scholarly journals A bronze mirror with Aphrodite and Eros from Nicomedia in Bithynia (northwestern Turkey)

Author(s):  
Ergün Lafli ◽  
Alev Çetingöz

The Archeological and Ethnographical Museum of Kocaeli has in its collection a small, disc–shaped bronze mirror decorated with a relief scene, whose protagonist is the goddess Aphrodite. The scene shows Aphrodite seated left of centre on a rock. She is accompanied by two figures, a female who stands on a pedestal in front of her and her young son, Eros, who is behind her. This formerly unpublished object was found in Nicomedia in Bithynia, and has been dated to the fourth century BC. This paper will give a detailed presentation of the mirror relief scene, focus on its art–historical contextualisation and argue a first century BC. date for this object.

Author(s):  
Julien Aliquot

This chapter traces the history of Phoenicia from the advent of Rome in Syria at the beginning of the first century bce to the foundation of the Christian empire of Byzantium in the fourth century ce. It focuses on the establishment of Roman rule and its impact on society, culture, and religion. Special attention is paid to the establishment of Roman rule and its impact on society, culture, and religion. The focus is on provincial institutions and cities, which provided a basis for the new order. However, side trails are also taken to assess the flowering of Hellenism and the revival of local traditions in the light of the Romanization of Phoenicia and its hinterland.


Author(s):  
Frank Russell

This chapter analyzes tactical intelligence, following a division by posture: offensive and mobile, and defensive or localized. There was an increase in the use of vanguards among the Greeks after the fourth century BC and among the Romans in the first. Cavalry widely used in this role. The role of reconnaissance in border security is then evaluated. It is noted that the speculatores who accompanied the legions left the field for the office sometime in the first century AD. Greek military intelligence never became professionalized, and did not ponder the sophistication of the prototypical organizations fielded by the tyrants of Cyprus and Sicily in the fourth century. Professionalism and unit identification in intelligence came neither to the poleis nor the kingdoms of Classical or Hellenistic Greece, and came finally to the Romans at least a century after they had pervaded the legions.


Early Judaism ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 97-120
Author(s):  
Adele Reinhartz

Although Jesus and his earliest followers had seen themselves as Jews, by the fourth century the Christian community perceived itself as separate. Scholars have offered various views of how that took place. Some think of Christianity as having evolved out of Judaism, while others see them as different components within the same tradition that eventually went separate ways. There is also disagreement as to when the separation took place – whether around the end of the first century as a result of Christians’ understanding of Jesus and their outreach to gentiles or as a consequence of the fourth century Christianization of the Roman empire.


Author(s):  
Simon James

Dura-Europos was a product and ultimately a victim of the interaction of Mediterranean- and Iranian-centred imperial powers in the Middle East which began with Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Achaemenid Persian empire in the later fourth century BC. Its nucleus was established as part of the military infrastructure and communications network of the Seleucid successor-state. It was expanding into a Greekstyle polis during the second century BC, as Seleucid control was being eroded from the east by expanding Arsacid Parthian power, and threatened from the west by the emergent imperial Roman republic. From the early first century BC, the Roman and Parthian empires formally established the Upper Euphrates as the boundary between their spheres of influence, and the last remnants of the Seleucid regime in Syria were soon eliminated. Crassus’ attempt to conquer Parthia ended in disaster at Carrhae in 53 BC, halting Roman ambitions to imitate Alexander for generations. The nominal boundary on the Upper Euphrates remained, although the political situation in the Middle East remained fluid. Rome long controlled the Levant largely indirectly, through client rulers of small states, only slowly establishing directly ruled provinces with Roman governors, a process mostly following establishment of the imperial regime around the turn of the millennia. However, some client states like Nabataea still existed in AD 100 (for overviews see Millar 1993; Ball 2000; Butcher 2003; Sartre 2005). The Middle Euphrates, in what is now eastern Syria, lay outside Roman control, although it is unclear to what extent Dura and its region—part of Mesopotamia, and Parapotamia on the west bank of the river—were effectively under Arsacid control before the later first century AD. For some decades, Armenia may have been the dominant regional power (Edwell 2013, 192–5; Kaizer 2017, 70). As the Roman empire increasingly crystallized into clearly defined, directly ruled provinces, the contrast with the very different Arsacid system became starker. The ‘Parthian empire’, the core of which comprised Iran and Mesopotamia with a western royal capital at Ctesiphon on the Tigris, was a much looser entity (Hauser 2012).


Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Bliquez

The chapter looks at Greek and Roman surgical instruments. The survival of Greco-Roman surgical instruments falls into two divisions: tools available in Hippocratic times (fifth to fourth century bce), and instruments at the disposal of surgeons, mostly Greek, from the late Republic through the Empire (first century bce to fifth century ce). From the former, most survivals are cupping vessels from graves. The texts suggest the Hippocratic physician often created his tool on the spot or had a tool prepared for an immediate need, whereas most of an Imperial surgeon’s repertoire consisted of instruments professionally made and sold by smiths. The various kinds of instruments are described, explained, and illustrated: cupping vessels, scalpels, phlebotomes (for phlebotomy), lithotomes (for bladder stones), needles, probes, cauteries, hooks, forceps, saws, drills, chisels, files, levers, tubes, douches, specula, and abortives.


2014 ◽  
Vol 20 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 384-402
Author(s):  
Nickolas P. Roubekas

AbstractWithin a general attempt to reconceptualise theology and its position in the modern university, the paper argues that the cognitive science of religion offers a great opportunity to modern theology to engage into interdisciplinary research that could be proven especially profitable to its future. By drawing examples from contemporary Greece and a religious ritual that is disputed by the official Christian Orthodox Church as well as from historical theology and the Arian controversy in the fourth century CE, I argue that Justin Barrett’s cognitive theory of religion, known as ‘Theological Correctness’, can provide to theology a useful tool in understanding the religious beliefs of everyday believers. Without discounting other methodologies, theories, and interpretations, this paper argues that there is space for cognitive theories within theological research that could only benefit theology and its future in the twenty-first century.


2013 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christelle Fischer-Bovet

The role and status of the Egyptians in the army of Hellenistic Egypt (323–30b.c.) has been a debated question that goes back to the position within Late Period Egyptian society (664–332b.c.) of the Egyptian warriors described by Herodotus asmachimoi. Until a few decades ago, Ptolemaic military institutions were perceived as truly Greco-Macedonian and the presence of Egyptians in the army during the first century of Ptolemaic rule was contested. The Egyptians were thought of as being unfit to be good soldiers. Egyptians would have been hired only as late as 217b.c.to fight against the Seleucid king Antiochus III in Raphia. The Ptolemaic victory (in fact rather a status quo) was made possible thanks to the addition of twenty thousand Egyptians to reinforce the Greek army. For a long time the subsequent role of Egyptians in the Ptolemaic army in the second and first centuriesb.c.did not attract much attention. One usually assumed that they were ‘second-rate soldiers’ calledmachimoi. In recent decades, the scholarship on Ptolemaic Egypt, notably Demotic studies, reasserted the role of Egyptians in the Ptolemaic army from the late fourth century onwards.


Britannia ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 259-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Wallace

ABSTRACTIn order to study the possibility that some samian (terra sigillata) vessels remained available and/or in circulation for quite some time, a review has been made of closed groups (especially grave-assemblages), as a useful starting point. This paper argues that it is reasonable to expect some complete first-century samian vessels to have survived into the second century; also that some second-century vessels had survived into the fourth century at least throughout Roman Britain.


Author(s):  
David S. Neal

This is an account of excavations of the Roman villa in Gadebridge Park, Hemel Hempstead, which took place in 1963–8. It describes the history of a villa from its simple beginnings in the first century A.D. to its heyday in the fourth century when the owner could boast one of the largest villa bath houses and a bathing pool comparable in size to the Great Bath at Bath. In the mid-fourth century disaster struck. The coin evidence shows that the villa came to an abrupt end and that in or about A.D. 353 it may have been demolished as a result of reprisals against the owner for his support of the rebellion by Magnentius.


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