The eternal spirit of Thalassa: The transmission of classical maritime symbolism into byzantine cultural identity

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 51-69
Author(s):  
Janet Wade
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Roman Culture ◽  
Mediterranean Regions ◽  
The City ◽  
Hearts And Minds ◽  
Vast Network

In antiquity, the sea held an important place in the hearts and minds of those living in the Mediterranean region, and maritime motifs were popular across a range of literary and artistic genres. Classical maritime imagery was transmitted almost seamlessly into early medieval and Byzantine cultural identity, despite its overt polytheistic connotations. Mosaics depicting maritime deities and mythological seafaring scenes were installed in private residences and Christian churches. Poets wrote of Fortune steering the ship of life and orators spoke of leaders at the helm of their state. Didactic and ecclesiastical texts taught of the corrupting nature of merchants and the sea, and compared the trials and tribulations of everyday life and faith with storms and squalls. The Christian church also became viewed as a ship or safe harbour. Seafaring imagery was regularly imbued with both traditional and contemporary religious, political, and cultural relevance. This paper argues that the ongoing popularity of maritime symbolism was not only a throwback to classical times or because seafaring themes had a greater relevance to Christians than non-Christians. Thalassa (the Sea) had always been important in Greek and Roman thought, and she acquired a more tangible and pervasive presence in the lives of those in the late antique Roman East. Unlike Rome, the eastern capital at Constantinople was itself a great maritime entrepot. The maritime cultural milieu that dominated coastal Mediterranean regions played an influential role in the city and its far-reaching empire. Constantinople sat at the centre of a vast network of seaports and was a major hub of Roman culture and communication. With the city's foundation, classical maritime imagery acquired a contemporary cultural and political relevance; even as the Graeco-Roman world slowly evolved into a Christian one.

scholarly journals City of Dog

2020 ◽  
pp. 009614422091013
Author(s):  
Sam Ottewill-Soulsby
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Urban Settings ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Roman Culture ◽  
Urban Settlements ◽  
The City

To be fully human in the Greco-Roman world was to be a member of a city. This is unsurprising as cities were the building blocks of Greek and Roman culture and society. The urban landscape of post-Roman Western Europe looked dramatically different, with smaller, less economically diverse cities which played a smaller role in administration. Despite this, Greco-Roman ideas of humans as city-beings remained influential. This article explores this by investigating early medieval descriptions of cynocephali, which sought to determine whether the dog-headed men were human or not. Accounts of the cynocephali that presented them as human showed them living in urban settlements, whereas in reports of non-human cynocephali there are no cities. In exploring interactions between cynocephali and urban settings through ethnographic portrayals and hagiography, this article traces the lingering importance of the city for concepts of humanity.

scholarly journals Gdańskie instytucje kultury jako miejsca (jakiej?) pamięci

Porta Aurea ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 269-289
Author(s):  
Marta Wróblewska
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Local Memory ◽  
Cultural Image ◽  
Places Of Memory ◽  
Dominant Tendency ◽  
The City ◽  
New Museology

The article contains reflections on the cultural image of Gdańsk and its cultural institutions as they near the mark of thirty years of self-governance. On the basis of the analysis of aspects connected with some of the themes derived from permanent exhibitions presented at selected cultural institutions in Gdańsk, an attempt is undertaken to highlight the problems and phenomena which remain in close connection with the processes of constructing the post-communist cultural identity of the city. Among the crucial factors which are subject of the analysis first and foremost mention has to be made of the specificity of the local memory and identity which can be referred to as insertive, yet with the dominant tendency towards historicism. Those features, in turn, lead to describing some of the cultural institutions as places of memory, both with reference to their architecture, as well as to the narratives they present. An important place in the course of those deliberations is assigned to Gdańsk’s cultural policy and its role in programming the local memory and identity, presented on the basis of the analysis of the development strategies published by the city over the analysed period of time. The state of events in Gdańsk is finally juxtaposed with popular trends in the development of new museology in Europe, where tendencies towards increasing introspection, revision, and anthropological approach can be observed.

ARTISTIC TRENDS AND CONTACT BETWEEN JEWS AND ‘OTHERS’ IN LATE ANTIQUE SEPPHORIS: RECENT RESEARCH

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-188
Author(s):  
Zeev Weiss
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Close Contact ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Roman Culture ◽  
Distinct Character ◽  
Major Urban Centre ◽  
The City ◽  
Insight Into

Sepphoris was a major urban centre in the Lower Galilee in the Roman and late antique periods. Architecturally, artistically, and culturally, it was not very different from the pagan cities of ancient Palestine, and its exposure to and assimilation of Graeco-Roman culture did not hinder Jewish life. This article compares the mosaics found in two public buildings constructed in early-5th c. C.E. Sepphoris, the Nile Festival Building and the synagogue, while arguing that these finds may imply close contact between artists working at different locations and for different communities within the city. This phenomenon demonstrates the city’s distinct character in Late Antiquity and offers insight into the complexity of the cultural relationship between the Jews and other segments of that society.

New Perspectives on Urban Economic Planning

2020 ◽  
pp. 57-98
Author(s):  
Fanny Bessard
Keyword(s):  
Central Asia ◽  
Near East ◽  
Economic Planning ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Urban Economic ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Early Islam ◽  
Trading Activities ◽  
The City

This chapter examines how the greater involvement of caliphs and governors in early Islam in the patronage of urban retailing and crafts contributed to a redefinition of the topography of late antique and early medieval settlements from the Near East to Central Asia. The model of clustering productive and trading activities, which can be seen in its infancy in the Roman world in Pompeii, was expanded and became the norm from 700. This model evolved from simple communal working areas integrated in the urban fabric before 750 in the Levant to solely economic rabaḍ relocated outside the city walls in the ninth and tenth centuries in Iraq, Soghdia, and Ferghana. This chapter argues that this clustering of economic activities was favoured by a change in the location of the civic power under the ‘Abbāsids.

scholarly journals Writing Edessa into the Roman Empire*

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-64
Author(s):  
John Kee
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Group Identification ◽  
Regional Identity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Local Identity ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Roman World ◽  
The People ◽  
The City

The Syriac tradition presents an exceptional opportunity to investigate how the people of a late Roman frontier articulated local community affiliation against the backdrop of the larger Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds. Over the last decade, Syrian/Syriac identity and Roman identity in late antique Syria-Mesopotamia have emerged as topics of increasing interest. In concentrating on ethnicity, however, studies of specifically local affiliations have generally left unexamined the other modes of group identification which may have been equally or more salient. This essay fills that gap by excavating non-ethnic means of constructing local and regional identity in three Syriac texts written in and about Edessa in the pivotal century around 500 CE: the Chronicle of Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite, the Chronicle of Edessa (540), and Euphemia and the Goth. Across their differences in date and genre, these three texts demonstrate a convergent set of strategies for reconciling Edessa and its neighbors to the Roman Empire at large. Crucially, all three project notions of local belonging which focus not on ethnic markers but on particular places: in the first instance, on the city. Drawing from cultural geography’s interdependent concept of “place,” the essay shows how in these texts local identity emerges from the interaction of city, church, and empire; Edessa’s connections to the wider Roman world serve not to negate but to articulate its specificity as a community. Moreover, such place-based means of identification could be extended to frame larger regional communities too, as Ps.-Joshua does in its most distinctive moments.

Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Machado
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Social ◽  
Traditional Elite ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

This book analyses the physical, social, and cultural history of Rome in late antiquity. Between AD 270 and 535, the former capital of the Roman empire experienced a series of dramatic transformations in its size, appearance, political standing, and identity, as emperors moved to other cities and the Christian church slowly became its dominating institution. Urban Space and Aristocratic Power in Late Antique Rome provides a new picture of these developments, focusing on the extraordinary role played by members of the traditional elite, the senatorial aristocracy, in the redefinition of the city, its institutions, and spaces. During this period, Roman senators and their families became increasingly involved in the management of the city and its population, in building works, and in the performance of secular and religious ceremonies and rituals. As this study shows, for approximately three hundred years the houses of the Roman elite competed with imperial palaces and churches in shaping the political map and the social life of the city. Making use of modern theories of urban space, the book considers a vast array of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic documents to show how the former centre of the Mediterranean world was progressively redefined and controlled by its own elite.

The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman World ◽  
Roman Culture

Inscriptions are valuable for anyone interested in the Roman world and Roman culture, whether they are studying history, archaeology, literature, religion, or are working in a field that intersects with the Roman world from c. 500 BCE to 500 CE and beyond. The goal of The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy is to show why inscriptions matter and to demonstrate to students and scholars how to utilize epigraphic sources in their research.

Mocking Parades and the Place of Pagan Statuary in Late Antique Alexandria

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-288
Author(s):  
Jonathan Stutz
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Mob Violence ◽  
Visual Contact ◽  
The Public ◽  
Sacred Objects ◽  
The One ◽  
The City

AbstractWith the present paper I would like to discuss a particular form of procession which we may term mocking parades, a collective ritual aimed at ridiculing cultic objects from competing religious communities. The cases presented here are contextualized within incidents of pagan/Christian violence in Alexandria between the 4th and 5th centuries, entailing in one case the destruction of the Serapeum and in another the pillaging of the Isis shrine at Menouthis on the outskirts of Alexandria. As the literary accounts on these events suggest, such collective forms of mockery played an important role in the context of mob violence in general and of violence against sacred objects in particular. However, while historiographical and hagiographical sources from the period suggest that pagan statues underwent systematic destruction and mutilation, we can infer from the archaeological evidence a vast range of uses and re-adaptation of pagan statuary in the urban space, assuming among other functions that of decorating public spaces. I would like to build on the thesis that the parading of sacred images played a prominent role in the discourse on the value of pagan statuary in the public space. On the one hand, the statues carried through the streets became themselves objects of mockery and violence, involving the population of the city in a collective ritual of exorcism. On the other hand, the images paraded in the mocking parades could also become a means through which the urban space could become subject to new interpretations. Entering in visual contact with the still visible vestiges of the pagan past, with the temples and the statuary of the city, the “image of the city” became affected itself by the images paraded through the streets, as though to remind the inhabitants that the still-visible elements of Alexandria’s pagan topography now stood as defeated witnesses to Christianity’s victory.

The City of Oslo in Jan Erik Vold’s Poems

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 219-230
Author(s):  
Raluca-Daniela Duinea
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Urban Landscapes ◽  
Reading Technique ◽  
Social Critical ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The City ◽  
Selection Of

"The City of Oslo in Jan Erik Vold’s Poems. The aim of this paper is to examine, from a cultural and social perspective, the Norwegian urban areas and everyday situations in Jan Erik Vold’s (b. 1939) poems. Our close-reading technique reveals important social aspects, different places and streets, located in the capital city of Norway, Oslo. These urban poems written by the contemporary Norwegian poet Jan Erik Vold contribute to the reconstruction of a new Norwegian cultural identity as it is reflected in a selection of poems taken from Mor Godhjertas glade versjon. Ja (Mother Goodhearted’s Happy Version. Yes, 1968), followed by the poet’s wanderings in the city of Oslo in En som het Abel Ek (One Named Abel Ek, 1988), and concluding with his bitter social criticism in Elg (Moose, 1989) and IKKE. Skillingstrykk fra nittitallet (Not: Broadsides from the Nineties, 1993). Vold’s urban poems emphasise the transition from nyenkle (new simple), friendly and descriptive poems which present closely the city of Oslo on foot, to short, political and social critical poems from the 90s. Thus, it is of great importance to traverse various urban ‘landscapes’ in different periods of time, beginning with the 1960s, followed by the 80s and the 90s. Keywords: Jan Erik Vold, urban poems, social criticism, Norwegian urban areas, the city of Oslo "

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