16 February 2012, 06:00 PM
Lecture Event
Vassals and Adversaries: Mitannians, Hittites and Alalakh
K. Aslihan Yener (Koç University and University of Chicago)
Recent research at the site of Tell Atchana, ancient Alalakh, in the province of Hatay (southern Turkey) has clarified the history of the city in the Late Bronze (LB) I, II and Early Iron I periods. While it was previously thought that the city was continuously inhabited from c.2000BC to about 1190BC, it can now be seen that there were several periods of abandonment and/or political realignment. The first, during the transition after the destruction of the Level VII Palace (final Middle Bronze Age), gradually ushered in a period of Mitannian overlordship in Levels IV-VI followed by a Hittite takeover in Levels III-I. Local responses to foreign imperial domination were varied and can be seen both in texts and in the hybrid local material culture that grew to incorporate features of Mitanni and Hittite origin. Textual references suggest that Alalakh could be fickle in its political alliances and remained proud of its local Amorite heritage. Excavations confirm that the site was burned at least three times in the Late Bronze I-IIa. Most if not all of the site was finally abandoned around 1300/1290BC and reoccupied briefly in Level O (c.1140BC) by a population that utilized a combination of local Bronze Age-derived wares, LH IIIC-Middle Developed ware, and Handmade Burnished Ware. This is the first time that this particular cultural facies has been discovered in the Amuq and may have some relation to the ‘Sea Peoples’ phenomenon of widespread migration in the 12th century Mediterranean. This paper details the new findings from field seasons 2006-2011 and begins to reconstruct the historical narrative of this important site in the LBI-Iron I.
event details >23 February 2012, 06:00 PM
Lecture Event
ARCE Lecture: Sailing Seas of Rock and Sand: Protodynastic Imagery, Early Dynastic Inscriptions, and the Origins of the Royal Ritualist in the Egyptian Deserts
John Darnell (Yale)
Registration required, please email info@arceny.com
event details >28 February 2012, 06:00 PM
Lecture Event
Visiting Research Scholar Lecture: Food practices as a heuristic tool for the study of the 'transformation of the Roman world'
Emmanuelle Raga
The historical period designated by the expression “transformation of the Roman world” by a scholarly tradition willing to replace the idea of decline previously associated with it, is still rather mysterious. From a cultural point of view, two main phenomena are considered predominant in this transformation: the accentuated presence of “barbarians” and the installation of their “successor” kingdoms on the one hand, and the so-called “Christianization” of Roman society on the other. In both cases, the nature of these two evolutions and whether they were perceived as external “invasions” (violent or not), or as internal phenomena of the classical culture, is still strongly debated among historians. Approaching these questions by means of discourses on food and food practices has proven highly interesting, and has brought a new - and refreshing - perspective on this period. Roman authors clearly expressed their views on the good way of eating and offered harsh criticism to those who were ignorant or disrespectful of those rules. This point of view allows us to observe how the influence of both the Christian normative discourse and the barbarian presence has or has not impacted (and in which manner) Roman conceptions of food and, more generally, their way of life.
event details >01 March 2012, 06:00 PM
Lecture Event
Third Annual M.I. Rostovtzeff Lecture Series - Shifting Narratives in Egyptian Christian Visual Culture: Upper Egypt and the Roman Empire in Late Antiquity
Elizabeth S. Bolman (Temple University)
About the Series: Exciting new interpretations are now emerging about the character and role of visual culture in late Roman Egypt. The Nile valley played a major role in the empire, but Egyptian Christian art and architecture outside of Alexandria have typically been seen as backward and peripheral to the culture of the greater Mediterranean region. Recent conservation and archaeological projects at the Red and White Monasteries near Sohag, in Upper Egypt, have revealed paintings that completely overturn this traditional view. The monuments at these sites attest to the wealth and power of these two ascetic communities in the fifth and sixth centuries. The church at the Red Monastery is the most important surviving historical church in Egypt, and one of the most significant from this period anywhere. Due to the thick layers of soot that until recently obscured the interior, its lavish architectural decoration is almost completely unknown. In four lectures, Elizabeth Bolman will explore some of the rich material and textual evidence from late antique Egypt, with an emphasis on recent finds from the Red and White Monasteries. She will draw on new paradigms, themes and methods that scholars in religious studies and practitioners of the “new art history” have developed. These include an interest in the body, gender, identity construction, ritual performance, decorum, visuality, memory, and the agency of art and architecture.
event details >07 March 2012, 06:00 PM
Lecture Event
Approaching Anshan: Cultural heterogeneity, ritual centralization and the segmentary state in the Bronze Age of southwestern Iran
Daniel T. Potts (University of Syndey)
Shortly after the Délégation scientifique française en Perse was established in 1897, the Assyriologist Vincent Scheil announced that ancient Elam – the name given conventionally to the southwestern part of Iran during the Bronze Age – had consisted of two parts, Susiana and Anshan/Anzan. Subsequent work by Pierre Amiet and François Vallat explored this distinction and the 1973 identification of Tal-e Malyan, on the Marv Dasht plain in central Fars, with the city of Anshan strengthened the notion that Elam’s highland component, rather than the Mesopotamian-dominated lowland site of Susa, was in many respects the key to understanding Elam’s unique nature. Recent research by the Iranian Center for Archaeological Research-University of Sydney Mamasani Expedition, in a series of intermontane valleys lying between Susa and Anshan, is contributing new evidence of cultural development in the land of Anshan during the era of Elamite hegemony. This lecture will examine some of that evidence in light of theoretical discussions of the segmentary state, as defined by Aidan Southall and Georges Balandier, focussing particularly on the notion that segmentary states were culturally heterogeneous and more centralized at the level of ritual than political action. Elam, it will be argued, was a quintessential segmentary state that differred markedly from contemporary, unitary states like the Akkadian empire and the Third Dynasty of Ur.
event details >08 March 2012, 06:00 PM
Lecture Event
Third Annual M.I. Rostovtzeff Lecture Series - Shifting Narratives in Egyptian Christian Visual Culture: Death, Decorum and the Making of a Saint at the White Monastery
Elizabeth S. Bolman (Temple University)
About the Series: Exciting new interpretations are now emerging about the character and role of visual culture in late Roman Egypt. The Nile valley played a major role in the empire, but Egyptian Christian art and architecture outside of Alexandria have typically been seen as backward and peripheral to the culture of the greater Mediterranean region. Recent conservation and archaeological projects at the Red and White Monasteries near Sohag, in Upper Egypt, have revealed paintings that completely overturn this traditional view. The monuments at these sites attest to the wealth and power of these two ascetic communities in the fifth and sixth centuries. The church at the Red Monastery is the most important surviving historical church in Egypt, and one of the most significant from this period anywhere. Due to the thick layers of soot that until recently obscured the interior, its lavish architectural decoration is almost completely unknown. In four lectures, Elizabeth Bolman will explore some of the rich material and textual evidence from late antique Egypt, with an emphasis on recent finds from the Red and White Monasteries. She will draw on new paradigms, themes and methods that scholars in religious studies and practitioners of the “new art history” have developed. These include an interest in the body, gender, identity construction, ritual performance, decorum, visuality, memory, and the agency of art and architecture.
event details >15 March 2012, 06:00 PM
Lecture Event
Third Annual M.I. Rostovtzeff Lecture Series - Shifting Narratives in Egyptian Christian Visual Culture: Masculinity, Animals and Asceticism
Elizabeth S. Bolman (Temple University)
About the Series: Exciting new interpretations are now emerging about the character and role of visual culture in late Roman Egypt. The Nile valley played a major role in the empire, but Egyptian Christian art and architecture outside of Alexandria have typically been seen as backward and peripheral to the culture of the greater Mediterranean region. Recent conservation and archaeological projects at the Red and White Monasteries near Sohag, in Upper Egypt, have revealed paintings that completely overturn this traditional view. The monuments at these sites attest to the wealth and power of these two ascetic communities in the fifth and sixth centuries. The church at the Red Monastery is the most important surviving historical church in Egypt, and one of the most significant from this period anywhere. Due to the thick layers of soot that until recently obscured the interior, its lavish architectural decoration is almost completely unknown. In four lectures, Elizabeth Bolman will explore some of the rich material and textual evidence from late antique Egypt, with an emphasis on recent finds from the Red and White Monasteries. She will draw on new paradigms, themes and methods that scholars in religious studies and practitioners of the “new art history” have developed. These include an interest in the body, gender, identity construction, ritual performance, decorum, visuality, memory, and the agency of art and architecture.
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