https://isaw.nyu.edu https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/herodes-atticus-and-the-greco-roman-world-imperial-cosmos-cosmic-allusions-art-and-culture-in-his-estate-in-southern-peloponnese 2017-11-21T21:26:39Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/elephantine-island The inhabitants of the first-cataract Nile Island Elephantine comprised a multi-ethnic, multicultural and multi-religious community, which has left behind large amounts of written material in addition to the archaeological remains. The first results of a larger project accessing these papyri from Elephantine Island will be presented in this lecture, using also up to date (virtual) unfolding techniques. No other settlement in Egypt has been so well documented over such a long period of time through its texts, which provide evidence of everyday life from the Old Kingdom right up to the era following the Arab conquest. 2017-06-09T19:43:11Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/death-and-taxes 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. 2017-06-09T19:43:10Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/mechanics-of-extraction-day-one The exercise of power depends on the ability of governing structures to collect and reallocate resources—be they in the form of currency, labor, agricultural produce, raw materials, or processed goods. Systems of taxation are the basis for the collection of resources and the generation of revenue. Today, such systems are ubiquitous, embedded in the socio-political structures associated with the modern state. While there are ongoing arguments about who should be taxed and precisely how much, there nevertheless exists a widespread recognition of a social contract, whereby the state enjoys widespread tax compliance in return for the provision of a variety of services. To what extent is this true for ancient societies? Ancient polities often diverge in many important respects from modern states—not least in the practical tools at their disposal when assessing the availability of resources or enforcing tax compliance. 2017-06-15T18:07:29Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/mechanics-of-extraction-day-two The exercise of power depends on the ability of governing structures to collect and reallocate resources—be they in the form of currency, labor, agricultural produce, raw materials, or processed goods. Systems of taxation are the basis for the collection of resources and the generation of revenue. Today, such systems are ubiquitous, embedded in the socio-political structures associated with the modern state. While there are ongoing arguments about who should be taxed and precisely how much, there nevertheless exists a widespread recognition of a social contract, whereby the state enjoys widespread tax compliance in return for the provision of a variety of services. To what extent is this true for ancient societies? Ancient polities often diverge in many important respects from modern states—not least in the practical tools at their disposal when assessing the availability of resources or enforcing tax compliance. 2017-06-09T19:43:10Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/sanctuary-of-poseidon-at-onchestos In the summer of 2014, Columbia University’s Department of Art History and Archaeology initiated, under the auspices of The Athens Archaeological Society, the excavation of the sanctuary of Poseidon at Onchestos, the seat of the Boeotian Confederacy and one of the few Greek sacred places mentioned in the Iliad. The excavation has focused on two large areas (Site A: 0.6 ha; Site B: 1.03 ha) between Thebes and Haliartos. The excavation has already yielded a rich array of finds: vases and vase-fragments (several bearing graffiti), countless bronze objects (including several strigils), bronze and silver coins, weapons (among them a fully preserved sword), objects associated with horse- and chariot races, and many architectural elements (including several architectural terracottas bearing floral and abstract decoration in black, white, and red color on a beige background; fragments of Ionic columns; two Ionic corner capitals). After only three years of excavation, the questions are still far more numerous than the answers, but we can securely state that the site was one of the major sanctuaries of Central Greece. 2017-06-09T19:43:11Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/prospective-students-fall-2016 ISAW's open house for prospective doctoral students will include lunch and tea 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. Lorenzo d'Alfonso and Prof. Roderick Campbell. 2017-09-15T15:31:45Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/terrace-house-2-ephesos Terrace House 2 is a ca. 4,000 m² insula lying directly in the Roman city centre of Ephesus. Due to its exceptional state of preservation the complex counts amongst the most scientifically important and moreover most remarkable monuments of its type. The special state of preservation results in the fact that the structure not only allows a classification and analysis based on ground plan, chronology and history of style, but also represents an almost inexhaustible source for the material culture of the Roman period, for multiple analyses in the study of domestic architecture. In addition to its undisputed scientific relevance, Terrace House 2 also represents a great challenge in terms of restoration. 2017-06-09T19:43:11Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/decrepit-rome 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. 2017-06-09T19:43:11Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/hic-sunt-dracones Borders, frontiers, and the lands beyond them were created, defined, and maintained through a variety of physical, geographical, and moreover, social and cultural means in the ancient Near East, Biblical World, and the ancient Mediterranean. While the first two definitions were most often enforced through open military conflict, the maintenance of forts or frontier territories, or the more fluid existence of trading networks, these real encounters interacted with a tradition of fictionalizing foreign locations, as well as inventing new and distant lands entirely. This workshop is principally concerned with this process of creating and sensationalizing, to a degree, distant lands in the ancient world, and the ways by which these spaces were represented in literary, religious, and economic texts, as well as being depicted artistically. This process of "othering" foreign lands, as well as those who lived there, speaks to the ways in which the separate civilizations of the ancient world each constructed their own mental maps of the world around them, and created points of both contact and conflict when those mental maps intersected with each other. 2017-06-09T19:43:11Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/levy-lecture-hittites Please Note: the Leon Levy Lecture is now fully booked; we are no longer accepting RSVPs or names for the wait list. Whereas the civilizations of the Assyrians and Babylonians in Mesopotamia and that of Egypt never faded from memory, knowledge of the Hittites was almost fully erased after the collapse of their kingdom around 1200 BC. In the now one-hundred-year-old resurrection of Hittite culture and society that followed the decipherment of the Hittite language in 1915, they were largely cast in the image of Mesopotamian civilization, especially where Hittite sources remain less eloquent or even silent. But is this always justified? Are we at liberty to assume entire text genres and social systems just because others had them? What would Hittite society look like without them? 2017-06-09T19:43:11Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/exhibition-lecture-ancient-sundials Nearly six hundred sundials are preserved from ancient Greek and Roman times. This richly illustrated lecture will explore the styles, uses, and significance of ancient sundials and their relevance historically and in context to our modern understanding of time. 2017-11-21T21:30:04Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/fruits-of-the-silk-road The Silk Road was the largest commerce network of the ancient world; it linked the disparate ends of the vast Eurasian supercontinent and in doing so connected the imperial centers of East and Southwest Asia. While organized trade, including military outposts and government taxation, along the Silk Road dates back to the Han dynasty in the second century B.C., the exchange of goods, ideas, cultural practice, and genes, through the thousands of kilometers of desert and mountainous expanses comprising this region dates back to the third millennium B.C. This flow of cultural traits through Central Asia during the past four and a half millennia was a major driving force in the development of cultures across the Old World and shaped cuisines around the globe. 2017-06-09T19:43:11Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/imhotep-comes-forth This lecture will focus on the Book of the Dead of the Priest of Horus of Hebenu, Imhotep (MMA 35.9.20a-w), one of the masterpieces displayed in the recently renovated Ptolemaic galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2017-06-09T19:43:11Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/late-antiquity-in-early-modernity In 1776, the English historian Edward Gibbon published the first volumes of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon’s paradigm of “decline and fall” maintained that the ancient world had swiftly and dramatically crumbled into a millennium of medieval darkness, torn asunder by what Gibbon labeled “barbarism and religion.” This temporal map did much to shape the emergent discipline of Classics, formalizing distinctions that, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, would privilege a supposedly canonical Greco-Roman antiquity over other cultures and periods of the past. Yet Gibbon, whose History extended all the way to the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453, hardly considered himself merely an ancient historian. Rather, as he claimed, his Decline and Fall would do nothing less than “connect the ancient and modern history of the world.” This lecture explores just what Gibbon meant by linking the ancient and the modern. In doing so, it examines how early modern European scholars in the centuries before Gibbon defined such categories as antiquity and modernity. When had modernity begun, and which portions of antiquity should this nascent modernity replicate or imitate? Which eras counted as truly ancient? And what purposes did a millennium-long “middle” period between ancient Rome and contemporary Europe serve? Retracing the history of these historical concepts—and their many paradoxes—promises to shed new light on our own approaches to the ancient world and its temporal boundaries. 2024-08-14T21:16:59Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/exhibition-lecture-weeks-months-and-years-in-greek-and-roman-calendars This talk looks at how time was structured in Greek and Roman antiquity. How and why was the year divided into just this many units and not more or less? Where did the seven-day week come from? How was the division of the year into weeks, days, and months related to religious and political cycles and duties? 2017-11-21T21:31:28Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/spread-of-monotheism From Yemen to the Persian Gulf to the eastern shores of the Red Sea, monotheism, principally in the form of Christianity and Judaism, was spreading its tentacles around the edges of the Arabian peninsula in the Late Antique period and by the time Muhammad began his preaching, around 610 AD, of Muhammad, it had begun to penetrate the land's vast interiors. It used to be thought that the Qur'an was a reaction to paganism, but now it is becoming increasingly evident that it should be understood rather as a response to the Judeo-Christian currents swirling around its birth place in west Arabia. But why did Muhammad and his followers not simply adopt one of the two established monotheist faiths, what was their objection to them and what was the nature of their new community? This talk will look at some of the new discoveries of Christian and Jewish remains in Arabia and present the latest perspectives on the origins of Islam and the Muslim community. 2024-08-14T21:14:37Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/a-cumulative-han-culture In the field of Ancient China studies, scholars have often turned to the more recent past and its many textual sources, to aid them in their efforts of illuminating the deeper past. What has allowed this ‘free movement through time’ is the notion that Chinese civilization is monolithic and unchanging: a cumulative culture that adds to its solid core. The issue of continuity vs. change is certainly not unique to Chinese scholarship, and ways in which scholars choose to reconcile long term regional developments, historical projections, and archaeological data in their studies vary widely. This talk calls for the continued reevaluation of the ways in which we approach the past by focusing on the tension between traditional narratives of a unified Han center and the existence of regional cultures during the Western Zhou period (1046-771). 2024-08-14T21:10:49Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/exhibition-lecture-geographical-portable-sundials This lecture considers one type of Roman sundial represented in the exhibition that has not been sufficiently appreciated from geographical, cultural, and social perspectives. These are the miniature bronze instruments fitted with adjustable rings to accommodate the changes of latitude liable to occur during long journeys. This lecture will explore the possibility that often they were valued not so much for practical use, but rather as prestige objects. 2017-11-21T21:36:32Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/brahmins-monks-and-astral-lore Described by the Indian scholar and Sanskritist P. V. Kane as “a problem not satisfactorily solved,” the introduction of a new form of astral science in India during the early centuries of the first millennium C.E. which resembles its Greco-Babylonian counterpart has been a heated topic in Indian historiography and history of science between Indian and Western scholars. Subsequent to the meticulous comparative analysis of David Pingree and his 1978 publication of a critical edition of the Yavanajātaka (“Genethliacal astrology of the Greeks”) dated to the second century C.E., a great number of questions concerning the origin and evolution of Greco-Indian astral science were clarified. However, with the recent discovery of new manuscripts and other materials, the issues appear to be far from being settled and some of Pingree’s widely accepted assertions now require serious reconsideration. 2017-06-09T19:43:11Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/enigmatic-sites-and-headless-nubians Scattered throughout the southeastern desert of Egypt are several late Roman sites, comprising clusters of dry-stone structures (often including more than a hundred separate buildings). Similarities in architecture and ceramic material reveal a connection between these settlements, all of which appear to have flourished between 400 and 600 CE. Often termed "enigmatic sites," the purpose or even the ethnic affiliations of their inhabitants remain sources of speculation. New archaeological work and survey over the past seven years has revealed not only new examples of these settlements, but also exciting information about why these sites were built, and who might have built them. 2017-06-09T19:43:12Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/copy_of_enigmatic-sites-and-headless-nubians Scattered throughout the southeastern desert of Egypt are several late Roman sites, comprising clusters of dry-stone structures (often including more than a hundred separate buildings). Similarities in architecture and ceramic material reveal a connection between these settlements, all of which appear to have flourished between 400 and 600 CE. Often termed "enigmatic sites," the purpose or even the ethnic affiliations of their inhabitants remain sources of speculation. New archaeological work and survey over the past seven years has revealed not only new examples of these settlements, but also exciting information about why these sites were built, and who might have built them. 2017-06-09T19:43:12Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/fantastical-space-heroic-journeys Sumerian literary texts from the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1800 BCE) are often stories with larger-than-life protagonists, featuring warriors, heroes, and kings – and occasionally individuals who manage to be all three at once. While many texts, such as those concerning the warrior Gilgamesh, are centered around a climatic battle or other martial events, they also incorporate a journey into the structure of the narrative. These journeys, a common feature of both literary texts and royal inscriptions, allow the narrative to transition to a more fantastical setting, and thus better accommodate the expanded heroic actions of the narrative. The distant and faraway nature of these spaces, however, is more complicated, as the more fantastical depictions of these locations must also exist within the framework of the real interactions that are also depicted within the cuneiform record. 2017-06-09T19:43:11Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/cosmos-east-west The conference is now fully booked. We are no longer accepting RSVPs or names for the waitlist. 2017-06-09T19:43:12Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/exhibition-lecture-time-and-cosmos-in-greco-roman-astrology 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. 2017-11-21T21:39:37Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/multilingual-texts-egyptian-temples 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. 2017-06-09T19:43:11Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/medicine-and-the-humanities 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. 2026-06-30T20:23:48Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/globalising-the-mediterraneans-iron-age 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. 2017-06-09T19:43:11Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/rostovtzeff-egyptian-vs-greek-lecture-1 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. 2017-06-09T19:43:12Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/anatolia-before-assyrians 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. 2017-06-09T19:43:11Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/rostovtzeff-egyptian-vs-greek-lecture-2 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. 2017-06-09T19:43:12Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/rostovtzeff-egyptian-vs-greek-lecture-3 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. 2018-02-01T18:08:00Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/exhibition-lecture-a-portable-cosmos 2017-11-21T21:39:01Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/rostovtzeff-egyptian-vs-greek-lecture-4 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. 2017-06-09T19:43:12Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/landscapes-of-death 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. 2017-06-09T19:43:11Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/excavating-the-ancient-city-of-tenea 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. 2017-06-09T19:43:12Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/madame-silsila Gebel el Silsila, meaning 'Mountain of the Chain' in Arabic, is located in Upper Egypt between Kom Ombo and Edfu. Most visitors to Egypt have only experienced Gebel el Silsila from the deck of a ship while cruising the Nile between Aswan and Luxor. However Madam Silsila, as she is affectionately known to the Gebel el Silsila team, is so much more. The massive site encompasses approximately 30 square kilometers and is known for its many New Kingdom stelae, Nile cenotaphs, shrines, and rock cut temple, the so-called Speos of Horemheb. Arguably Silsila's predominant features are her cavernous, cathedral-like quarries. Numbering 104, these quarries produced much of the quality sandstone used to construct some of the most famed temples in Egypt. This talk will introduce you to wondrous Madam Silsila with an overview of her most renowned aspects, present those which are lesser known, and reveal some of the latest news from the field. 2017-06-09T19:43:12Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/core-of-a-new-age The workshop aims at reflecting on the conceptualization, organization, and cultural expressions of power, as well as circulations of people, goods, and knowledge in Northern Mesopotamia and Syria. The central question to be explored is how and in which contexts we can observe some kind of common ideology reflecting the multiple intersections of political, economic, and social frameworks of the Club of the Great Powers. Simultaneously, the focus will be on the peculiarities of the local dynamics shaping the relations East and West of the Euphrates during the Late Bronze Age. 2017-06-09T19:43:12Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/exhibition-performance-1-a-high-school-drama-class A drama class from the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts will be performing a piece as a result of ISAW's participation in the Guggenheim's social practice initiative project Circle Through New York. 2017-06-09T19:43:12Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/exhibition-performance-a-high-school-drama-class A drama class from the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts will be performing a piece in connection with ISAW’s participation in the Guggenheim’s social practice project Circle Through New York. 2017-06-09T19:43:12Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/exhibition-performance-a-high-school-drama-class-1 A drama class from the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts will be performing a piece in connection with ISAW’s participation in the Guggenheim’s social practice project Circle Through New York. 2017-06-09T19:43:12Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/paradise-in-the-caucasus Contrary to its immense historical impact on the cultures of the Ancient Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean, the Achaemenid Empire has been difficult to grasp archaeologically outside its centres, the impressive monumental complexes of Persepolis, Susa and Pasargadae. This is particularly surprising given the historic and epigraphic evidence for the existence of a very tight‐knit, efficiently organized administration. During the past 20 years, excavations led to new archaeological discoveries that have changed this picture. In a peripheral corner of the empire, the Southern Caucasus, administrative complexes were found which bear all hallmarks of ‘Iranian Achaemenid’ monumental architecture, from building standards to the physical organization of the landscape. This suggests that the Achaemenids did create and export within their realm a fundamentally new way of representing rulership, by managing space on an unprecedented scale and creating new imperial landscapes. Their ‘paradises’ were at the same time luxurious residences with spacious gardens and administrative centres, playing an important role for the control of the dependent territories. 2017-10-13T14:31:58Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/attic-vases-in-new-york At the end of the 19th century Thomas B. Clarke donated four ancient Greek vases to the venerable Century Association, a private club founded by members of the Hudson River School. This talk serves as a public debut for three of the vases —one black-figure and two red-figure—which have been all but lost to the scholarly and academic community since they entered the club's collection in 1891. I address briefly the phenomenon of private New York social clubs and their impressive art collections before turning to the iconography and the style of the vases themselves. 2017-06-09T19:43:12Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2016/economic-complexity-7th-century In this lecture Heath will describe his work on a mid-7th century AD group of amphoras and related objects - such as stoppers and funnels - found in 1976 at Kenchreai, the Aegean port of the ancient city of Corinth. This material is now being studied by the American Excavations at Kenchreai sponsored by Vanderbilt University by permit of the Greek Ministry of Culture. Most of the amphoras are regionally produced and Heath will show how these can be easily distinguished from the many imported forms, including examples from near Cyprus and regions within ancient Palestine. The local amphoras come in two sizes as do the amphora stoppers that may have sealed them. There are at least two forms of funnel. As with many late imperial historical contexts, the Seventh Century AD in the Mediterranean was a time of turmoil and a time of ongoing economic activity. 2017-06-09T19:43:11Z Event