https://isaw.nyu.edu https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/architectural-conservation-amheida Architectural conservation and presentation work at the site of Amheida in the Dakhla Oasis, supported by ISAW, began in 2007 and has focused on mud-brick structures of the late-Roman period. The work has also included the creation of a full-scale replica of a house with outstanding painted decoration that belonged to a member of the town council named Serenos. This structure was designed to serve as the site’s visitor center, and its construction provided many insights into the processes required to fabricate such a building. The new House of Serenos was opened earlier this year. This lecture is the first occasion in America that the architectural conservation of Amheida has been described and placed in context. 2018-09-06T19:23:49Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/scribal-mind-day-1 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 along. It is the intention of this conference to draw out the details concerning 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). 2019-07-24T13:57:35Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/scribal-mind-keynote-lecture 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 along. It is the intention of this conference to draw out the details concerning 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). 2018-09-06T19:23:48Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/scribal-mind-day-2 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). 2018-09-06T19:23:48Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/water-in-sumer Ancient water management, especially for irrigation purposes, has featured prominently in anthropological theories on the development of socio-political and economic complexity. Traditional approaches have assumed that centralized control was needed to meet the managerial requirements of water control on a large scale. However, recent ethnographic and archaeological studies have shown that centralized control is a choice rather than a necessity. To date, there has been no empirical study on the exact nature of state control (if any) in the organization of ancient water control and irrigation due to the lack of empirical data. 2018-09-06T19:23:49Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/eastern-iran-and-western-central-asia-during-late-antiquity-3rd-5th-cent-ce Late Antiquity in Western Central Asia and Eastern Iran—that is the centuries between the downfall of the Great Kushan dynasty and the beginning of Türk suzerainty—remains a particularly obscure period. Major questions concerning even basic political and cultural developments are still poorly understood. Yet, it is clear that this period was one of important and momentous political, social, demographic, and cultural change—such as the rise of Iran as a new hegemonic power in the wider region, the ascent of Sogdiana as one of the main cultural and economic power-houses of Eurasia, and the influx of new populations and elites, labeling themselves and/or labeled by others as “Huns.” 2018-09-06T19:23:50Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/here *Video of this lecture is now available!* In the lecture HERE, Elizabeth Price will discuss a series of inter-related places and spaces that are pertinent to A RESTORATION, and her other, recent work in digital video. These include the location of the literal archive or collection, the space of the digital cache and the figurative locations established within the video’s own narrative, which include the institution of a museum and the historic site of Knossos. In addition, she will reflect upon the politics of restoration, expanding upon the proposition of the video itself, that the damaged or incomplete evidence of the past, offers an imaginative refuge: a place for radical invention. 2018-09-06T19:23:55Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/urban-redevelopment-in-north-africa City life in North Africa during the Roman period is often portrayed as a monolithic image of gleaming marble temples and elites, of unrivalled urban wealth and unquestionable success. Yet amongst these developments the neighborhoods of North Africa also saw periods of disuse, small- and large-scale regeneration projects, and a broad shift from mixed-use to specialized districts. This talk examines these changes using the modern concept of gentrification. By tracing examples of the displacement of urban production and the consolidation of property into larger and more elite residences, we can better understand both the nature of Roman urban renewal and the impact of these changes on local populations. 2018-09-06T19:23:49Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/conserving-cairo This presentation offers a retrospective view of the history of architectural conservation in Cairo. Blessed, or perhaps cursed, with an astonishing number and variety of historic structures, Cairo has served as a physical laboratory for different conservation approaches from the time of the foundation of the "Committee for the Conservation of Monuments of Arab Art" in 1882 until the present. The lecture addresses many of these approaches ranging from "honest repair" to "Disney-esque" fabrication, and looks behind them to motivations that vary from the aesthetic to the commercial. Recent attempts to quantify Cairo’s architectural heritage, to devise strategies for its economically sustainable re-use, and to expand the scope of preservation efforts to include late-19th and early-20th century buildings will also be discussed in the context of recent civil conflict. 2018-09-06T19:23:50Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/chinese-bronze-age-economics 2018-09-06T19:23:50Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/prospective-students-fall-2017 ISAW's open house for prospective doctoral students will include coffee 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 graduate seminar. 2018-09-06T19:23:50Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/spying-on-antiquity In 1995, President Clinton declassified 800,000 photographs from CORONA, the United States' first spy satellite program, in order to make them available for environmental and historical research. Since then, imagery from the U2 aerial missions and from HEXAGON, the CORONA successor, have been declassified as well. Archaeologists working in the Near East have been quick to embrace these newly available resource, which capture images of sites and landscapes in the 1960's. Many of these landscapes have been damaged or destroyed in the intervening 40 years. This presentation will discuss how CORONA imagery has been used to study ancient landscapes in the Near East, with case studies from Bronze Age Syria, Iron Age northern Iraq, and late Antique northwestern Iran. 2018-09-06T19:23:50Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/hurrian-song-of-liberation Around 1400 BCE, Hittite scribes recorded a Hurrian epic poem entitled “Song of Liberation” in a bilingual Hurro-Hittite edition, in cuneiform script on clay tablets. Fragments of these tablets were discovered in 1983 CE in the excavations at Hattusha, capital city of Hatti. The poem tells a mytho-historical tale turning on the gods’ demand that the city of Ebla release the people of another city, Igingallish, whom they have subjected. The storm god promises prosperity and military success if the Eblaites release the people of Igingallish, and threatens to annihilate their city if they do not. But the senate of Ebla refuses to grant release, exercising their liberty as a body of free men to deny liberty to those who serve them. The city of Ebla was indeed destroyed around 1600 BCE, and this poem explains why. What was the condition of liberty to which the gods demanded that the subjected people be released, and why did this interest the scribes of Hatti two centuries later? 2018-09-06T19:23:49Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/leon-levy-lecture-2017 Please note: the Leon Levy Lecture is now fully subscribed; we are no longer accepting RSVPs or names for our wait-list. This lecture will explore the representations of The Twelve Caesars (from Julius Caesar to Domitian) in western art since the Renaissance, aiming to show that they are a much more difficult, edgy, and contested art form than those standard line-ups of busts on museum shelves would suggest. Examples will range from ceramic to waxwork, stone to silver, and they will include the extraordinary set of sixteenth-century Silver Caesars (known as the Aldobrandini Tazze), which are shortly to feature in their own show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. One underlying question (often taken far too much for granted) is why generations of dynasts, autocrats, the old and the new rich, chose to decorate their homes and palaces with this collection of (largely) monsters. 2018-09-06T19:23:51Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/gilgamesh-flood-story The Flood story in the eleventh Tablet of Gilgamesh includes a mysterious message from the god Ea, featuring a rain of cakes and wheat. Since 1890 scholars have suspected some deliberate ambiguity (a forecast of the Flood disguised as a message about something else), and while the different proposals for how this may work make for a fascinating case study in the history of Akkadian philology, none of them quite work. A new solution is offered in this paper, and its broader implications are explored. 2018-09-06T19:23:49Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/ancient-world-research Starting from the example of Trismegistos, Depauw will discuss how digital tools are transforming antiquity research. Heuristics used to be the most time-consuming task of the scholar, but are increasingly a matter of a few mouse-clicks. This implies that scholars of the ancient world will have more time to do what lies at the core of the humanities: asking questions and studying ancient society and culture critically. On the other hand, some of these new questions can only be answered by developing new tools. 2018-09-06T19:23:50Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/exhibitions-lecture-photography-and-the-early-excavations-at-knossos Sir Arthur Evans was not alone among pioneering archaeologists in his use of the important new technology of photography in his excavations at Knossos on Crete at the beginning of the 20th century. However, as it has recently been noted, Evans was unique in his frequent modifications of these photographs. This talk will discuss these modifications as well as recent work in the Sir Arthur Evans archive at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford which point to the methods he used and some of his motivations. Ultimately the talk will reflect on Evans' broad interest in restoration of the site and its finds and how we might understand this today. 2018-09-06T19:23:51Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/tale-of-two-tombs Burial goods and an epitaph recently excavated from two contemporary Tang-style tombs in central Mongolia provide a rich record of political and cultural interactions between Tang and Turkic political elites in the mid-seventh century. One tomb contained the Chinese-language epitaph of a Tang ally, Pugu Yitu (635-678) and the scattered remains of some grave goods left by looters. The other tomb, only eleven kilometers away at Ulaan Khermiin, lacked an epitaph, but was undisturbed, retaining a full complement of rich burial objects. Though the epitaph’s rhetoric provides a conventional Tang-centered narrative of Pugu’s subservience to the dynasty, a careful examination of the epitaph and contents of the two tombs provides evidence of reciprocity and cultural compromises in the political relationship. On one hand, the design of the tombs, funerary ritual described in the epitaph, and many burial goods were typical of the Tang. On the other hand, both funerals have signs of local practices and tastes including cremations, a gold hoard in the coffin of the Ulaan Khermiin tomb, and some unusual wooden and terracotta figurines. 2018-09-06T19:23:51Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/monumental-art-and-political-change In the 12th century BCE, when the dissolution of the Hittite Empire released the Eastern Mediterranean communities into times of profound change, the polities of ancient Syria began experimenting with monumental art on public display. Exploring new communicative practices, local rulers decorated city gates and ceremonial squares with colossal statues and cycles of bas-reliefs with an increasingly manifest political content. In doing so, they initiated a unique tradition of public art that lasted five centuries and exerted a significant influence on neighboring regions. This talk will focus on the city of Carchemish between 1200 and 700 BCE and explore how monumental art was used to reinforce political practices, negotiate power struggles, express changing civic identities, and challenge the status quo. 2018-09-06T19:23:51Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/the-prehistory-of-crete The lecture will first summarize quickly the history of Crete from the first known settlement in Crete c. 6900/6600 BC at Knossos to the collapse at the end of the Bronze Age c. 1200–1150 BC and the population nadir c. 1025 BC. We will then return to c. 1600 BC in order to focus on the nature and role of Knossian-controlled Minoan Crete and its seaborne empire at its zenith, considering among many other aspects the dependence of Minoan Crete on overseas sources for the copper and tin needed to create the bronze of the Bronze Age, the nature of the colonies, trading stations and ports of call required, and the cultural impact of Minoan Crete on the Mycenaean civilization of mainland Greece. Please note: This lecture is now fully subscribed; we are no longer accepting RSVPs or names for our wait-list. 2018-09-06T19:23:50Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/eighth-century-khotan Khotan is an oasis on the southern rim of the Taklamakan Desert in Xinjiang, China. Viewed as an entrepôt along the “Silk Road,” Khotan is famed as a source of high-quality jade (in China) and musk (in Iran). Apart from sporadic mentioning in Chinese historical sources, however, we know next to nothing about the history of Khotan in pre-Islamic times. Fortunately, explorations and excavations in Xinjiang in the late 19th and early 20th centuries yielded a large number of manuscripts written in Khotanese, an Eastern Iranian language akin to modern Pashto in Afghanistan. These manuscripts, many of which are administrative documents directly from the offices of Khotanese officials, open up for us a rare window into the everyday life in Khotan during the late eighth century, when Chinese, Arabs, Tibetans, and Turks were all vying for supremacy in Central Asia. 2018-09-06T19:23:51Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/from-scripture-to-literature From the first century BCE to the second century CE, China experienced a wax and wane of zeal for the so-called “Confucian” Classics. For example, in 72 CE, the court sacrificed to Confucius and his seventy-two disciples. But by 165 CE, the sacrifice was to Laozi 老子, supposedly a Daoist figure. While Yang Xiong 揚雄 (53 BCE–18 CE) believed that rhapsody writing was a minor and childish skill compared to classicism, Cao Pi 曹丕 (187–226 CE) two hundred years later claimed that literary writing was a grand, everlasting accomplishment, as opposed to the narrow-minded practice of interpreting the classics. What caused these seemingly opposite phenomena and attitudes, and was there any underlying relationship between them? This talk will explore how in the first two centuries CE China, classicism encouraged people to travel and in turn shaped their social relationships, material lives, and certain intellectual trends such as erudite learning and literary writing. 2018-09-06T19:23:52Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/silent-fall-of-an-empire The events causing the end of the Hittite empire at the end of the Late Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean are still unknown, but while its causes have been widely discussed, little to no attention has been devoted to the lack of memory of it, as well as the lack of a clear attempt by later polities to claim the legacy of the Great Kings of Hatti. The talk will focus on the perceptions of the fall of the empire, and the non-uniform trajectories of its aftermath. The lack of central power allowed local groups to develop several political experiments. By the 9th century these were transformed into regional monarchies. Phrygia and Urartu are widely known to the great public. The talk will present evidence in support of the existence of a third one: the Land of Tuali. 2018-09-19T21:01:19Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/dreaming-in-common Around 500 BCE, the Ionian thinker Heraclitus is supposed to have said: “For those who are awake there is a single, common universe, whereas in sleep each person turns away into his own, private one.” This fragment captures what seems to be an uncontroversial, common-sense observation and a view of dreaming that is dominant in modernity. What I will argue in this talk is that views of dreaming recorded or implied in a wide variety of texts in early and medieval China offer a strong contrast to this view of dreaming as private. There, the very experience of dreaming itself was understood as an encounter with someone or something other than oneself. 2018-09-06T19:23:52Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/tricks-of-the-trade While working in the per-ankh or "house of life" where vast repositories of manuscripts were kept, Egyptian scribes made every effort to transmit ancient knowledge through Egyptian history. Over the course of several millennia, these individuals were confronted with damaged papyri, misinterpreted passages, and language difficulties. In this talk, I will look at the tools that were developed by those ancient intellectuals to overcome those problems and preserve Egyptian cultural materials even in the face of foreign rule in the first millenniums BCE and CE. 2018-09-06T19:23:51Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/fluid-fire Medical treatises of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) make constant reference to phlegm (tan 痰) as both cause and consequence of disease. Phlegm figures as a central, indispensable concept in the Chinese imagination of the body and its pathologies. Curiously, however, the Huangdi neijing 黃帝內經 (first cent. B.C.), the earliest and foundational classic of Chinese medicine, does not mention it at all. The rise to prominence of the discourse of phlegm represents one of the most important changes in Chinese medical theory after the classical period. What does this transformation mean, and how did it occur? 2018-09-06T19:23:53Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/my-violent-king Representations of violence abound in ancient Egyptian art and texts, where the figure of the smiting king is one of the longest enduring images. Trampling the nine bows with every step or recounting his victories in far away territories, the king is featured as a victorious conqueror who defeats Egypt’s enemies with vigor and violence. Many of these representations belong, however, to the royal sphere, and this paper will explore New Kingdom tomb art, autobiographical texts, stelae, and other objects to consider the image of the violent king among the elite and its own concepts of violence. 2018-09-06T19:23:52Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/cutting-rome-down-to-size Three-quarters of the monumental work of the Roman historian Livy (59 B.C.-A.D.17) is lost. The single most important source to enable us to reconstruct the contents of the missing volumes is a summary known as the "Periochae," composed in (probably) the 4th century A.D. This summary, reducing each volume of Livy to a single paragraph, appears on its surface a mechanical exercise. However, this lecture will show that a comparison of the "Periochae" of the surviving books with Livy's original work reveals many subtle alterations and distortions, which reflect a distinctive historical outlook on the part of the summarizer. Armed with this knowledge of the summarizer's techniques, we gain a clearer picture of the missing books for which the "Periochae" provides us with our primary evidence, and can refine our knowledge of the events of Roman history that Livy described in the books now lost. 2018-09-06T19:23:52Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/greeks-in-the-north Note: We are now fully booked for this event and are only accepting names for the wait-list. Ancient Thrace was a land of opportunity, adventure, and trouble. This talk presents the results of a Greek-American archaeological expedition that has explored a large trading port on the Thracian sea, south of modern Komotini. Established by Greek colonists in the 7th or 6th cen. BC, the settlement participated in a north Aegean trade network. The talk will present the history of occupation at the site; the evidence for daily life in the Classical and Roman periods; and the site’s contributions to economic, political, and social history. Excavation and survey have uncovered important information on the settlement and its changing relationship to the wider landscape and to the environment. 2018-09-06T19:23:52Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/revisiting-harappan-iconography During the second half of the third millennium BC, the Harappan civilization covered an area of over one million square kilometers in South Asia, extending from the Afghan highlands to Western India. Excavations sites in modern-day India and Pakistan like Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, and Dholavira have shown that this impressive civilization was characterized by a shared material culture and extensive trade networks. A fascinating example of this shared material culture is the extensive corpus of miniature arts — seals, seal impressions and molded tablets — found at sites throughout the Greater Indus Valley. The iconography of the Harappan world embedded in these objects includes a number of iconic characters, scenes, and narratives. While there is no question that these images played an important role in the visual codification of Harappan culture, the fact that the Indus script remains undeciphered, paired with the lack of comparable iconography in contemporary or later contexts, poses significant challenges to their interpretation. This talk focuses on the role that seals, sealings and tablets play in codifying the visual vocabulary of the Harappan world and on how the imagery they bear may have conveyed information to an informed viewer. 2018-09-06T19:23:52Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/autobiographical-polis All communities tell stories about themselves. In literate communities, this historical consciousness manifests itself not only as cultural memory but also as local historiography. The ubiquity of the form is astonishing; whether the focalizer is polis or urbs, county or parish, state or nation, local history abounds. My talk, "The Autobiographical Polis," explores the phenomenon of local history in Classical and Hellenistic Greece, suggesting that the self-identity of a Greek community is reflected in the way its members construct narratives of the collective past. 2018-09-06T19:23:54Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/fragments-of-greek-science In 1819 Angelo Mai discovered that on several pages of an 8th century codex of Isidore of Seville's "Etymologies" in the Ambrosiana Library in Milan, the Latin text was written over partially effaced scientific texts in Greek. With the exception of Ptolemy's "Analemma," which we have in a 13th century Latin translation by William of Moerbeke, none of the Greek texts in the Milan palimpsest survive in any other copy, and their authors are unknown. This lecture will retrace the rather sad story of this manuscript, explore what we can learn from the texts, and consider the prospects of recovering more of them from the many pages that have so far been very incompletely transcribed. 2018-09-19T20:59:16Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/immortalizing-death The corpus of carved ivories from the sanctuary of Orthia at Sparta has often been invoked as evidence of religious and artistic interrelations between Sparta, Crete, and the Levant in the Iron Age. In this talk, I explore these long distance interrelations through the lens of shared ideologies of death operating amongst communities of elites across western Asia and the Aegean in the eighth to sixth centuries BCE. In particular, I examine a seemingly anomalous scene on two ivory plaques showing three figures mourning a deceased male and its mythical and ritual place within the larger votive repertoire from the sanctuary of Orthia. 2018-09-06T19:23:54Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/poor-man-of-nippur "The Poor Man of Nippur" is a comic folk tale in Babylonian language. The main manuscript is a clay tablet from 701 BC found at the site of Sultantepe, in South-East Turkey. It probably stems from an ancient scribal school. The story is 160 lines long, laid out in verse. Recounted by a third-party narrator, it tells of the three-fold revenge which one Gimil-Ninurta wreaks on the local Mayor, after the latter wrongs him. In 2017 the story was a “set text” for Cambridge Assyriology students, who thought it would be interesting to dramatize it (in the original language, of course). The project grew in complexity and ambition, until it ended up as a short film — probably the first of its kind – directed by current ISAW Visiting Research Scholar Martin Worthington. English subtitles are provided. 2018-09-06T19:23:52Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/containers-commodities The 8th century BCE is punctuated by milestones in the history of the ancient Mediterranean and by a remarkable intensification of connections, from the Near East to Iberia. There are numerous interrelated processes and cultural conditions that may have shaped this development, but one factor that seems to have influenced the Mediterranean sphere was colonization, which mobilized Phoenicians and Greeks to establish new communities overseas, and thus to reshape the cultural and economic landscape of the entire region. The lecture revisits the traditional discourse on the economics of Greek colonization and argues in support of “commercial”—as opposed to “agrarian”— stimuli, using evidence of transport containers and the commodities they contained, the latter being the “soft things” that often leave no trace in the archaeological record. 2018-09-06T19:23:54Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/beyond-thucydides Drawing on overlooked genres of evidence and new theoretical approaches, my research illuminates how the fifth-century Athenian empire was not a stable, monolithic entity but, rather, a bundle of systems and processes that interacted and competed in complex ways. Athenian imperialism, I argue, attempted to control the collision of autonomous religious and economic systems and to subsume them within an imperial politics; but in so doing, it left itself open to contestation as well as accommodation in the languages of those systems. In this lecture, I explore some of the concrete domains in which the meaning of the Athenian empire was created and contested. 2018-09-06T19:23:54Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/dirty-pictures-for-a-dangerous-goddess Note: We are now fully booked for this event and are only accepting names for the wait-list. Papyrus 55001 in Turin's Museo Egizio, often called the "Turin Erotic Papyrus" has long been a subject of intense Egyptological interest despite its rather fragmentary state. Almost certainly the product of the community of royal artists at the village of Deir el-Medina on the west bank at Thebes, it dates to the later New Kingdom period, probably to the reign of Ramesses III (roughly 1184-1153 BCE). Two thirds of its length shows a sequence of twelve couples in sexual poses while the remaining third depicts a wide variety of animals engaged in role-reversed or anthropomorphic activities. Diverse interpretations of the meaning and social function of the papyrus have been proposed, ranging from cosmological to pornographic to cautionary, although most scholars seem to agree that it was intended for male edification and titillation. This X-rated talk will propose a new interpretation of the social function of the papyrus and suggest a rather different audience, pointing to a reinterpretation of ancient Egyptian erotica more generally. 2018-09-06T19:23:52Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/Saliba The talk will address the circumstances under which beautifully illustrated manuscripts could become dangerous to your health. While the production of illuminated manuscripts certainly enhanced the beauty – and thus the price of the manuscript – this beauty almost always came at a price. At times this price dangerously involved sacrificing essential part(s) of a text in order to accommodate the illumination. Furthermore beautifully illuminated manuscripts usually involved at least two people: one to copy the text, the other, and more artistically talented one, to produce the illuminations, for it is indeed very rare to find an illuminated manuscript that was produced by one person who could perform both tasks. This cooperative effort was not always risk free either. This to say nothing of manuscripts that were translated from one language to another as was the case with most Greek manuscripts that were translated into Arabic. The talk will demonstrate how some of those intricate problems involved in the very nature of the production of illuminated manuscripts came to impact the final content of the text thus exposing the consumer of the text to real danger. 2018-09-06T19:23:54Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/display-in-graeco-roman-egypt In this paper, I will discuss the creative ways that individuals wove Demotic into traditional Hieroglyphic texts using a group of funerary stelae from the Ptolemaic cemeteries at Panopolis, modern Akhmim. These stelae created different visual experiences for audience members, dependent on their level of literacy. By drawing on both the textual and iconographic elements on the stelae, I will show that the individual agency of the person or family commissioning these memorials offered a means of innovating within the traditional realm of Egyptian religious representation. The updating of older features on these stelae with new approaches highlights the broader effect of changes to mortuary practice at this time, and the struggle to guarantee the religious efficacy of ancient rituals. Through this material, I will assess how individuals modified the visuality of both text and image on monuments of personal commemoration to accommodate new modes of interaction in the Hellenistic world. 2018-09-06T19:23:53Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/rostovtzeff-2018-lecture-1 Note: We are now fully booked for this event and are only accepting names for the wait-list. Due to inclement weather on March 21st, the first lecture of the Rostovtzeff series has been rescheduled for March 28th, and the second lecture of the series has been rescheduled for April 3rd. In the first lecture the geographical and historical contours of Babylonian astronomy are sketched, the cuneiform sources are introduced, and the methodological framework for interpreting Babylonian astronomy as an ancient science is discussed. Babylonian astronomy takes us to ancient Iraq, where thousands of cuneiform tablets with an astronomical content have come to light since the end of the nineteenth century. What can we learn by studying these tablets? While early interpretations were strongly shaped by modern mathematics and astronomy, the focus of much current research has shifted to uncovering the conceptual framework of Babylonian astronomy and exploring its practical, institutional, political, religious, and social context. In order to achieve this, methodological considerations from the wider historiography and sociology of science are increasingly applied. 2019-02-05T19:22:24Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/savoring-the-past Note: We are now fully booked for this event and are only accepting names for the wait-list. What is food? Why should we study it? Different archaeologists will give you different answers to these questions. This talk outlines some of the variability that exists in food archaeology, and explains how researchers are using the traces of past foodways to investigate centuries- and millennia-old social distinctions. Particular attention is paid to cooking's role in establishing food values, to the complexities of identifying "food" in the past, and to the ways in which people's food habits may transgress social boundaries. 2019-05-20T18:13:24Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/NYU-interviews-RCK Romance and Reason gallery tour and interview. 2025-06-06T18:35:00Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/rostovtzeff-2018-lecture-2 Note: We are now fully booked for this event and are only accepting names for the wait-list. Due to inclement weather on March 21st, the first lecture of the Rostovtzeff series has been rescheduled for March 28th, and the second lecture of the series has been rescheduled for April 3rd. The second lecture will focus on the astronomical diaries and related texts, which are observational reports that emerged in Babylonia during the seventh century BCE and continued to be written for at least six centuries. Apart from astronomical phenomena, market prices, weather phenomena, river levels and historical events were also reported in these texts. They provide unique opportunities for reconstructing observational practices and the predictive methods to which these texts turn out to be intricately linked. 2018-09-06T19:23:53Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/rostovtzeff-2018-lecture-3 Note: We are now fully booked for this event and are only accepting names for the wait-list. The third lecture will present new insights into Babylonian mathematical astronomy, which emerged after about 400 BCE. The underlying mathematical methods for predicting lunar and planetary phenomena are predominantly based on purely arithmetic methods, that is, they operate by manipulating sequences of numbers. However, recent discoveries have corrected this firmly entrenched arithmetic characterization of the Babylonian methods by revealing that some tablets employ geometric concepts in order to compute the distance traveled by a planet. These geometric methods imply a surprisingly deep understanding of the graphical connections between time, velocity and distance on the part of some Babylonian astronomers. 2018-09-06T19:23:53Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/rostovtzeff-2018-lecture-4 Note: We are now fully booked for this event and are only accepting names for the wait-list. The fourth lecture will discuss the scholars who pursued astronomy and their institutional, religious, social and economic context. This takes us to the main temples of Babylon and Uruk, in which most of the Babylonian astronomers were employed during the second half of the first millennium BCE. The lecture will also explore how the astral sciences were increasingly linked to other branches of Babylonian scholarship and what role astronomy and astrology played in Babylonian society. 2018-09-06T19:23:54Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/AlextoIsk This talk will trace the story of Alexander from the ancient Greek novel, the Alexander Romance, to its Persian and Turkish adaptations. A variety of Islamic literary texts, namely the 11th century Persian Shahnama of Firdawsi, the 12th century Iskandarnama of Nizami, and the 14th century Turkish Iskendername of Ahmedi, will be discussed. Both famous and rarely-known paintings from Islamic manuscripts dating from the 14th to the 17th centuries in various collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, will be featured. This visual journey will touch upon Alexander’s shift from a military hero/invader to a wise ruler and how the image of Alexander adapted to changing political contexts from the Ilkhanid Tabriz in Iran to Ottoman Amasya in Turkey. Even if the historical Alexander couldn’t conquer the entire world, Islamic traditions certainly imagined him as doing so in their development of his legendary persona. 2018-09-06T19:23:54Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/what-do-barbarians-eat The cultures inhabiting the Western fringes of the Shang and Zhou world are mostly seen as inferior and uncivilized. Archaeological work here has been limited to studying mortuary practices and the association of material styles with historically mentioned groups. The Siwa culture 寺洼 (1400-700 BCE), inhabiting modern day Gansu, has been identified as the Qiang 羌 people -- prized captives who were sacrificed by the Shang -- or the Rong 戎 and Di 狄tribes, the marauding barbarian hoards who toppled the Western Zhou dynasty. 2018-09-06T19:23:53Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/future-philologies NOTE: We are now fully booked for this event and are no longer accepting RSVPs. Future Philologies will provide a forum for historical-language projects with a strong text analysis component to present their work across language-specific barriers in an effort to foster cross-linguistic, comparative feedback, recommendations, criticism, etc. between projects. Moreover, it is meant to embrace the scope of ancient-world languages represented at ISAW, which states in its mission the goal of offering "an unshuttered view of antiquity across vast stretches of time and place.” The format will be presentations on the state of corpus/text analysis/natural language processing work for each language coupled with recent successes and immediate challenges to be addressed in the near future. Projects will represent Latin, Greek, Coptic, Arabic, Classical Chinese, and cuneiform languages among others. Researchers in Computer Science and Information Science who can offer different perspectives on philological and corpus-based language work have also been included. 2018-09-06T19:23:54Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/babylonians-and-elamites The comparison drawn in much of the scholarly and popular literature between the Mesopotamian alluvium and the Iranian plateau, coupled with the imposing nature of the Zagros mountains, often seem to imply that the cultural and political boundaries between these two worlds was fairly firm through time. In reality, that boundary fluctuated thanks to a variety of cultural, linguistic, military and political factors. Some of the implications of this situation as it pertained to Assyria, Babylonia, the indigenous peoples of the Zagros, and Elam will be discussed in this lecture. 2018-09-06T19:23:53Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/text-and-image NOTE: We are now fully booked for this event and are no longer accepting RSVPs. In the ancient Near East many monuments and artifacts incorporated both pictorial and written compositions. “Text and Image” has long been a trope in philological and art historical studies inquiring into the mixture or conjoining of the verbal and the visual. Image and language, and discourse and icon, are disjunctive symbolic systems, and there are sense-making operations that do not necessarily take a narrative form. Moreover, when it comes to narrative, it has been long recognized that the migration of a story or message from one medium to another presents cognitive consequences, and that the narrative potential will necessarily be differently actualized. Rather than perceiving of narrative as a linguistic object, this workshop examines narrative in cognitive terms, understanding it in the first place as a mental image realizable in various media. 2018-09-06T19:23:54Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/appetite-for-the-past NOTE: We are now fully booked for this event and are no longer accepting RSVPs. This endeavor will bring scholars of the ancient world and food specialists together to create and serve the fruits of their collaborative efforts to the NYU community. Teams composed of chefs and scholars are cooperating on research projects focusing on food to study and create a consumable final product. 2018-09-06T19:23:55Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/Stoneman "Plato's advice to Alexander: Amir Khusraw's 'Mirror of Alexander' (1299)" introduces the poet Amir Khusraw and sets his poem in the context of the mirror-for-princes literature of the Arab and Persian Middle Ages. It considers the links of this tradition with the actual work of Plato, and also of Aristotle, and finds little direct connection. In the poem, Alexander visits the hermit Plato in his cave to obtain advice on rulership. Alexander is thus presented as a kind of philosopher-king, as much a Sufi and a sage as he is a monarch. 2018-09-06T19:23:54Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archive/2017/Morrison The Renaissance is often seen as the result of Europeans’ re-engagement with the heritage of Classical Antiquity, which Islamic societies preserved during the Dark Ages. Recent research has shown, though, that the science of Islamic societies from the twelfth through sixteenth centuries was crucial for Renaissance science. This lecture will describe this late medieval Islamic scientific culture and the fascinating stories of how it reached Renaissance Europe, often as a by-product of economic activity and as a result of a quest for social capital. In fact, European scholars in the later sixteenth century and the seventeenth century continued to value the science of Islamic societies, even after European science had blossomed. Renaissance science turns out to have more diverse foundations than previously thought. 2021-01-22T17:03:14Z Event