Institute for the Study of the Ancient World

Prof. Candida Moss spoke about her research into enslaved labor and the creation, transmission, and preservation of biblical literature over the Roman period to a packed room at ISAW on Oct. 7, 2025.

Published 10/08/2025 — filed under: library-event Located in Library ISAW Library Blog

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Prof. von Reden will offer alternative ways of thinking about why we find Chinese silk in Palmyra, Egyptian glass vessels in Afghanistan, and Roman coins in Thailand and Vietnam.

Published 09/19/2025 — filed under: library-event Located in Events

Prof. Candida Moss draws from her research in her recent book, God’s Ghostwriters, to reveal how enslaved scribes, copyists, and curators were essential to the production, preservation, and dissemination of the texts we now regard as sacred or canonical.

Published 08/14/2025 — filed under: library-event Located in Events

The domestication of plants in prehistory allowed humanity to demographically expand, form dense population congregations (urbanism and social hierarchies), and advance the arts and sciences. For millennia, humans drove the evolution of domestication traits in crops and animals. Archaeologists, ecologists, and geneticists are all working to develop new theories about how domestication in antiquity occurred; one of these theories – the ecological release hypothesis – suggests that crops and animals evolved traits of domestication as a response to humans simply removing predators and herbivores. Dr. Spengler will briefly explore a few key themes in this theory and the rich history of domestication and culture, which he traces in his recent book, Nature's Greatest Success: How Plants evolved to Exploit Humanity.

Published 07/31/2025 — filed under: library-event Located in Events

Dr. Leah Mascia presents on the ways in which funerary customs of Roman Egypt adapted to a changing multicultural landscape while remaining firmly embedded in the Pharaonic tradition.

Published 06/03/2025 — filed under: library-event Located in Events

Maria Doerfler (Yale University; ISAW Visiting Research Scholar 2014-15) returns to ISAW to discuss wealth and death in late antique Syria, part of her forthcoming monograph from the Cambridge University Press, Death and Afterlife in Syriac Christianity: Social Identity and Emotional Communities.

Published 03/12/2025 — filed under: library-event Located in Events Events Archive Academic Year 2024-2025

This lecture is the third in the ISAW Libraries events series for the 2024-2025 academic year. It will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Sarah Bond will share some of her research from her recently published book Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire (Yale University Press), exploring how Roman workers used strikes, boycotts, riots, and rebellion to get their voices—and their labor—acknowledged.

Published 09/12/2024 — filed under: library-event Located in Events Events Archive Academic Year 2024-2025

This lecture is the second in the ISAW Libraries events series for the 2024-2025 academic year. It will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Sabine Huebner shares some of her recent work on the ancient environment, exploring how the Nile's floods shaped Egypt’s agriculture, society, and political stability, highlighting the incredible adaptability of the Egyptian people to environmental changes over centuries. She will reveal how a blend of climate change, particularly in the Nile flooding, and political choices shaped agricultural output, tax policies, and overall economy of Egypt under Roman rule.

Published 08/19/2024 — filed under: library-event Located in Events Events Archive Academic Year 2024-2025

This lecture is the first in the ISAW Libraries events series for the 2024-2025 academic year. It will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. The fabled reign and tragic death of Cleopatra loom large in the Western imagination, but they can only be properly understood in the context of the queen’s inheritance: the preceding three centuries of Ptolemaic rule over the Nile Valley. In advance of the publication of a major new history of the period, Egyptologist and best-selling author Toby Wilkinson revisits Ptolemaic Egypt, with its dazzling mix of Greek and Egyptian cultures, exploring how Egypt under the Ptolemies became the greatest of the Hellenistic kingdoms.

Published 08/06/2024 — filed under: library-event Located in Events Events Archive Academic Year 2024-2025

The ISAW Library publishes new interactive, map-based visualization of its collection based on a newly redesigned database of bibliographic items tagged with Pleiades IDs, linked open data URIs for ancient places. In addition to the new visualization, the ISAW Library is also publishing the underlying data set, which now comprises over 4,000 curated bibliographic records in ancient studies, as well as the machine-learning algorithm that programmatically performs the initial assignment of Pleiades IDs to raw bibliographic records.

Published 03/02/2021 — filed under: policy, website, library-event Located in Library ISAW Library Blog

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