Academic Year 2015-2016

02/18/2016 06:00 PM ISAW Lecture Hall

ARCE Lecture: Middle Kingdom Clappers, Dancers, Birth Magic, and the Reinvention of Ritual

Ellen F. Morris

This talk focuses upon a particularly enigmatic artifact category. Hand-shaped clappers fashioned out of hippo tusk are occasionally found in tombs of Middle Kingdom date. While later equivalents are often decorated with the head of the goddess Hathor on their sleeve or with an inscription naming their owner, Middle Kingdom clappers are unadorned. This talk argues that the archaeological and iconological contexts of these artifacts reveal a great deal. On the basis of studies of archival material from Asasif and Lisht at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and on excavation records from other other sites, three points emerge. First, the findspots of clappers and the artifacts with which they were discovered suggest their employment in Hathoric rituals oriented toward the strengthening of the sun-god and the reviving of the souls posthumously identified with this god. Second, clappers are also strongly associated with birth magic and especially with the entities that protected the sun-god and all those about to be born or reborn. Finally, it is argued that, like many Middle Kingdom grave goods, clappers had been ‘rediscovered’ and religiously re-envisioned by sacral authorities who encountered Protodynastic and Early Dynastic votive material during temple renovations and perhaps also during work at the pilgrimage site of Umm el-Qa’ab.
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03/01/2016 06:00 PM ISAW Lecture Hall

Territorial Barriers in Central Asia

Investigating the "Long Wall" of Bukhara (Uzbekistan)

Sören Stark

Territorial barriers are a widespread phenomenon in Western Central Asia where they specifically take the shape of large-scale oasis walls, surrounding the entirety or large parts of the agricultural hinterland of important urban centers vis-à-vis stretches of desert or desert steppe in the region. Nonetheless, starting with their dating, our understanding of these sizable monuments is still very insufficient. The most monumental and best preserved one of these territorial barriers, the 'Long wall' of Bukhara – at least 250 miles long and complete with an impressive array of adjoining fortresses and watchtowers –, has been since 2011 subject to comprehensive investigations carried out in the framework of an American-Uzbek field project. The results of five seasons of extensive field surveys and excavations allow now, for the first time, substantiated conclusions regarding the chronology and the purpose of the barrier.
03/07/2016 10:00 AM ISAW Lecture Hall

Material Worlds: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Contacts and Exchange in the Ancient Near East

Workshop organized by Arnulf Hausleiter (ISAW Visiting Research Scholar)

Based on most recently obtained late 3rd/early 2nd millennium BC evidence from excavations on the Arabian Peninsula, a number of distinguished scholars will discuss the interdependencies between and different views on material culture, contacts and exchange in the Middle East. The workshop, focusing on selected data sets will tackle interdisciplinary questions of archaeological-historical as well as socio-economic significance in one of the most dynamic contact zones of the ancient world. Chronologically covering the Middle Bronze to Iron Age periods (20th to 7th century BC) the following case studies are the subject of lectures, responses, and discussions: Economic framework(s) of the Ancient Near East; textual records as evidence for contacts; Egyptian sea trade; economic and cultural exchange from the Middle to Late Bronze Ages in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Levant and Arabia; material culture and technology at the margins of the Neo-Assyrian empire.
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03/08/2016 06:00 PM ISAW Lecture Hall

(Re-)Defining an Ancient Near Eastern Contact Zone

Northwest Arabia in the 2nd Millennium BC

Arnulf Hausleiter

Newly discovered funerary contexts of late 3rd / early 2nd millennium BC date at Tayma, North-west Arabia, suggest close contacts to the Syro-Levantine world already during the Bronze Age as evidenced by ceremonial weapons elsewhere known from so-called warrior-graves. At the same time -- surrounded by an impressive wall -- the oasis reached its largest premodern extension. In addition, archaeometric analysis of bronze objects from Tayma indicate an uninterrupted acquisition of raw materials from the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula through Bronze to Iron Ages, together with stratigraphic evidence suggesting a settlement continuity of the oasis, probably independent from the collapse of LBA societies in the Eastern Mediterranean. The interest of foreign powers, such as Egypt, Assyria, Babylon and Achaemenid Persia in the region can thus be understood as consequence of Tayma being part of earlier Bronze Age networks.
03/10/2016 06:00 PM ISAW Lecture Hall
03/21/2016 06:30 PM ISAW Lecture Hall

Brush Lecture (AIA): Maya Cultural Heritage

How Archaeologists and Indigenous Peoples Create and Conserve the Past

Patricia McAnany

03/22/2016 06:00 PM ISAW Lecture Hall

Through the Looking Glass

An Evolving Perspective on Northern Zhou Dynasty (557-581) Buddhist Art

Annette Juliano

Northern Zhou Buddhist art has long been exiled to a dark corner of the scholarly world. Its contribution to the development of early Buddhist art (4th to 7th centuries) in China has too often been minimized, stereotyped and, at times, dismissed in favor of work produced by the rival Northern Qi dynasty (550-577), the bitter contemporary rival to the Northern Zhou. However, the cumulative effect of recent discoveries of Northern Zhou Buddhist sculpture and painting calls for a reassessment.
03/24/2016 06:00 PM ISAW Lecture Hall

Memory, Tradition, and Image Production in Ancient Mesopotamia

Beate Pongratz-Leisten

Just as memory has been conceived of as a passive reservoir where visual data can be stored to be tapped when necessary, so has tradition been looked at as conservative, static, and rigid in nature. Reworking, creativity, and innovations, as reflected in the visual and textual repertoire, however, and the persistence of cultural key metaphors in tradition throughout Mesopotamian history need not to be exclusive. The variations upon received themes reveal that reception and interpretation or reformulation are not separable operations. Rather they are thoroughly interdependent, and the way themes are seen and depicted depends upon and varies with experience and expectations. Developmental psychology and cognitive science have long been calling attention to the fact that the experience of recollection and the recollection of experience are reciprocally engaged, in other words that visual intelligence richly interacts with, and in many cases precedes and drives, rational and emotional intelligence. Vision is not merely a matter of passive perception, it is an intelligent process of active recollection and construction. What follows then is that any imagery created as a pictorial construction steeped in the stream of tradition had to pass the scrutiny of the beholder’s visual intelligence before they can address his or her emotional and rational intelligence. It is this combination of representation by means of acquired schemes and formulas meeting the expectations of the beholder and Bildmagie blurring the boundaries between reality and image and so directly affecting him which will be explored.
03/29/2016 06:00 PM ISAW Lecture Hall

Rostovtzeff Lecture Series: Silk Roads and Steppe Roads of Medieval China: History Unearthed from Tombs, I

A Slave Road? Sogdian Merchants and Foreign Slaves at Turfan

Jonathan K. Skaff

This lecture, the first in a series of four Rostovtzeff Lectures during spring 2016, introduces the Silk Roads through a case study of Sogdians living as a minority at the Chinese oasis city of Turfan in the six and seventh centuries. The Sogdians were early inhabitants of modern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan who spoke an Iranian dialect, and began to migrate eastward by the fourth century CE to settle in cities and towns on the Silk Roads. The lecture will update Skaff’s previous publications on Sogdian farmers and merchants at Turfan by considering recently-discovered paper documents and epitaphs.
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03/31/2016 06:00 PM ISAW Lecture Hall

The Trade and Technique of Late Antique Textiles

First of Two Presentations

Irene Soto

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04/05/2016 06:00 PM ISAW Lecture Hall

Rostovtzeff Lecture Series: Silk Roads and Steppe Roads of Medieval China: History Unearthed from Tombs, II

Sogdians or Borderlanders?, Part I: Lives Revealed in Epitaphs

Jonathan K. Skaff

This lecture, the second in a series of four Rostovtzeff Lectures during spring 2016, will return to the topic of immigrants, but in this case two lineages with the same surname of Shi who settled at Guyuan in China’s Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region where the Silk Roads and Steppe Roads intersect. These people were locally powerful elites serving a succession of China-based dynasties as military officers, imperial bodyguards, horse breeders and translators in the sixth and seventh centuries. Their existence literally came to light when archaeologists excavated six tombs at Guyuan in the 1980s and 1990s containing burial goods and seven engraved stone epitaphs written in Chinese. A scholarly consensus has developed that both lineages had Sogdian origins, but this lecture along with the third lecture in the Rostovtzeff series will challenge and complicate this conclusion.
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04/08/2016 10:00 AM ISAW Lecture Hall

The Formation of Cultural Memory: Ancient Mesopotamian Libraries and Schools and Their Contribution to the Shaping of Tradition and Identity

Workshop organized by Beate Pongratz-Leisten (ISAW)

When dealing with archives and libraries in the ancient Near East, Assyriological scholarship has dedicated much effort into the publication of their texts, often concentrating on one particular genre. Less attention has been paid to the questions what particular texts or genres were collected and for what potential purposes in a particular place. The workshop intends to approach Mesopotamian tablet collections, tablet-depots, archives, and libraries from a cultural-anthropological perspective, looking at the epistemic practices and forms of production and reception of texts in order define more closely the repertoire of cultural memory and tradition.
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