Results by title

Is it possible to trace the footprints of the historical Sokrates in Athens? Was there really an individual named Romulus, and if so, when did he found Rome? Is the tomb beneath the high altar of St. Peter’s Basilica home to the apostle Peter? To answer these questions, we need both dirt and words—that is, archaeology and history. Bringing the two fields into conversation, Artifact and Artifice offers an exciting excursion into the relationship between ancient history and archaeology and reveals the possibilities and limitations of using archaeological evidence in writing about the past. Jonathan M. Hall employs a series of well-known cases to investigate how historians may ignore or minimize material evidence that contributes to our knowledge of antiquity unless it correlates with information gleaned from texts. Dismantling the myth that archaeological evidence cannot impart information on its own, he illuminates the methodological and political principles at stake in using such evidence and describes how the disciplines of history and classical archaeology may be enlisted to work together. He also provides a brief sketch of how the discipline of classical archaeology evolved and considers its present and future role in historical approaches to antiquity. Written in clear prose and packed with maps, photos, and drawings, Artifact and Artifice will be an essential book for undergraduates in the humanities.

Assyria’s Plunder offers a new history of ancient Assyria and its interactions with its client states of Israel and Judah. Considering the entanglement of modern imperialism with the historiography of ancient empire, Jessie DeGrado reassesses the conventional understanding of the Neo-Assyrian Empire using textual analysis, art history, and archaeology.

Engaging texts from Israel and Judah, DeGrado refuses the usual framings of Biblical resistance to Assyrian despotism and asks instead why subject populations may have capitulated to Assyrian rule. Paired chapters consider specific Assyrian imperial practices and biblical texts that engage them. As the study moves from the awe-filled spectacle of Assyrian throne rooms to the Assyrian policy of deporting divine statues, Assyria’s Plunder centers the embodied experiences of those subjected to Assyrian hegemony. DeGrado also explores how the empire’s violence still holds sway in the popular imagination while Euro-American imperialism goes largely unacknowledged.

Drawing on decolonial studies alongside epigraphic and textual analysis, Assyria’s Plunder shows how critical historiography and theory can enrich historical analysis and provide a fuller portrait of Assyrian interaction with its client states.

On a summer night in 415 BCE, unknown persons systematically mutilated most of the domestic “herms”—guardian statues of the god Hermes—in Athens. The reaction was immediate and extreme:  the Athenians feared a terrifying conspiracy was underway against the city and its large fleet—and possibly against democracy itself.   The city established a board of investigators, which led to informants, accusations, and flight by many of the accused.  Ultimately, dozens were exiled or executed, their property confiscated.

This dramatic period offers the opportunity to observe the city in crisis. Sequential events allow us to see the workings of the major institutions of the city (assembly, council, law courts, and theater, as well as public and private religion). Remarkably, the primary sources for these tumultuous months name conspirators and informants from a very wide range of status-groups: citizens, women, slaves, and free residents. Thus the incident provides a particularly effective entry-point into a full multifaceted view of the way Athens worked in the late fifth century.

Designed for classroom use, Athens 415 is no potted history, but rather a source-based presentation of ancient urban life ideal for the study of a people and their institutions and beliefs.  Original texts—all translated by poet Robert B. Hardy—are presented along with thoughtful discussion and analyses by Clara Shaw Hardy in an engaging narrative that draws students into Athens’ crisis.

A critical history of the recurring idea that technology will free us from work and bring about a truly democratic society.

In popular thought, ancient Athens endures as a place ahead of its time—the birthplace of democracy, a cultural center, and a model toward which modern societies should strive. In Automated Athens, Michele Kennerly examines the many and frequent appeals to this nostalgic vision of the ancient city-state throughout the early age of computerized automation. In the mid-twentieth century, people hoped that automation would free us from mindless, dehumanizing work so that we could attend to creative and communal pursuits. Proponents appealed to ancient Athens, saying automated systems and machines would stand in for the craftsmen, enslaved people, and subordinated women who performed the undesirable work that enabled that city-state’s flourishing. Automated Athens scrutinizes this appeal as it moves chronologically into present debates about the promise of automation and AI. For Kennerly, our inability to settle debates about where accelerating automation may take us, especially politically, reveals a deeper cultural indecisiveness about how to live well and live well together.