Results by title

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.

An edited collection exploring how Roman contemporaries thought about unrest.

Despite Roman claims to have brought peace, unrest was widespread in the Roman Empire. Revolts, protests, and piracy were common occurrences. How did contemporaries relate to and make sense of such phenomena? 

This volume gathers eleven contributions by specialists in the various literatures and modes of thinking that flourished in the empire between the second century BCE and the fifth century CE, including Graeco-Roman historiography and philosophy, Jewish prophecy, Christian apology, and the writings of the Tannaitic rabbis, to investigate these questions. Each contribution analyzes the discourses by which the diverse authors of these texts understood instances of unrest. Together, the contributions expand our understanding of the varied politics that pervaded the Roman empire. They highlight the intellectual labor at every level of society that went to (re)making this imperial formation throughout its long history.
 

In Untangling the Intangible a diverse group of authors focuses on new and rigorous ways to approach religion, beliefs, and ideology in archaeology. Reconstructing the human experience from archaeologically recovered materials is a complex task that can only benefit by making use of all available avenues of inquiry. To that end, the authors of this volume model inclusive discussions that recognize the inherent overlap, intersectionality, and co-constitutive relationship among the widely considered “intangibles” of culture: ideas, beliefs, ideology, and religion. The material and tangible aspects of these related elements inform human behavior and should not be treated independently because they constitute different and equal parts of a cognitive mosaic that forms the basis of the human experience.

The chapters encompass an array of research topics, geographical settings (Crete, Eurasia, the eastern Mediterranean, Madagascar, Mexico, and Mongolia), and temporal periods and highlight how practices associated with religious and ideological beliefs have shaped human societies across space and time. By focusing on multiple scales of inquiry and novel ways of accessing the material expressions of cultural phenomena and addressing underrepresented themes, this book challenges existing approaches and perspectives on the topic and directs future researchers to grapple with these elements as integral to researching the past.

Emphasizing a more comprehensive study of religious and ideological aspects of material culture, Untangling the Intangible highlights the potential for a more holistic understanding of the past and for approaching the very aspects that make us human through archaeology.

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the von Bothmer Publication Fund of the Archaeological Institute of America.

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.

The ancient Romans are well known for their love of the pageantry of power. No single ceremony better attests to this characteristic than the triumph, which celebrated the victory of a Roman commander through a grand ceremonial entrance into the city that ended in rites performed to Rome’s chief tutelary deity, Jupiter Optimus Maximus, on the Capitoline hill. The triumph, however, was only one form of ceremonial arrival at the city, and Jupiter was not the only god to whom vows were made and subsequently fulfilled at the end of a successful assignment. Ushering in a New Republic expands our view beyond a narrow focus on the triumph to look at the creative ways in which the great figures of Rome in the first century BCE (men such as Sulla, Caesar, Augustus, and others) crafted theological performances and narratives both in and around their departures from Rome and then returned to cast themselves in the role of divinely supported saviors of a faltering Republic.

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.