INTERPRETATION OF A GROUP OF TERRACOTTA FIGURINES FROM ANCIENT GREEK SANCTUARIES OF THE CRIMEAN PRYAZOVIA

2021 ◽  
pp. 229-239
Author(s):  
Н. В. Кузина
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Terracotta Figurines ◽  
Human World ◽  
Divine Child

В статье рассматривается группа терракотовых статуэток с изображениями мальчиков, происходящая из раскопок сельских святилищ Крымского Приазовья. Сюжеты с детьми широко представлены в боспорской коропластике II-I вв. до н. э. и долгое время считались бытовыми. Однако обстоятельства находок и анализ иконографии позволяют проследить сакральный смысл этих статуэток. В контексте ритуальной практики святилищ фигурки детей с сопутствующими атрибутами (птица, собака, лошадь, щит) могут быть интерпретированы как воплощение полисемантического образа божественного ребенка, символизирующего плодородное жизненное начало, потенциальную жизнь, обновление, возрождение, заключающего в себе характеристики лиминального существа, помещаемого в сакральном пространстве на границе земного и потустороннего миров, наделенного функциями медиатора, связующего космические зоны. The paper reports on a group of terracotta figurines featuring boys that comes from excavations of rural sanctuaries in the Crimean Priazovia. Narrative scenes with children are widely represented in Bosporan coroplast of the 2 - 1 cc. BC, for a long time they were considered items for household use. However, circumstances of the finds and analysis of iconography suggest sacral meaning of these figurines. In the context of the sanctuary practice, the children figurines with accompanying attributes (a bird, a dog, a horse, a shield) can be interpreted as incarnation of a polysemantic image of a divine child as a symbol of a fertile start of life, potential life, renewal, rebirth that includes characteristics of a liminal creature placed in sacral space on the borderline between the human world and another world with functions of a mediator linking cosmic zones.

scholarly journals Urbanisme régulier, occupation des campagnes et rapports interethniques en Grande-Grèce

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (29) ◽  
pp. 199
Author(s):  
Airton Pollini
Keyword(s):  
The South ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
South Italy ◽  
Native Populations ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Archaeological Work ◽  
Greek Colonization ◽  
Greek World ◽  
Written Sources

L’Italie du Sud est probablement la région la mieux connue du monde grec antique. Quelques sources écrites mais surtout des études archéologiques menées depuis longtemps ont permis le développement des recherches sur plusieurs aspects au cœur de la thématique de la colonisation grecque. Ce travail se concentre sur trois aspects essentiels : l’appropriation de l’espace colonial, l’interaction avec les populations indigènes et l’urbanisation des nouvelles installations. The South Italy is probably the best known region of the ancient Greek world. Some written sources but especially archaeological work undertaken for a long time allowed the development of research on several aspects at the heart of the issues of Greek colonization. This paper concentrates on three essential aspects: the appropriation of colonial space, the interaction with the native populations, and the urbanization of new establishments.

Ancient Greek Terracotta Sculpture

2022 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Southern Italy ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Greek Life ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Monumental Sculpture ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Terracotta Figurines ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Greek World ◽  
Material Form

The phrase “terracotta sculpture” refers to all figurative representations in fired clay produced in Greece and in the Greek world during the first millennium bce, (from the Geometric period to the end of the Hellenistic period), whatever their size (figurine, statuette, or statue), whatever their manufacturing technique (modeling, molding, mixed), whatever their material form (in-the-round, relief, etc.), whatever their representation (anthropomorphic, zoomorphic [real or imaginary], diverse objects), and whatever the limits of their representation: full figure (figurines, statuettes, groups), truncated or abbreviated representations, including protomai, masks, busts, half figures, and anatomical representations, among others. All these objects, with the possible exception of large statues, were the products of artisans who were referred to in ancient texts as “coroplasts,” or modelers of images in clay. Because of this, the term “coroplasty,” or “coroplathy,” has been used to refer to this craft, but also increasingly to all of its products, large and small, while research on this material falls under the rubric of coroplastic studies. Greek terracottas were known to antiquarians from the mid-17th century onward from archaeological explorations in both sanctuary and funerary sites, especially in southern Italy and Sicily. Yet serious scholarly interest in these important representatives of Greek sculpture developed only in the last quarter of the 19th century, when terracotta figurines of the Hellenistic period were unearthed from the cemeteries of Tanagra in Boeotia in the 1870s and Myrina in Asia Minor in the 1880s. These immediately entered the antiquities markets, where their cosmopolitan, secular imagery had a great appeal for collectors and fueled scholarly interest and debate. At the same time, sanctuary deposits containing terracottas also began to be explored, but scholarly attention privileged funerary terracottas because of their better state of preservation. For most of the 20th century, the study of figurative terracottas basically was an art-historical exercise based in iconography and style that remained in the shadow of monumental sculpture. It is only in the last four decades or so that coroplastic studies has developed into an autonomous field of research, with approaches specific to the discipline that consider modalities of production, as well as the religious, social, political, and economic roles that terracottas played in ancient Greek life by means of broad sociological and anthropological approaches. Consequently, this bibliography mainly comprises publications of the last forty years, although old titles that are still essential for research are also included.

Prologue

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Daniel Oro
Keyword(s):  
Stable State ◽  
Western Mediterranean ◽  
Ebro Delta ◽  
Suitable Habitat ◽  
World Population ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Critical Transitions ◽  
Social Species ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Eventual Collapse

The idea of combining social species, information, perturbations, and nonlinear responses related to dispersal originated naively a long time ago, in the Gulf of Roses in the western Mediterranean. As a kid, I used to spend holidays in a tiny village nearby the ruins of Empuries, a magical place where an ancient Greek colony was founded in 575 BC, later occupied by the Romans. I remember going to the beach where I would place my towel sheltered from the wind behind a large section of the ancient Greek dock built on huge stones. More than 2100 years later, one can still enjoy the mosaics, the temple columns, and the large walls protecting the Roman city from the outside. Once, while visiting this place with my parents, I asked them why that magnificent settlement was abandoned, vanished, and was buried by dust, but I did not get a convincing answer (even now, I would not be able to answer this question if asked by my own kids). Archaeologists believe that the collapse of Empuries was caused by a combination of factors, namely the appearance of other flourishing communities (Barcino and Tarraco, or Barcelona and Tarragona as they are known today) and a perturbed environmental regime, caused by an accumulation of sediments resulting from a nearby river, which disabled the use of the harbour. These factors likely contributed to dispersal, which ended up in the abandonment of the city. In any case, my wonderings about Empuries remained dormant for the next 40 years. But these questions slowly awakened when one of my fieldwork studies monitoring Audouin’s gulls at the Ebro Delta was unexpectedly affected by a perturbation that began in the mid-1990s. This breeding patch, which came to hold almost 75% of the total world population of this once endangered species, has collapsed in recent times, but strikingly it remained apparently resilient for many years (Figure P1). The Ebro Delta shared with Empuries the characteristic of being an exceptionally suitable habitat allowing a population to flourish, prior to eventual collapse. Empuries and the Ebro Delta represent all of the issues I have come to be interested in as a researcher: a social group thriving in a favourable patch, perturbations generating dispersal, and a nonlinear response leading to patch extinction (as a form of a new stable state). Some years ago a reading of Marten Scheffer’s book about critical transitions was also very inspiring. Understanding why Empuries and the Ebro Delta collapsed has intrigued my curiosity over the past several years, and has led me to take the leap in writing this book....

scholarly journals Cerebral localization of the mind and higher functions The beginnings

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eliasz Engelhardt
Keyword(s):  
Nervous Tissue ◽  
The Body ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Mental Functions ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Cerebral Localization ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
Higher Mental Functions ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

Abstract The debates about the mind and its higher functions, and attempts to locate them in the body, have represented a subject of interest of innumerable sages since ancient times. The doubt concerning the part of the body that housed these functions, the heart (cardiocentric doctrine) or the brain (cephalocentric doctrine), drove the search. The Egyptians, millennia ago, held a cardiocentric view. A very long time later, ancient Greek scholars took up the theme anew, but remained undecided between the heart and the brain, a controversy that lasted for centuries. The cephalocentric view prevailed, and a new inquiry ensued about the location of these functions within the brain, the ventricles or the nervous tissue, which also continued for centuries. The latter localization, although initially inaccurate, gained traction. However, it represented only a beginning, as further studies in the centuries that followed revealed more precise definitions and localizations of the higher mental functions.

On the Rules Regulating the Celebration of the Eleusinian Mysteries

1959 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Sokolowski
Keyword(s):  
British Museum ◽  
Real Problem ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Easy Task ◽  
Classical Studies ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Eleusinian Mysteries

The old and very illegible inscription from Athens containing the charter of the Eleusinian Mysteries was happily completed by a few small fragments discovered during the American excavations on the Agora. It was not an easy task for Professor B. D. Meritt to bring together the broken pieces and the stone bearing the inscription (now in the British Museum). He did it with his usual epigraphical expertness and contributed very much to the reading and to the restoration of a document which has been a real problem to many scholars for a long time. Of course, the inscription so old and so badly preserved will continue to be debated by specialists in different fields of Classical studies, but the part of Professor Meritt in elucidating this important testimony of the ancient Greek cult always will be gratefully appreciated. I should like to discuss some passages of the document in question in the hope that small changes in certain lines may perhaps make it more intelligible.

UNDERSTANDING DELPHI THROUGH TIBET

2018 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Flower
Keyword(s):  
Exact Nature ◽  
Altered Consciousness ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Religion ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Mount Parnassus ◽  
North Western ◽  
Western Greece ◽  
Academic Debate

The question of the exact nature of the Pythia's expertise has been the subject of academic debate for a very long time. It would indeed not be an exaggeration to say that this has been, and continues to be, one of the most controversial questions in the study of ancient Greek religion. Modern scholars are sharply divided over whether any inspired female oracles, and especially the Pythia at Delphi, had the ability to prophesy in hexameter verse without male assistance. During the classical period the two most famous oracles were those of Zeus at Dodona in Epirus in north-western Greece and of Apollo at Delphi, which was located on the south-western spur of Mount Parnassus. According to Plato (Phaedrus244), the Delphic priestess, as well as the priestesses at Dodona, prophesied in a state of altered consciousness (which he callsmania), and were practitioners of ‘inspired prophecy’ (mantikē entheos).

scholarly journals Transcribing Greece, Arranging France: Bourgault-Ducoudray’s Performances of Authenticity and Innovation

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-168
Author(s):  
Peter Asimov
Keyword(s):  
Music History ◽  
Folk Song ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Ethnic Nationalism ◽  
Scholarly Research ◽  
Artistic Integrity ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Paris Conservatoire

Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray (1840–1910), composer, folklorist, and long-time professor of music history at the Paris Conservatoire, dedicated intense energies to the propagation of ancient Greek modes as a modern resource for French composition. Instigated by his 1875 folk-song collection mission in Greece and Anatolia, Bourgault-Ducoudray’s attraction to Greek modes was bolstered by ideological commitments to Aryanism (nourished by his relationship and correspondence with philologist Émile Burnouf), and further reinforced by his observation of “Greek modes” in Russian and Breton folk song. This article examines how Bourgault-Ducoudray translated his quasi-philological analyses into an artistic agenda through techniques of transcription, arrangement, and composition. Beginning with a close reading of his important collection, Trente mélodies populaires de Grèce et d’Orient (1876), a continuity is established between his transcriptive and compositional practices, with particular attention paid to Bourgault-Ducoudray’s performances of authenticity through calibrated scientific and artistic rhetoric. I then turn to the reception of Bourgault-Ducoudray’s collection by two composers—Alfred Bruneau and Camille Saint-Saëns—who rearranged his Greek songs in different contexts. Treating the songs with remarkable plasticity, they appropriated Bourgault-Ducoudray’s authority to enhance representations of “oriental” and “ancient” worlds, negotiating a balance between scholarly research and artistic integrity. The article concludes by returning to Bourgault-Ducoudray’s work in the 1880s—a period during which the musical and ideological ambitions of his song arrangements were magnified to an operatic scale—culminating in a rereading of his Thamara (1891) in light of his ethnic nationalism.

scholarly journals The reflection of the formation of the Hellenistic international order in the work of Plutarch „Comparative biographies”

2020 ◽  
pp. 124-137
Author(s):  
Alina Koval ◽  
Keyword(s):  
International Order ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Global Order ◽  
Long Time ◽  
History Of ◽  
Regional Order ◽  
International Interaction ◽  
Humanitarian Values ◽  
Key Questions

The article comprehensively deals with the evidence of the peculiarities of the formation of the Hellenistic international order in the IV century BC. The author notes that the development of the Ukrainian historiography, among other things, is characterized by a deep interest of historians in studying the problems of international interaction between Eastern and Western civilizations. The study of this question allows to find answers to key questions – whether it is possible to create a universal global order based on common political and humanitarian values, or is it just an utopia, because no unifying model can take into account all the specifics of unique cultures, initially doomed to failure. In this context, it is important for the author to consider the history of such interaction between civilizations, in particular during the creation of the Hellenistic regional order in the IV century BC. This aspect is covered in detail in the treatise „Comparative Biographies”, compiled by the ancient Greek writer Plutarch (approximately 46 - 120/127 AD), the analysis of which is the main purpose of the article. As a result of the study, the author concluded that the biography of Alexander the Great presented by Plutarch allows us to consider the process of creating a Hellenistic empire, which united the key territories of West and East, to identify the logic of certain actions of the commander. Plutarch's description also allowed the author to conclude that in creating a new international order in the East, Alexander faced the traditional challenges of the time – increasing conflict with the tribal aristocracy, which for a long time stood behind him and used for personal gain closeness to the king. As a way out of this crisis, Alexander was forced to resort to strengthening his power, in fact reproducing the foundations of Eastern despotism.

The Divine Child in Ancient Greek Athletics

1995 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22
Author(s):  
Benny J Peiser
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Divine Child

Jacob Baldes Batrachomyomachia Homeri Tuba Romana cantata (1637) und der Dreißigjährige Krieg

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 214-228
Author(s):  
Dirk Werle ◽  
Katharina Worms
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
European Literature ◽  
Greek Epic ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Latin Version

Abstract One of the most extensive texts of the neolatin poet and Jesuit Jacob Balde is his ›Battle of the Frogs and Mice‹, a Latin version of the Batrachomyomachia, an ancient Greek epic, which for a long time was seen as a work of the founder of European literature, Homer. The pseudo-Homeric Batrachomyomachia was read as a humorous travesty of the Iliad. By assigning the comic text to Homer, scholars implied the appealing, yet wrongful idea that the author of the greatest mythical war was mocking his own work, thereby parodying the respectable genre of heroic epics. With Balde’s creation of a new version of this Greek poem during the Thirty Years’ War, the question arises as to whether his text is no more than an intertextual play on a famous literary genre, or whether it reacts to the recent historical events in early modern Europe - or both.

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