Winckelmann in Nineveh

By the middle of the 19th century, French and British diplomats managed excavations in the biblical land of legendary Assyrian kings, where Nineveh had been buried long before Greek classical era. Here was the opportunity to reconsider the way Winckelmann cristallised the art of Antiquity, but when Assyrian remains entered in museums, they had precisely been evaluated under the reputation of Greek art inherited from the History of the Art of Antiquity, in which few Near Eastern items were said to be the exact opposites of classical beauty: scientists questioned art values of such strange objects, and museums themselves hesitated to exhibit this unexpected heritage so close to Greek "high art" (Edmund Oldfield). However, Assyria had got too many supporters in a few years to be forgotten a second time, and instead of highlighting the value of Hellenic unrivalled items, the « chain of art » principle figured from Winckelmann was used to support how Assyrian remains, at the very end, had influenced the brighter well-known classical masterpieces.

Scientific Method in Late-Antique Paganism: The (Rational) Empiricism of al-Filāḥa l-nabaṭiyya (The Nabatean Agriculture)

The reputation of the late-antique or early Islamic al-Filāḥa l-nabaṭiyya (The Nabatean Agriculture) as an esoteric forgery has recently begun to shift and its value as a source for the study of early-Islamic or late-antique Near Eastern paganism has been restored. This article contributes to a further reinterpretation of the work by elucidating its value for the history of late-antique and early Islamic science. It argues that the work distinguishes between the epistemological categories of the rational and the marvelous and critically approaches both based on a rational empiricism which it shares with contemporary disciplines such as medicine and astrology. The concepts of experience (taǧriba) and reason (qiyās) are central to al-Filāḥa l-nabaṭiyya’s epistemology, and the work relies on observation and experiments, combined with methods of deductive and analogical reasoning to obtain applied botanical and agricultural knowledge. Al-Filāḥa l-nabaṭiyya also contains competing views regarding prophecy and astrological knowledge which are illustrative of epistemological debates within Pagan late-antique scholarship.

Some remarks on change and innovation in ancient Near Eastern customary law

The article presents the ways customary law could be gradually changed in the ancient Near East. They included working with existing institutions while modifying their consequences as well as their scope of application with tools such as legal fiction. However, the conservative nature of the ancient oriental culture, as well as that of the scribal education made any sudden, radical modification impossible, and even if a new contract type was created, it would keep the pretense of following a long-established practice.

Pottery Styles in Transition in Iron Age Crete

This paper presents the preliminary results of the study carried out by the author on a precise class of materials: Protogeometric B pottery from the site of Prinias, in central Crete. The pottery comes from the excavations conducted in the necropolis of Siderospilia, used from the end of XII century BC until the VII/VI century. A large assemblage of material has been so far analyzed, mostly consisting on figured specimens. Among this, a particular class of pithoi, characterized by straight sides and mostly used as cinerary urns, stands out for its quite unique features, finding comparisons just in Knossos and in few other Cretan sites. The impressive figured repertoire adopted in decorating PGB pottery (850-800 BC) does not find comparisons in continental Greece and it seems to reflect some sort of mixed tendency between Near Eastern influences, involving Crete in Early Iron age, and Minoan background. Keywords: Prinias, Protogeometric B, Pithos, Crete, Aegean

HEADDRESSES AS SYMBOLS OF HIGH SOCIAL STATUS (BASED ON NEAR EASTERN MATERIALS OF THE EARLY METALS PERIOD)

Статья посвящена археологическим находкам металлических деталей головных уборов. Диадемы в виде длинных узких лент появляются на Ближнем Востоке во второй половине IV тыс. до н. э. В III тыс. до н. э. вырабатываются другие типы головных украшений, среди которых простые овальные и ромбовидные налобные бляхи и сложные конструкции с дополнительными деталями. Соответствующие находки рассматриваются как маркеры высокого социального статуса, связанные с процессом формирования элитарных групп в догосударственных и раннегосударственных обществах Месопотамии и Анатолии. The article is focused on the archaeological finds of headdress details made of metals. The diadems in the shape of long narrow bands appeared in the Near East in the second half of the 4th millennium BC. In the 3rd millennium BC other types of head ornaments were introduced, among them oval and rhomboidal frontlets and elaborate constructions with additional details. The corresponding finds are considered as markers of high social position related with the process of formation of elite groups in pre-state and early state societies in Mesopotamia and Anatolia.

Conceptual History of the Near East

Conceptual history holds tremendous potential to address a central issue in Near Eastern Studies, namely the formation of modernity in the Near East, provisionally located between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The encounter with European powers, primarily Britain and France, was a decisive historical factor in this formation; and European hegemony is, in fact, inscribed into the very concept of “modernity,” which we take as an historical, rather than analytical, concept. The conceptual formation of modernity in Arabic and Turkish was, however, a multilayered process; involving both ruptures and continuities, intersecting various temporalities, and incorporating concepts from several languages. To interrogate this multilayered process, we suggest the metaphor of the Sattelzeit (Saddle Period) as a heuristic tool, precisely because of its being tied to modernity. Finally, the article will show what conceptual history of the Near East has to offer to conceptual history more broadly.