this case it is the opposition Russia–Europe). Hostility towards strangers is already noticeable in the Ruthenian tribes. The outsiders were seen as savages, as animals, and even as evil forces. It relates to the perception of the symbolic center of the world.  It is recognizable in the work of Hilarion and the concept of Moscow as the Third Rome.


Author(s):  
John Reeves ◽  
Annette Yoshiko Reed

This book provides scholars with a comprehensive collection of core references extracted from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim literature to a plethora of ancient writings associated with the name of the biblical character Enoch (Gen 5:214). It assembles citations of and references to writings attributed to Enoch in non-canonical Jewish, Christian, and Muslim literary sources (ranging in age from roughly the third century BCE up through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries CE) into one convenient thematically arranged repository, and it classifies, compares, and briefly analyzes these references and citations to develop a clearer picture of the scope and range of what one might term “the Enochic library,” or the entire corpus of works attributed to Enoch and his subsequent cross-cultural avatars. The book consists of two parts. The present volume, Volume 1, is devoted to textual traditions about the narratological career of the character Enoch. It collects materials about the distinctive epithets frequently paired with his name, outlines his cultural achievements, articulates his societal roles, describes his interactions with the celestial world, assembles the varied traditions about his eventual fate, and surveys the various identities he is assigned outside the purely biblical world of discourse within other discursive networks and intellectual circles. It also assembles a range of testimonies which express how writings associated with Enoch were evaluated by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim writers during late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Volume 2, currently in preparation, will concentrate upon textual sources which arguably display a knowledge of the peculiar contents, motifs, and themes of extant Enochic literature, including but not limited to 1 Enoch (the Ethiopic Book of Enoch) and 2 Enoch (the Slavonic Book of Enoch).


2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (108) ◽  
pp. 40-57
Author(s):  
Leonardo Cecchini

Dante’s Christian Universalism and Islam:During the years 2001-2004, when the establishment of a Constitution for Europe was on the EU’s agenda, the suggestion to include a reference to the ‘Christian roots’ of Europe in the Constitution’s Preamble lead to an animated debate. Some Italian Catholic intellectuals (Anna Maria Chiavacci, Giuseppe Reale) took part in the debate and used Dante to illustrate the essential significance of Christianity in the European culture, thereby involving themselves in this debate. Referring to T.S. Eliot’s famous quote (»the culture of Dante was not of one European country but of Europe«), they claimed that Dante’s work was one of the greatest expressions of a Christian European cultural identity which took form in the Middle Ages and drew impulse from a synthesis of the two great Mediterranean cultural traditions: the Greek-Roman and the Jewish-Christian; a cultural identity they identified tout court with our present ‘European’ or ‘Western’ culture. It is worth observing that Chiavacci and Reale did not mention in their narrative the third great Mediterranean cultural tradition (especially in the Middle Ages) of Islam and its own likely contribution to the ‘European’ civilization. In my paper, I wish to contribute to the understanding of how Dante represents ‘Europe’ and ‘Islam’ in his work. My suggestion is that in Dante’s work we can neither find an idea of a Europe (or ‘West’) as separated or superior to other continents nor an orientalized image of the Orient as claimed by Edward Said. On the contrary, Dante considers ‘Europe’ as a metaphor for an ideal universal Christian community (with strong eschatological features), that is a community that potentially includes the whole of humanity.As few other intellectuals in the Middle Ages, Dante’s attitude to Islamic culture is primarily assimilative; he does not include but assimilates Arabian culture and philosophy to the extent that they have contributed to Christian thinking. As a good medieval Christian, Dante is hostile to Islam just because he looks at it as a heretical or schismatic version of Christianity (and therefore assimilated to his own faith), not as ‘another’ religion.


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