Palmyra and the East

1950 ◽  
Vol 40 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henri Seyrig
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Great Prosperity ◽  
The Middle Ages

Although Palmyra is mentioned in several cuneiform texts, the oldest of which go back to the time of Sargon I of Assyria, it seems to have remained a mere village until the middle of the first century B.C. Its sudden growth to the size of one of the largest towns in the East coincides with the moment in history when the demand for oriental luxuries began to grow in Rome and its dominions, and it was due to the clever policy of its merchants and camel-riders who knew how to keep order in the desert between their town and the great factories and warehouses of Lower Mesopotamia. From that time caravans were able to cross the Syrian desert instead of skirting it, and the transit brought huge profits to the Palmyrenes. The desert therefore, whose barren waste, to our European eyes, would easily seem a barrier, was no such thing in reality, but acted on the contrary as a link with Mesopotamia, very much in the same way as the sea connected Venice by her merchant ships with the harbours of the Levant. Indeed, a comparison of Palmyra with the great commercial cities of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Venice, Antwerp, Bruges, Lisbon, etc.), is one that in several respects helps us to understand its sudden and great prosperity, as well as its sudden decline. From the day when Aurelian put an end to Palmyra's command of the wilderness, the roads of commerce had to change, the caravans again resorted to the Euphrates route around the desert, and the fortunes of Aleppo and Chalcis began to rise.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 201-208
Author(s):  
Conor McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
The State ◽  
First Century ◽  
New Combinations ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Middle Ages

The Conclusion restates the book’s four key arguments. Firstly, legal exclusion in various related forms is a tactic of power. Secondly, legal exclusion is an enduring phenomenon, alive and well in disturbing new combinations in the twentieth and twenty-first century West. Thirdly, exclusion from law is a shared concern for the literature of outlawry and the literature of espionage, and hence a key theme in a range of writings about the state and its actions from the Middle Ages to the present day. Finally, the role of literature here is often to offer critique: in offering such critique it shares with law a demand for justice.

The Triumph of the Mule

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
History Of ◽  
Symbolic Value ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter starts as the Roman Empire fragmented, encompasses the emergence of Christianity and Islam, and explores the donkey’s place in the history of the Middle Ages, as well as what Fernand Braudel termed ‘the triumph of the mule’ in the ensuing early modern period from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Being closer in time to the present, historical documents are generally richer and more plentiful than for earlier periods, but archaeological excavations and surveys—especially of post-medieval sites and landscapes—are still undeveloped in many regions. Inevitably, therefore, what I present draws as much on textual sources as it does on them. I look first at the symbolic value of donkeys and mules in Christianity and Islam. Next, I consider their disappearance from some parts of Europe in the aftermath of Rome’s collapse and their re-expansion and persistence elsewhere. One aspect of this concerns their continuing contribution to agricultural production, another their consumption as food, a very un-Roman practice. A second theme showing continuities from previous centuries is their significance in facilitating trade and communication over both short and long distances. Tackling this requires inserting donkeys and mules into debates about how far pack animals replaced wheeled forms of transport as Late Antiquity gave way to the Middle Ages. Wide-ranging in time and space, this discussion also provides opportunities for exploring their role in human history in areas beyond those on which I have concentrated thus far. West Africa is one, the Silk Road networks linking China to Central Asia a second, and China’s southward connections into Southeast Asia a third. According to the New Testament Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday seated on a donkey (Plate 20). The seventh-century apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew also envisages donkeys carrying His mother to Bethlehem, being present at the Nativity, and conveying the Holy Family into temporary exile in Egypt. Donkeys thus framed both ends of Jesus’ life and, given their importance in moving people and goods in first-century Palestine, must have been a familiar sight. But the implications of their place in Christianity’s narrative were originally quite different from those that are generally understood today.

scholarly journals Traditions of Tolerance: The Long-Run Persistence of Regional Variation in Attitudes towards English Immigrants

2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Fielding
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Group ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Regional Variation ◽  
Geographical Variation ◽  
First Century ◽  
Specific Group ◽  
Immigrant Settlement ◽  
Cultural Trait ◽  
Long Run ◽  
The Middle Ages

This article builds on existing studies of the long-run persistence of geographical variation in tolerance towards other ethnicities. Using English data, the study tests whether the persistent characteristic is an attitude towards a specific ethnic group, or is an underlying cultural trait of which the attitude towards a specific group is just one expression. It finds evidence for the latter, identifying geographical variation in anti-immigrant sentiment in the twenty-first century that is correlated with patterns of immigrant settlement in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, despite the fact that modern immigrant groups are quite different from those in the Middle Ages.

scholarly journals Venice Carnival from the Middle Ages to the Twenty- First Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-104
Author(s):  
Gilles Bertrand
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
First Century ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
Private Interests ◽  
History Of ◽  
Common Destiny ◽  
The Middle Ages

As with other carnivals around the world, the history of the Venetian Carnival sheds light on the complex dialectic between festivity and politics and more particularly on the growing need for political authorities to control the urban environment. This article provides a longue durée approach to carnival in Venice and unpacks the meaning of its successive metamorphoses. During the Middle Ages, Venetians used carnival as a defense strategy for their city, intended to ensure the cohesion of its various neighborhoods around a common destiny. In the fifteenth century, the legacy of public festivals for both rich and poor gave way to a more official celebration, which allowed Venice to outdo its European rivals. The civilized and policed expressions that were elaborated from the Renaissance until the eighteenth century gradually set Venetian Carnival apart from the exuberance and invertibility displayed by rustic carnivals in other parts of Europe. However watered-down and commodified present-day Venetian Carnival may seem, it continues to raise eminently political issues, most of which have to do with the appropriation of public space by private interests and the recreation of traditions for mass consumption.

Pleasures and Dangers of Conversion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Nisse
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Jewish Text ◽  
Joseph And Aseneth ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter examines Joseph and Aseneth, a Greek Jewish text that was translated into Latin in late twelfth-century England, and how it reemerges as significant within a crisis over Jewish conversion. Joseph and Aseneth, an account of the marriage of Joseph, then second in command to Pharaoh, to the Egyptian beauty Aseneth, was probably composed in the mid-first century in Egypt. The Jewish story is a text of the Diaspora in Egypt that imagines the circumstances of the marriage. Two of its major themes, conversion and female agency, offer a glimpse into the relations between Christians and Jews. The chapter shows how, in the Middle Ages, Joseph and Aseneth becomes a narrative of its heroine's conversion to Christianity and considers Jewish conversion as a deadly topic in the era following the Crusades.

Virginia Woolf's Imaginary Museum of the Medieval in ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-184
Author(s):  
Caroline Marie
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
British Museum ◽  
National Narrative ◽  
Culture Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Middle Ages

This article shows that the Middle Ages Virginia Woolf imagines in her 1906 short story ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ are influenced by the staging of the medieval in late-Victorian museums and reflects late-Victorian medievalism. From the perspective of material culture studies, Woolf's tale reflects the representation and fabrication of the medieval by the British Museum and the South Kensington Museum and shapes a similar narrative of the Middle Ages. Relying on Michel Foucault's definitions of ‘heterotopia’ as well as on Tony Bennett's analysis of Victorian museums, this article argues that Woolf's fictionalisation of the medieval evidences a new, complex temporality of knowledge and consciousness of the past which also defines late-Victorian curatorial philosophy and practices. It analyses each regime of that new temporality: first, the archaeological gaze and its contribution to the grand national narrative via the literary canon and, second, the theatrical gaze, with its focus on spectacularly displayed artefacts, that partakes of an image's mystique. In temporal terms, this results in a tension between the tangible remains of a past clearly separated from the present and the mystical fusion of past and present reinscribing Woolf's poetics of the moment within a sense of history.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document