Academic Year 2016-2017

This lecture will consist of a brief introduction to the historical development and the main characteristics of Greco-Roman astrology, to be followed by a survey of the theoretical and practical importance of accurate time-measurement in the practice of horoscopy and other astrological applications.

With the linguistic history of Egypt writ large on objects and monuments, individuals of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods (ca. 4th cent. BCE to 4th cent. CE) were constantly confronted by visual records of the past. Temples in particular were spaces where rulers and elite had been displaying their religious piety while also affirming political allegiances or exhibiting their social status for millennia. The Egyptian temples of the pharaonic period provided templates for the massive construction projects that were underwritten by foreign rulers during the first millennium BCE. However, the unique innovations in architecture and decoration of those same buildings are a testament to the changing dynamics of post-pharaonic Egypt. This talk will focus on the function of inscriptions and reliefs placed within Egyptian temples.

Since the emergence of Greek medicine as an independent field of study in the time of Hippocrates, there has been debate about its status vis-à-vis the humanities. In the second century A.D., the physician Galen took considerable pains to identify medicine as a foundational liberal art rather than as a manual or menial trade. The subsequent fate of his vast corpus—what was read when, how, and by whom—is illustrative of the push and pull of ancient medicine between science and the humanities up to the present day. Unlike the writing of his more literary contemporaries, Galen's corpus had an extensive, pragmatic role in professional training. He formed the cornerstone of medical education until the 17th century and his role there persisted even into the 19th century. It was only as his medical popularity waned that study of him among philologists began to gain momentum. This talk will investigate the issues at stake in Galen's time and then follow the fate of his influence through the ages into the modern debate on the role of humanities in medical education.

The Mediterranean’s Iron Age – roughly 1200-600 BCE – may be regarded as one of its most dynamic periods of history. Although it is not its first era in which people across the sea exchanged goods, ideas, values, customs, practices, and technologies, the difference is the scale to which this occurred. The interactions that resurged from the tenth century onwards eclipsed their Bronze Age antecedents in geographical, material and ideological scope. The period is characterized perhaps most of all by the movement of peoples from their homeland to areas far away on an unprecedented scale, notably the settlement of Greeks and Phoenicians in the central and western Mediterranean, which began in the ninth and eighth centuries.

During the first three centuries of its history, Coptic, the final stage of the Egyptian language written with Greek letters, was only used for literary purposes and private correspondence but not for contracts between individuals, documents sent by individuals to the authorities, or internal administrative communication—areas in which the Greek language had a monopoly. This situation is unique in comparison with what is observed in other provinces of the Roman Empire and cannot be explained by a legal prohibition.

The recent findings and the information from Kültepe over the last decade will be presented in this talk. Kültepe or the capital city of the ancient Kanesh Kingdom consists of a 21-meter high mound, mostly occupied by official and religious monumental buildings including palaces and temples, and a lower town settlement known as the “karum of Kaneš”. The mound exhibits a long cultural sequence of 18 building levels from the Early Bronze Age until the late Roman period, whereas the lower town contains four well-defined levels.

This lecture will outline several possible reasons for the late development of official Coptic. Possible reasons include the nature of the language itself, the prestige enjoyed by the Greek language, the milieu of Coptic’s creation, and the longstanding distrust of the Greek-speaking State towards the legal use of Egyptian.

In the middle of the 6th century, Coptic began to be used in a limited way for some documents other than purely private letters or accounts. Cultural and political considerations may account for the progressive use of Coptic for legal documents, but the key to this linguistic revolution must be sought in the situation of the judicial state institutions after Justinian and before the Arab Conquest.

This lecture will present an unpublished set of wooden tablets from Panopolis (now in the Louvre) attesting the use of Coptic for tax receipts in the 6th century and revisit the archive of Apa Abraam bishop of Hermonthis (c. 595-621) and of the monastery he founded—the largest group of legal Coptic texts prior to the Arab Conquest. These texts will lead us to examine the role of the Church and especially monasticism in the development of Coptic for official transactions.

After more than a century of Russian Imperial and Soviet research dominated by the excavation of thousands of tumulus burials, researchers examining the Bronze Age South Caucasus have now spent two decades investigating how the very different archaeology of settlements sheds light on the region's earliest political institutions and mass social inequalities (ca. 3500-1150 BCE). Most of this data has emerged from the sites of the Tsaghkahovit Plain, which have served as a micro-regional laboratory for Bronze and Iron Age studies since 1998. In this high elevation setting between Mt. Aragats and the Tsaghkunyats Range, deep consideration of the relations between burial tumuli, settlements, and hilltop fortresses has enabled a clearer picture to emerge of the development of socially stratified polities involved in warfare and the accumulation of wealth and status. But how exactly do the detailed and local models of political life from Tsaghkahovit articulate with the broader dynamics that tied the residents of the South Caucasus into a regional ecumene with a common political vocabulary? Data from the Kasakh Valley Archaeological Survey of Project ArAGATS—just south and east—are providing access points to these regional aspects of society and economy. At the same time, they are illuminating the paths and stakes of political landscape archaeology more generally.

Dr. Eleni Korka, General Directorate of Antiquities in the Ministry of Culture and Sports in Athens will give a special lecture on the excavation of the ancient city of Tenea.