Institute for the Study of the Ancient World

The intellectual exercise of textual criticism is far from a modern invention. Without the regularity provided by printing, there were constantly different texts in circulation, and it was up to learned individuals to figure out how to make sense of them. While no manual on the assembly and editing of ancient manuscripts existed in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, or China, scribes diligently worked through copies of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Sumerian Incantations, or Buddhist manuscripts, and noted variants as they went. It is the intention of this conference to draw out the details of how those scribes produced a text tradition, added commentary to new editions, or marginalia to old ones, and what these practices might say about the culture in which the scribes were working. Please note that separate registration is required for DAY ONE (9/21/17), KEYNOTE LECTURE (9/21/17), and DAY TWO (9/22/17).

Published 06/16/2017 — filed under: video Located in Events Events Archive Academic Year 2017-2018

Video Recordings from The Scribal Mind: Textual Criticism in Antiquity

Published 10/12/2017 — filed under: video Located in Events Events Archive Academic Year 2017-2018

Listing of event pages that have been updated to include embedded streaming video from the recording of the event. Videos are hosted on the NYU Stream service. Some area available here for public viewing, with the permission of the presenter.

Published 11/23/2016 — filed under: video Located in Events

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.

Published 01/05/2016 — filed under: video Located in Events Events Archive Academic Year 2015-2016

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.

Published 01/27/2016 — filed under: video Located in Events Events Archive Academic Year 2015-2016

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.

Published 01/27/2016 — filed under: video Located in Events Events Archive Academic Year 2015-2016

This lecture, the third 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 second lecture in the Rostovtzeff series will challenge and complicate this conclusion.

Published 01/27/2016 — filed under: video Located in Events Events Archive Academic Year 2015-2016

Published 08/08/2016 — filed under: exhibition-event, video Located in Events Events Archive Academic Year 2016-2017

In the first half of the sixth century BCE, Babylonia experienced rapid economic development and increasing prosperity. Focusing in particular on the role of resource extraction and distribution by the state, the lecture explores the causes that led to this "golden interval," as J. Maynard Keynes termed such rare breaks in the (supposed) monotony of pre-industrial economic development. The talk will also look at how the changes in the core area of the Babylonian empire are reflected in its periphery, and it will investigate the consequences of increasing prosperity for social cohesion within Babylonia.

Published 08/18/2016 — filed under: video Located in Events Events Archive Academic Year 2016-2017

This talk will address the persistent late antique and early medieval hagiographical and historiographical perception of Rome as a city too burdened by its monumental pagan and imperial past and worldly distractions to be a sacred city. The title, “Decrepit Rome, your morals disintegrate, your walls collapse!” is a loose translation of the line “moribus et muris, Roma vetusta, caedes,” from a satirical poem arguably dating to the late 9th century, the so-called Versus Romae. The poem is unusual for its vehemence, but, as this talk will demonstrate, the complaints against the city of Rome it expresses were deep-seated.

Published 08/26/2016 — filed under: video Located in Events Events Archive Academic Year 2016-2017

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