scholarly journals The Place of the Dead in the Mediterranean. A Sicilian Experience

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolina Kobelinsky ◽  
Filippo Furri ◽  
Camille Noûs

Death during the journey to Europe is both a spectre hanging over border crossers and a concrete reality. It is also a very present issue within the society that finds itself forced to deal with these inert bodies. Drawing on a field study has been conducted since January 2018, we focus here on how the bodies found at sea and taken to the port of Catania (Sicily) are managed, exploring both their itinerary and how a small group of people from the city has become involved in a project to give them a name and a biography.

Author(s):  
Michael Koortbojian

The ancient Romans famously distinguished between civic life in Rome and military matters outside the city—a division marked by the pomerium, an abstract religious and legal boundary that was central to the myth of the city's foundation. This book explores, by means of images and texts, how the Romans used social practices and public monuments to assert their capital's distinction from its growing empire, to delimit the proper realms of religion and law from those of war and conquest, and to establish and disseminate so many fundamental Roman institutions across three centuries of imperial rule. The book probes such topics as the appearance in the city of Romans in armor, whether in representation or in life, the role of religious rites on the battlefield, and the military image of Constantine on the arch built in his name. Throughout, the book reveals how, in these instances and others, the ancient ideology of crossing the pomerium reflects the efforts of Romans not only to live up to the ideals they had inherited, but also to reconceive their past and to validate contemporary practices during a time when Rome enjoyed growing dominance in the Mediterranean world. The book explores a problem faced by generations of Romans—how to leave and return to hallowed city ground in the course of building an empire.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Hamid Alshareef ◽  
François Chevrollier ◽  
Catherine Dobias-Lalou
Keyword(s):  
The Dead ◽  

Abstract This paper publishes four inscriptions recently discovered by chance in the Cyrenaican countryside. Nos 1, 2 and 3 are in Greek. No. 1, from a tomb near Mgarnes, is a funerary stele inscribed in verse for a woman whose family was of some importance in the city of Cyrene. No. 2, from the same tomb, is an anthropomorphic stele for another woman, which is discussed on the basis of the dead person's name and the vicinity of the stone to the preceding stele. No. 3, from the middle plateau below Cyrene, is a marble panel with the epitaph of two women named Cornelia, increasing our knowledge of the Cornelii family in Cyrenaica. No. 4, from near Khawlan in the south-east, is a boundary stele in Latin mentioning the boundaries of the province; combining this with the evidence from another such stone from el-Khweimat, close to Gerdes el-Gerrari towards the south-east, also mentioning the provincial boundaries, we are now able to outline the Roman limes in the central part of Djebel Akhdar.


Urban Science ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
Georgios-Rafail Kouklis ◽  
Athena Yiannakou

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the contribution of urban morphology to the formation of microclimatic conditions prevailing within urban outdoor spaces. We studied the compact form of a city and examined, at a detailed, street plan level, elements related to air temperature, urban ventilation, and the individual’s thermal comfort. All elements examined are directly affected by both the urban form and the availability of open and green spaces. The field study took place in a typical compact urban fabric of an old city center, the city center of Thessaloniki, where we investigated the relationship between urban morphology and microclimate. Urban morphology was gauged by examining the detailed street plan, along with the local building patterns. We used a simulation method based on the ENVI-met© software. The findings of the field study highlight the fact that the street layout, the urban canyon, and the open and green spaces in a compact urban form contribute decisively both to the creation of the microclimatic conditions and to the influence of the bioclimatic parameters.


2020 ◽  
Vol 110 ◽  
pp. 5-27
Author(s):  
Allison L. C. Emmerson

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.


2008 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-85
Author(s):  
Fereshteh Habib ◽  
Ibrahim Numan ◽  
Hifsiye Pulhan

In casting a new look at city; this study interprets the urban form in respect of the role played by human perception of space. The main aim of this research at a macro level is to attain a strong theorical basis through a multi-dimensional approach to the city. The method of analyzing and carrying out a critique of it at an applied level will clarify the impact, which cultural factors have in the formation of urban form. This preliminary recognition and idealism is based on a hermeneutic and deductive method that is particular to the intellectual sciences In the process of devising theories, studying the urban planning texts related to the subject of study and the conclusion from the field study which is carried out in the Isfahan Naghshe Jahan square in the Safavy period played a key role in the research in addition to the goals and questions.


Antiquity ◽  
1933 ◽  
Vol 7 (28) ◽  
pp. 405-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guido Calza

Twenty years have gone by since I was first appointed Director of Excavations at Ostia, and I feel that I have devoted the better part of my activity as an archaeologist to the great task of bringing the dead city back to life.All that was known about Ostia when scientific investigation was first started there was the legendary tale of its foundation at the mouth of the Tiber by Ancus Marcius, fourth King of Rome ; its probable expansion under the republic, although the growth of Pozzuoli and the clogging up of the river’s bed would support the theory of a period of decline for Ostia at that time ; and its tremendous development under the Empire, especially in the second century. Of this there was proof in the vestiges of imperial constructions rising above ground and in the historically ascertained fact that Ostia was Rome’s trading centre and outlet on the sea. Little or nothing was known of the later period of the city, nor of its decline and final disappearance.


2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayad F. Altememi ◽  
Imad A. Hassouneh ◽  
Shaker Jarallah Alkshali

This study aims to identify the relationship between the creative capabilities of workers in 5-star hotels in the city of Amman and their cultural intelligence. In its measurement of the creative capabilities as an independent variable, the study adopted a scale consisting of three dimensions, namely: fluency, flexibility and originality. Whereas it relied in measuring the cultural intelligence as a dependent variable, on a scale consisting of three dimensions, namely: knowledge (cognition), motivation and behavior. The study was conducted on a sample of (258) workers currently working in these hotels. The required particulars for this study were collected through a specially prepared questionnaire for this purpose after having reviewed multi previous studies. The sample was distributed according to the simple random sample mechanism. The study revealed that there is a significant positive relationship between the dimensions of creative capabilities of workers in such hotels and their cultural intelligence. The study also included a set of recommendations and mechanisms that can be applied by the managements of these hotels to tackle some aspects of the dimensions constituting the cultural intelligence of workers.


2018 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 105-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clarisse Godard Desmarest

AbstractThe Melville Monument, which stands at the centre of St Andrew's Square in Edinburgh, was erected between 1821 and 1823 in memory of the Tory statesman Henry Dundas, first Viscount Melville (1742–1811). The design for the monument, more than 150 ft tall, was provided by William Burn (1789–1870). The 15 ft statue of Dundas that stands on top, added in 1827, was carved by Robert Forrest (1789–1852), a Scottish sculptor from Lanarkshire, from a design by Francis Chantrey (1781–1841). The Melville Monument, imperial in character and context, is part of a series of highly visible monuments built in Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century to celebrate such figures as Horatio Nelson, Robert Burns, William Pitt, King George IV and the dead of the Napoleonic wars (National Monument). This article examines the commission and construction of the Melville Monument, and analyses the choice and significance of St Andrew's Square as a locus for commemoration. The monument is shown to be part of an emerging commitment to enhance the more picturesque qualities of the city, a reaction against the exaggerated formality of the first New Town and its grid pattern.


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