Abundantly illustrated, this essential volume examines depictions of the Underworld in southern Italian vase painting and explores the religious and cultural beliefs behind them.

What happens to us when we die? What might the afterlife look like? For the ancient Greeks, the dead lived on, overseen by Hades in the Underworld. We read of famous sinners, such as Sisyphus, forever rolling his rock, and the fierce guard dog Kerberos, who was captured by Herakles. For mere mortals, ritual and religion offered possibilities for ensuring a happy existence in the beyond, and some of the richest evidence for beliefs about death comes from southern Italy, where the local Italic peoples engaged with Greek beliefs. Monumental funerary vases that accompanied the deceased were decorated with consolatory scenes from myth, and around forty preserve elaborate depictions of Hades’s domain.

For the first time in over four decades, these compelling vase paintings are brought together in one volume, with detailed commentaries and ample illustrations. The catalogue is accompanied by a series of essays by leading experts in the field, which provides a framework for understanding these intriguing scenes and their contexts. Topics include attitudes toward the afterlife in Greek ritual and myth, inscriptions on leaves of gold that provided guidance for the deceased, funerary practices and religious beliefs in Apulia, and the importance accorded to Orpheus and Dionysos. Drawing from a variety of textual and archaeological sources, this volume is an essential source for anyone interested in religion and belief in the ancient Mediterranean.

The aim of this volume is to adopt an original analytical approach in explaining various dynamics at work behind the Arab Spring, through giving voice to local dynamics and legacies rather than concentrating on debates about paradigms. It highlights micro-perspectives of change and resistance—as well of contentious politics—that are often marginalized and left unexplored in favor of macro-analyses. First, the story of the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Morocco and Algeria is told through diverse and novel perspectives, looking at factors that have not yet been sufficiently underlined, but carry explanatory power for what has occurred. Second, rather than focusing on macro-comparative regional trends, the contributors to this book focus on the particularities of each country, highlighting distinctive micro-dynamics of change and continuity. The essays collected here are contributions from renowned writers and researchers from the Middle East and North Africa, along with Western experts, brought together to form a sophisticated dialogic exchange.

 

This book discusses the history, topography, and urban development of Corinth with special attention to civic and private religious practices in the Roman colony. Expert analysis of the latest archaeological data is coupled with consideration of what can be known about the emergence and evolution of religions in Corinth. Several scholars consider specific aspects of archaeological evidence and ask how enhanced knowledge of such topics as burial practice, water supply, and city planning strengthens our understanding of religious identity and practice in the ancient city. This volume seeks to gain insight into the nature of the Greco-Roman city visited by Paul, and the ways in which Christianity gradually emerged as the dominant religion.

This is a collaborative effort by scholars of archaeology, Greco-Roman studies, and early Christian literature who met at Harvard University in January 2002. It is the third in a series of volumes on ancient cities utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to understand urban life in ancient times. The earlier books are Ephesos, Metropolis of Asia (1995) and Pergamon: Citadel of the Gods (1998).

Sicily has been the fulcrum of the Mediterranean throughout history. The island’s central geographical position and its status as ancient Rome’s first overseas province make it key to understanding the development of the Roman Empire. Yet Sicily’s crucial role in the empire has been largely overlooked by scholars of classical antiquity, apart from a small number of specialists in its archaeology and material culture.

Urbanism and Empire in Roman Sicily offers the first comprehensive English-language overview of the history and archaeology of Roman Sicily since R. J. A. Wilson’s Sicily under the Roman Empire (1990). Laura Pfuntner traces the development of cities and settlement networks in Sicily in order to understand the island’s political, economic, social, and cultural role in Rome’s evolving Mediterranean hegemony. She identifies and examines three main processes traceable in the archaeological record of settlement in Roman Sicily: urban disintegration, urban adaptation, and the development of alternatives to urban settlement. By expanding the scope of research on Roman Sicily beyond the bounds of the island itself, through comparative analysis of the settlement landscapes of Greece and southern Italy, and by utilizing exciting evidence from recent excavations and surveys, Pfuntner establishes a new empirical foundation for research on Roman Sicily and demonstrates the necessity of including Sicily in broader historical and archaeological studies of the Roman Empire.

Upon its initial release in Arabic in the fall of 2014, Using Life received acclaim in Egypt and the wider Arab world. But in 2016, Ahmed Naji was sentenced to two years in prison after a reader complained that an excerpt published in a literary journal harmed public morality. His imprisonment marks the first time in modern Egypt that an author has been jailed for a work of literature. Writers and literary organizations around the world rallied to support Naji, and he was released in December 2016. His original conviction was overturned in May 2017 but, at the time of printing, he is awaiting retrial and banned from leaving Egypt.

Set in modern-day Cairo, Using Life follows a young filmmaker, Bassam Bahgat, after a secret society hires him to create a series of documentary films about the urban planning and architecture of Cairo. The plot in which Bassam finds himself ensnared unfolds in the novel’s unique mix of text and black-and-white illustrations.

The Society of Urbanists, Bassam discovers, is responsible for centuries of world-wide conspiracies that have shaped political regimes, geographical boundaries, reigning ideologies, and religions. It is responsible for today’s Cairo, and for everywhere else, too. Yet its methods are subtle and indirect: it operates primarily through manipulating urban architecture, rather than brute force. As Bassam immerses himself in the Society and its shadowy figures, he finds Cairo on the brink of a planned apocalypse, designed to wipe out the whole city and rebuild anew.

The Recognition of the Lord (Īśvarapratyabhijñā) by the Kashmirian Utpaladeva (c. 925–975) is a landmark in the history of nondual Śaivism, and one of the masterpieces of Indian philosophy. The detailed commentary (Vivṛti) on it by the author himself was so far considered almost entirely lost, but three chapters of this major work were recently recovered from marginal annotations in manuscripts of other commentaries on Utpaladeva’s treatise. The book provides the first critical edition, annotated translation and study of one of these chapters, which endeavours to justify a fundamental paradox of the system—namely, the idea that Śiva (understood as an infinite, omniscient, and omnipotent consciousness) has a dynamic essence since the core of consciousness is a subtle form of action, and yet is by no means limited by the temporal and spatial sequence that affects all ordinary acts and agents.