https://isaw.nyu.edu https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/arabia-at-the-crossroads Known from Biblical and cuneiform sources as an important trading post, the oasis of Tayma, Northwest Arabia, was a major stop of the famous “incense road” used for trading South Arabian aromatics to the Mediterranean and at the same time part of a larger communication network for caravans all over the peninsula. 2015-09-09T19:31:05Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/wizard-wunderkinder Sorcery, reincarnation, mummification – rituals, magic, and divination play a major role in ancient Egyptian literature from the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2137 BC) until the Roman Imperial Period (ca. 3rd century AD). Franziska Naether will present and analyze passages of cult practices from a particularly rich and exciting story – the Second Setna Novel about the son of pharaoh Ramesses II, Setna, and his wunderkind son. 2015-09-09T19:13:46Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/diglib-grad-fall2015 The Library and the Digital Programs team of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World continue the work of the Linked Ancient World Data Initiative (LAWDI) by organizing an informal coffee house for New York metro area scholars and scholars-in-training with an interest in digital approaches to the study of antiquity. Click on the event link to read more about the program and speakers. 2023-03-30T17:45:31Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/first-pagan-historian This lecture examines several episodes in the neglected 1500-year afterlife of the forged "De excidio Troiae historia" or "History of the Destruction of Troy" of pseudo-Dares Phrygius. Although the Latin "De excidio" was a late antique fabrication composed most likely in the fifth or sixth century CE, its author claimed to be an eyewitness to the Trojan War, whose account of the conflict openly contradicted such canonical sources as Virgil and Homer. Deemed by many to be the first pagan to write history, Dares infiltrated numerous domains of literary culture in medieval and early modern Europe. 2015-09-29T15:39:15Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/Emporia-and-Rebirth The problem of the origins of early medieval towns has been of interest to scholars since the days of Henri Pirenne. While much of the early research was based on historical records, archaeology has played an increasingly important role since the 1960s and 1970s. This talk will present some of the results of the Origins of Ipswich Project (1974-1990), with a particular focus on the faunal remains that can reveal how the residents of Ipswich were provisioned with meat and other animal products. The role of the ‘wic’ sites in the development of medieval towns will also be examined. 2015-09-24T19:56:24Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/prospective-students-fall-2015 ISAW's open house for prospective doctoral students will include coffee and lunch with ISAW students, faculty, and scholars; an information session about our academic program; a tour of ISAW and the ISAW Library; a Q&A session with current students; and an opportunity to attend an ISAW seminar taught by Prof. Elizabeth Murphy and Prof. Lorenzo d'Alfonso. 2016-08-22T16:03:31Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/sanctuary-at-torbulok A sanctuary of the Hellenistic period was recently discovered at the village of Torbulok in southwest Tajikistan. Excavations at the site, started in 2013 by a German-Tajik team, give insights into the structure of the sanctuary and confirm the dating to the 3rd and 2nd century BC, as Bactria was part of the Hellenistic world. The site seems to have functioned as a pilgrim sanctuary, associated with an ancient settlement at distance of ca. 30 kilometers. 2015-09-28T15:01:49Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/statues-of-amun The lecture presents representative examples from among more than 60 statues of Amun and his consorts, Mut and Amunet, created to replace images destroyed during the iconoclastic phase of Akhenaten’s reign. This corpus, compiled over three decades, forms the basis of a study in the final stages of preparation. The main focus of the lecture is the indispensable role connoisseurship plays in such a project – and what can result from failure to apply it. 2015-09-10T00:25:00Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/nasseredin-shah-and-his-84-wives 2015-10-28T16:10:00Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/defining-elsewhere Mesopotamia is populated with a host of supernatural figures, creatures often referred to as monsters or demons. In many cases, these figures represent the embodiment of dangers such as illness or disease, or they stood as a natural expression of the wild, uncivilized lands of the desert and the mountains, far beyond the reach of the inhabited city. While these qualities are not mutually exclusive by any means, this talk will focus on the characteristics of the creatures that predominately inhabited these liminal spaces, described generally as the desert or steppe. 2015-10-19T23:43:18Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/levy-lecture-scythian-burials The social structure of Scythians and other groups in the Eurasian steppe is mainly reflected by their graves, burial mounds, which are called "kurgans." Excavations during the last 20 years in different parts of Russia, from Siberia in the far east to southern Russia in the west, have yielded significant new information and have led to a rather new understanding of the phenomenon of elite kurgans. 2015-10-27T18:59:13Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/after-the-hittite-empire When historians and archaeologists try to define who the Phrygians were, they have to face the existence of a complex, often contradictory body of information deriving from the many ancient Phrygian identities. This is particularly true if we examine the formation and development of the Phrygian kingdom. While the main discourse on the Phrygian kingdom derives from the classical Greek and Roman authors, the formation of this kingdom is deeply linked with the new political situation generated in Central Anatolia by the fall of the Hittite empire. 2015-11-02T15:51:41Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/not-in-gods-path One of the paradigmatic chronological demarcations in Middle and Near Eastern studies has been the notorious notion of a “pre-Islamic” vs. an “Islamic” divide in this history. For some in the field, the cue has come from the Arab conquests of the region in the seventh century, a series of conquests which have been, regularly and fallaciously, also identified as “Islamic Conquests.” For others, and even more problematically, the watershed has been based on the date of the Hijra, or Prophet Muhammad’s Immigration from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE – a single event in Islamic narratives of origin. 2015-10-27T14:56:53Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/the-discursive-spaces-of-qajar-photography 2015-09-09T18:21:56Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/empire-personhood-child-sacrifice Ancient North Africa has long been considered a landscape of stasis, where cultural trajectories can be traced from the Phoenician colonization of the 9th century BCE through the Islamic conquest to modernity. The practices surrounding the Phoenician rite of child sacrifice in the Maghreb are often highlighted as a prime piece of evidence for this grand narrative. In this talk, Matthew McCarty will argue that we see marked shifts from the Phoenician rite into the Roman imperial period, and that these extend beyond the level of practice and into the conceptual realm. 2015-10-29T06:40:01Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/qajar-photography-and-contemporary-iranian-art 2015-09-09T18:20:47Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/defense-architecture-and-order Since the discovery of sally ports covered with corbelled vaults in Mycenae and Tiryns, the suggestion that Hittite building techniques were applied in Mycenaean Greece has appeared in the relevant literature. This lecture will analyze and compare the fortification architecture of Late Helladic Mycenaean sites, such as Mycenae, Tiryns, Midea, Gla and Athens Acropolis, with the fortification architecture of Late Bronze Age Anatolia, specifically the Hittite fortifications. The lecture will also address questions of identity, technology transfer, the assertion of social order, symbols of power, and Hittite-Mycenaean relations. 2015-12-02T19:32:16Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/antikythera-mechanism-1901-1910 During the first years following the discovery of the Antikythera Mechanism, its nature, purpose, and date were the subject of intense interdisciplinary debate among archeologists, historians of navigation, and classical scholars. In this lecture, Prof. Jones will trace how a basically incorrect identification of the Mechanism came to be widely accepted for half a century, as well as explore the unpublished investigations of the philologist and epigrapher Albert Rehm in which he proposed an identification that was correct in principle and anticipated many details revealed by recent research. 2015-09-25T16:49:19Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/ancient-persianisms-persepolitan-motifs-in-19rh-century-qajar-persia 2015-09-09T18:07:44Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/the-other-woman Due to unforeseen circumstances, this lecture has been canceled. 2016-01-20T14:22:43Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/lifeworlds-in-early-china Tombs are often considered as places of death and portals to the afterlife, and admittedly, they can function as such. However, viewing tombs solely from this perspective effectively overlooks that tombs are, as often, not only products of the living, but also designed to display the “lived” aspects of the dead. This talk focuses on such a tomb, closed in 316 B.C.E., from southern China, then the heartland of a mighty kingdom of Chu. 2016-01-05T19:08:37Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/counting-roman-amphitheaters By the Second Century AD, well over 200 amphitheaters had been built within the territory of the Roman Empire. The most famous of these, the 50,000+ seat "Colosseum" in Rome, is also among the most unusual by being the largest and most complex amphitheater around. While the crowds watching gladiators and animals fight, as well as criminals being executed, were huge at Rome, in Italy’s smaller cities and in the Empire's provinces they could be very much smaller. This paper explores the diversity in the size and capacities of amphitheaters by emphasizing the visualization of their spatial distribution. This in part means making maps, but also making use of modern tools for representing and exploring large data sets. When the capacities of amphitheaters are totaled, it is likely that there were over two million seats available for watching all the activities that occurred in these uniquely Roman structures. That large number provides one avenue to a nuanced understanding of the role of amphitheaters in creating and maintaining the territorial and political stability of imperial Rome. 2016-01-25T16:15:13Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/a-view-from-below The Shang Dynasty, or the second dynasty of Chinese historiography, is largely known to us from elite sources—be they royal divinatory texts, the archaeology of palaces and elite tombs, or the received accounts of kings and ministers. Indeed, despite the fact that archaeological investigation of the Shang dynasty is about as old as archaeology itself in China, never before in its nearly hundred year history has a village site been closely and thoroughly excavated and studied. This talk will focus on collaborative work at the first such site, Guandimiao, and the surprising things we are finding there—things that may force us to re-consider our understanding of Early China. 2016-01-26T18:07:05Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/religious-space-in-sepphoris This lecture will focus on the cultic buildings known to date in Sepphoris -- a Roman temple, two churches, and a synagogue -- and will discuss their implications for the study of the architectural development, social structure, religious behavior, and cultural relationships between the Jews and other segments of society in this late antique city. 2016-01-05T19:16:34Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/middle-kingdom-clappers 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. 2016-02-02T19:34:06Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/territorial-barriers-in-central-asia 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. 2016-02-29T20:08:57Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/material-worlds 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. 2016-02-26T19:51:07Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/ancient-near-eastern-contact-zone 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. 2016-03-07T13:41:51Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/veiling-the-late-roman-house 2016-01-21T14:25:13Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/maya-cultural-heritage 2016-02-11T21:20:57Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/through-the-looking-glass 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. 2016-01-05T19:36:17Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/memory-tradition-image-production 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. 2016-11-04T19:47:25Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/rostovtzeff-silk-roads-lecture-1 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. 2016-11-04T20:18:17Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/the-trade-and-technique-of-late-antique-textiles 2016-03-16T18:41:41Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/rostovtzeff-silk-roads-lecture-2 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. 2017-01-10T15:19:10Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/formation-of-cultural-memory-workshop 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. 2016-03-24T17:24:14Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/rostovtzeff-silk-roads-lecture-3 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. 2016-11-04T20:16:54Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/the-trade-and-technique-of-late-antique-textiles-1 2016-03-16T16:26:36Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/global-eighth-century-day-one Around the middle of the eighth century CE different societies in Eurasia experienced important changes. The Carolingian revolution in Western Europe, the Abbasid revolution in the Middle East and the An Lushan rebellion in China practically coincided with the sudden relocations of the capital of Japan. The eighth century in general seems to be a period of simultaneous socio-economic upswing in societies as far apart as Southeast Asia and Northwestern Europe. This two-day workshop on April 15-16, 2016, will investigate these simultaneous developments by bringing together specialists on the history of the eighth century in Western Europe, Byzantium, the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, China, Japan and Southeast Asia. 2016-03-14T15:38:24Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/global-eighth-century-day-two Around the middle of the eighth century CE different societies in Eurasia experienced important changes. The Carolingian revolution in Western Europe, the Abbasid revolution in the Middle East and the An Lushan rebellion in China practically coincided with the sudden relocations of the capital of Japan. The eighth century in general seems to be a period of simultaneous socio-economic upswing in societies as far apart as Southeast Asia and Northwestern Europe. This two-day workshop on April 15-16, 2016, will investigate these simultaneous developments by bringing together specialists on the history of the eighth century in Western Europe, Byzantium, the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, China, Japan and Southeast Asia. 2016-03-14T15:35:44Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/rostovtzeff-silk-roads-lecture-4 The final lecture in the Rostovtzeff series takes the audience along the Steppe Roads from China to Mongolia to investigate another recently discovered tomb and epitaph. The history of Mongolia is little known between the First Türk (552–630) and Second Türk (682–742) Empires. Chinese historical records claim that the Tang Dynasty exerted suzerainty over Mongolia during the interregnum through vassal rulers, but offer few details after 660. Likewise, Uighur Empire (744-840) inscriptions assert an earlier period of rule over Mongolia in alliance with the Tang. The recent excavation of Pugu Yitu’s tomb and Chinese-language epitaph shows that an alliance endured through the 670s and throws new light on cultural connections between China and Mongolia. 2017-07-19T18:02:41Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/iran-across-the-east-west-trade The central location of Iran in the overland routes of trade and communication between western and eastern Asia, throughout the historical and up to the early modern period, has been long acknowledged by the scholarly community. Yet the overland trade routes, networks of East/West trade and exchange, or the products of exchange of this world in late antiquity and the early medieval periods have yet to attract the scholarly attention that they deserve. This lacuna is especially felt in the Late Antique period of Iranian history (circa 500-900 CE). This workshop, conceived as an interdisciplinary dialogue, seeks to further highlight the parameters of research on this important aspect of Late Antique history of western Asia. How central was Iran, if at all, to the networks of trade and exchange in the Late Antique world? What role did it play, if any, in connecting the Byzantine Empire to China, and what are some of the analytical tools through which we can further investigate the socio-political and cultural contexts and implications of the East/West trade at this crucial juncture of world history. 2016-04-20T21:44:45Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/work-economy-and-society Roman crafts production -- and its associated technological and labor organization -- has been conceived of as segmented, in part, although not exclusively, because of the structure of archaeological practice. Yet, in approaching potmaking, metalwork, glass manufacture, and other industries as discrete types of process, the intrinsically messy nature of the lived experience of making in the ancient Mediterranean is unhelpfully glossed. In response, this paper considers the bridge between intra- and inter-craft production; how and in what terms ways of making intersected and informed each other, from recycling to pooled infrastructure. Cases studies are presented from Roman and Late Antique Sagalassos, which illustrate the extent to which embedded social attitudes to making, and culturally constructed notions of the optimal, drove the structure of Roman crafts production. 2016-04-26T15:48:34Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/horus-set-and-israel While differences of opinion exist on the historicity of the biblical stories about Israel in Egypt, in this lecture Greenberg will look at various Egyptian stories, including the New Kingdom tale known as “The Contendings of Horus and Set,” Manetho’s third century BCE Egyptian story connecting the Exodus to Pharoah Akhenaten, and Plutarch’s summary of the story of Osiris and Isis and the activities of their children Horus and Set. We will then compare portions of these stories with elements from the biblical accounts of Jacob and Esau, and Moses and the Exodus, showing how the Egyptian imagery of Horus and Set appears to inform both biblical narratives. 2024-08-14T21:21:35Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/cult-practices-day-one Heroic stories and novels, tales, travel fictions and wisdom texts in the ancient world, from Egypt to Greece, from Anatolia to Rome, they contained rituals, magic and divination. In this two-day workshop on May 16-17, 2016, we will discuss phenomena of such cult practices and their functions in regard to ritual and literary studies. Topics include secret knowledge, presentations of the divine and of fate, sacred justice and practitioners of cult practices as protagonists in the narratives. 2016-08-11T19:01:13Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/cult-practices-day-two Heroic stories and novels, tales, travel fictions and wisdom texts in the ancient world, from Egypt to Greece, from Anatolia to Rome, they contained rituals, magic and divination. In this two-day workshop on May 16-17, 2016, we will discuss phenomena of such cult practices and their functions in regard to ritual and literary studies. Topics include secret knowledge, presentations of the divine and of fate, sacred justice and practitioners of cult practices as protagonists in the narratives. 2016-04-27T16:58:01Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/coptic-art-modern-design-art-history-the-changing-value-of-late-antique-textiles-at-the-brooklyn-museum 2016-01-21T14:25:40Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2015/other-woman-egyptian-art Middle Kingdom stelae play an important role in the study of ancient Egyptian society. Subtleties expressed in the pictorial evidence of these monuments offer information not given elsewhere. Though most of the stelae are inscribed, the inscriptions are often brief and limited in content. Meant as memorials or historical monuments, they consciously include information which the owner wished to convey, though unconsciously, may include symbolic visual nuances -- i.e., identifying markers, understood in their time and place, but lost to the modern viewer. This presentation will take a closer look at the representation of the female Asiatic servant, Seneb-reniseneb, whose image appears on the Thirteenth Dynasty Stela of Reniseneb from Abydos, and determine what other roles she may have played in his household. 2024-08-14T21:19:46Z Event