scholarly journals «Blachii ac pastores romanorum»: de nouveau sur le destin du latin à l’est / «Blachii ac pastores romanorum»: again, on the destiny of Latin in the East

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-123
Author(s):  
Iosif Camara

The shepherding tradition in Romanic peoples enjoyed some interest among linguists in the first half of the 20th century. However, this tradition has been misunderstood, poorly known, or even completely ignored. Therefore, starting from a suggestion by Alf Lombard, we took up this research direction, discussing several issues revealed by the study of Eastern Romanity. These are the rustic character of the Romanian language bearing pastoral traits; the Carpathian-Balkan space in which the language was born and the issue of continuity in the North Danube area; and the dialectal configuration of the Romanian, having four relatively homogeneous historical dialects and language varieties. In this direction, we relied on linguistic, ethnographic, historical and archaeological research, in order to emphasize the importance of shepherding in the research of Eastern Romanity. Genealogically, Romanian is defined as the Latin language spoken continuously in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, from the Carpathians to the Balkans, with the changes that have taken place throughout history. The pastoral character of Eastern Romanity is rendered by the early medieval chronicles; even the exonym vlah (Wallachian) designating the Romanic population has acquired the meaning of ‘shepherd’. The specificity of this community is supported by numerous linguistic facts: semantic evolutions (e.g. animal ‘living creature, animal’ > nămaie ‘sheep’), specific derivations (a înţărca ‘wean’, derived from ţarc ‘corral, enclosed area for animals’, which initially meant ‘getting the lamb into a corral, so it stopped sucking’), expressions (a închega un gând ‘crystallise thoughts’, where the verb used is a închega ‘coagulate’) or even morphologic elements (the structure of the Romanian numeral from 11 to 19, linked to the scoring system). Throughout time, shepherding has been associated with the controversial issue of the territory in which the Romanian language and the Romanian people were born. Ethnological research has revealed the existence of four types of shepherding: local – agricultural – one, two types characterised by short transhumance, and the last one, associated with long-distance transhumance. Of the three types of transhumant shepherding, none identifies itself with the nomadic lifestyle and, therefore, the existence of a balkanische Hirtenromania (Balkan pastoral Romanity) does not imply the phenomenon of migration, as it was erroneously believed. Shepherding, through the forms described by ethnologists, explains both the sedentary character and the mobility of Oriental Romanity. Linguistic and archaeological arguments support G. Ivănescu’s view identifying the origins of the Romanian language in both the north and south of the Danube. The pastoral character of Romanity led to a population mobility that influenced the language at diatopic level. There is, on the one hand, a dialectal diversity due to population movements, and, on the other hand, a surprising linguistic unit, due to transhumant shepherds whose travels played a linguistic levelling role. This fact explains the linguistic unity of the Romanian language, despite its territorial spread and development in several historical provinces separated by natural boundaries. While shepherding explains some important issues in the history of Eastern Romanity, there is still need for systematic study on this topic. A comparative study of shepherding at the level of the entire Romanity is required in order to draw a complete picture of the lifestyle that characterized Romanity especially in the mountainous areas of Europe, bearing influence on the historical languages that we can only guess nowadays.

Biologia ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 63 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marko Sabovljević ◽  
Jan-Peter Frahm

AbstractThe genetic structure, diversity and phylogeography of the moss species Campylopus oerstedianus in Europe was studied, based on the ITS region of the nrDNA of nine selected European populations. Although this species is only known in sterile stage, long-distance dispersal and gene flow among populations seem to be present within Europe. High levels of genetic differentiation between the investigated Greek population and the western European populations indicate a long lasting isolation.The populations from France and Switzerland root together and supposedly have a common origin. From the French populations, the one from the Pyrenees is the most basal one and the populations in the Massif Central and the Vosges Mts can be derived from it. This indicates relatively recent dispersal of the species from the Mediterranean to the north, in spite of the lack of sporophytes and the fact that the type of the dispersed propagules and their vectors are not obvious.


Author(s):  
Mark Whittow

The Roman world in the second century was remarkably homogeneous, and the ties that bound it together remarkably thick and apparently strong. But what happened when the western half went its own way, when imperial territories were limited to bits of Asia Minor and the Balkans, when the construction of new monumental buildings had slowed to a trickle or stopped entirely, when the epigraphic habit had died? How did political communication work in the Roman empire of the Middle Ages that we know as Byzantium? The answer requires conjuring up a picture of people on the move; of soldiers, priests, students, pilgrims, appellants, merchants, tax collectors, administrators, painters, and builders. And it requires thinking about the messages they received and passed on. Placing the Byzantine experience in comparative perspective to Song China, this chapter surveys the evidence of Byzantine political communication to investigate both the means of transmitting news and orders as well as the underlying networks of shared discourse and identity. It shows that the survival of the Byzantine state depended largely on its ability to create an imagined community as the nation-state of the Romans. The decline of Byzantium and the rise of Muslim identities in its former territories can thus be linked to a failure to maintain effective long-distance communication networks that projected a ‘Roman’ narrative across the entirety of the empire.


2019 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 421-438 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduardo José Peralta Labrador ◽  
Jorge Camino Mayor ◽  
Jesús Francisco Torres-Martínez

Over the centuries, Spanish historiography has attached great importance to the wars that Octavian launched at the start of the last third of the 1st c. B.C. against the population in the north of the Iberian peninsula. In this way he intended to bring an end to the long conquest of Iberia that had begun two centuries earlier in the hegemonic struggle with Carthage. Although the wars previously attracted the attention of European scholars, today they play little part in the historiography of the Early Roman Empire and even less in the biographies of Augustus, who suffered some of his worst military fortunes in this war, putting his very life in danger (Suet., Aug. 29.3 and 81.1; Hor., Carm. 3.14; Dio 53.25.5-7; Oros. 6.21.4). Even Departments of Ancient History in Spanish universities have failed to progress beyond well-worn exegesis of the written sources. This is because until just two decades ago all the information came from two historical sources: Florus and Orosius, on the one hand, and Dio Cassius, on the other (the relevant books of Livy being lost). Although they stress the importance of the conflict, these sources are excessively laconic; they have also been subjected to erudite speculations about place-names that have turned the military campaigns into a series of historiographic fictions.1


1962 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. M. Nicol

At the beginning of the eleventh century the Byzantine empire was at the height of its glory. The emperor Basil II, who died in 1025 after a reign of nearly fifty years, completed and consolidated the work of the two great soldier emperors before him, and deserves to rank with Justinian and Heraclius as among the greatest of all the rulers of Byzantium. In the East the Arabs had been beaten back and humiliated; on the North the Bulgars were savagely defeated by Basil himself and their territory reduced to a province of the empire; Armenia and parts of the Caucasus were conquered; and the Mediterranean was cleared of pirates and policed by the Byzantine fleet. The internal security of the empire seemed unshakable, its riches inexhaustible, and its prestige extended far beyond its boundaries. It was in 989, in the reign of Basil II, that the largest of the Slav states came within the Byzantine sphere of influence, when Vladimir of Kiev married the emperor's own sister and was converted to Orthodox Christianity and Byzantine culture. At the beginning of the eleventh century the Byzantines were justly proud of themselves, of their empire, its civilisation, stability and prosperity, and equally of their Church. They were more convinced than they had ever been of the truth, cherished since the days of Constantine, that the Roman empire was God's plan for the order of the world, or, as Eusebius had said, the terrestrial image of the Kingdom of Heaven, and that its ruler, the one true emperor in the ‘Queen of Cities’, was divinely ordained as God's regent on earth.


EMPIRISMA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fathimatuz Zahra Dan Abdul Azis

Pati is a region on the north coast, according to the hypothesis of the researcher, the region is divided into three categories. The northern regions are more religious, the central is more plural, while the southern region is in the middle. In the central region there are many relics of tombs believed to be the those of the Muslim proselytizers in the area of Pati. The one that attracts the researcher is a tomb in the Gambiran area, where there are five local Muslim saints buried, one of them belons to mbah Hendro Kusumo, the son of Syech Ahmad Mutamakkin. This article attempts to trace back the spreading of Islam in Pati based on the existence of thetomb of Mbah Hendro Kusumo. It wants to answer question of whethere the existence of his tomb is due to his studying there or marital relationship, and how it relates to the spreading of Islam.Keywords: Mbah Hendro Kusumo, Traces of Islamic Dakwah, Islam


Focaal ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Vasiliki P. Neofotistos

Using the Republic of North Macedonia as a case study, this article analyzes the processes through which national sports teams’ losing performance acquires a broad social and political significance. I explore claims to sporting victory as a direct product of political forces in countries located at the bottom of the global hierarchy that participate in a wider system of coercive rule, frequently referred to as empire. I also analyze how public celebrations of claimed sporting victories are intertwined with nation-building efforts, especially toward the global legitimization of a particular version of national history and heritage. The North Macedonia case provides a fruitful lens through which we can better understand unfolding sociopolitical developments, whereby imaginings of the global interlock with local interests and needs, in the Balkans and beyond.


2019 ◽  
pp. 14-31
Author(s):  
P.V. Kuzenkov

The article offers a new evaluation of the wellknown phenomenon of cultural renaissance of the peoples of the Middle East and Egypt of the Syrians, the Copts, the Armenians, the Georgians, etc., in the first centuries AD. This period is commonly associated with the spreading of Christianity around the territory of the Roman Empire and the Parthian, later on Sassanid Iran. According to the author there are reasons to regard the genesis of the Christianity in the Middle East as a single yet multifaceted process of transformation of the Late Antiquity culture in its totality of the Eucumene, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pamir mountains. The essence of this process could roughly be defined as overcoming the Hellenistic culture crisis called forth by the ever deepening disparity between the transcendental intellectual environment it had given rise to, on the one hand, and its ideological nucleus rooted in the archaic Greek mythology, on the other. The only feasible recourse out of this crisis was the appearance of a new cultural nucleus, conventionally described as the canonized sacred text (The Holy Scriptures). This nucleus, together with the Hellenistic cultural and technological achievements (general literacy, school education, science, literature, symbolic culture, etc.) gave rise to religious civilizations with Christianity as the principal example. Thus, the author describes the historical transition from the Late Hellenistic and Post Hellenistic cultures of the Ancient Rome and the Ancient Middle East that resulted in the new nationallytinged in form but supranational in content cultures of the Christianity in the Middle East.В статье предлагается новая оценка известного феномена культурного возрождения народов Ближнего Востока и ЕгиптоСирийцев, Коптов, Армян, Грузин и др. в первые века нашей эры. Этот период обычно связывают с распространением христианства по территории Римской Империи и Парфянского, позднее Сасанидского Ирана. По мнению автора есть основания рассматривать генезис христианства на Ближнем Востоке как единый, но многогранный процесс трансформации культуры поздней Античности в ее тотальности Ойкумены, от Атлантического океана до Памирских гор. Суть этого процесса можно приблизительно определить как преодоление кризиса эллинистической культуры, вызванного все более углубляющимся несоответствием между трансцендентальной интеллектуальной средой, которую она породила, с одной стороны, и ее идеологическим ядром, коренящимся в архаической греческой мифологии, с другой. Единственным возможным выходом из этого кризиса было появление нового культурного ядра, условно описываемого как канонизированный священный текст (Священное Писание). Это ядро, наряду с эллинистическими культурными и технологическими достижениями (общая грамотность, школьное образование, наука, литература, символическая культура и др.) породило религиозные цивилизации с христианством, в качестве основного примера. Таким образом, автор описывает исторический переход от Позднеэллинистической и Постэллинистической культур Древнего Рима и Древнего Ближнего Востока к новым национально окрашенным по форме, но наднациональным по содержанию культурам христианства в Cредние века.


Author(s):  
Nicolas Wiater

This chapter examines the ambivalent image of Classical Athens in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Roman Antiquities. This image reflects a deep-seated ambiguity of Dionysius’ Classicist ideology: on the one hand, there is no question for Dionysius that Athenocentric Hellenicity failed, and that the Roman empire has superseded Athens’ role once and for all as the political and cultural centre of the oikoumene. On the other, Dionysius accepted Rome’s supremacy as legitimate partly because he believed (and wanted his readers to believe) her to be the legitimate heir of Classical Athens and Classical Athenian civic ideology. As a result, Dionysius develops a new model of Hellenicity for Roman Greeks loyal to the new political and cultural centre of Rome. This new model of Greek identity incorporates and builds on Classical Athenian ideals, institutions, and culture, but also supersedes them.


This interdisciplinary volume presents nineteen chapters by Roman historians and archaeologists, discussing trade in the Roman Empire in the period c.100 BC to AD 350, and in particular the role of the Roman state, in shaping the institutional framework for trade within and outside the Empire, in taxing that trade, and in intervening in the markets to ensure the supply of particular commodities, especially for the city of Rome and for the army. The chapters in this volume address facets of the subject on the basis of widely different sources of evidence—historical, papyrological, and archaeological—and are grouped in three sections: institutional factors (taxation, legal structures, market regulation, financial institutions); evidence for long-distance trade within the Empire, in wood, stone, glass, and pottery; and trade beyond the frontiers, with the East (as far as China), India, Arabia, and the Red Sea, and the Sahara. Rome’s external trade with realms to the east emerges as being of particular significance to the fisc. But in the eastern part of the Empire at least, the state appears, in collaboration with the elite holders of wealth, to have adapted the mechanisms of taxation, both direct and indirect, to support its need for revenue. On the other hand, the price of that collaboration, which was in effect a fiscal partnership, in slightly different forms in East and West, in the longer term fundamentally changed the political character of the Empire.


Author(s):  
Ulf Brunnbauer

This chapter analyzes historiography in several Balkan countries, paying particular attention to the communist era on the one hand, and the post-1989–91 period on the other. When communists took power in Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia in 1944–5, the discipline of history in these countries—with the exception of Albania—had already been institutionalized. The communists initially set about radically changing the way history was written in order to construct a more ideologically suitable past. In 1989–91, communist dictatorships came to an end in Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Albania. Years of war and ethnic cleansing would ensue in the former Yugoslavia. These upheavals impacted on historiography in different ways: on the one hand, the end of communist dictatorship brought freedom of expression; on the other hand, the region faced economic displacement.


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