Search results for "ancient"
showing 10 items of 810 documents
Losing Monarchs: The Legacy of German and English National Historiography
2017
During the nineteenth century, Leopold von Ranke, Johann Gustav Droysen, Alfred von Arneth, and other German-speaking historians established an alleged ‘scientific’ approach to history, based on the so-called historiographic method. They interpreted history as determined by ‘great’ ideas, such as nation, state, and religion. Similarly, the British Whig interpretation of history—represented, for example, by Henry Hallam and Thomas Macaulay—conceptualized history as a continuously ascending process, in which Great Britain established a civilised modern empire spanning territories on all continents. This chapter shows how monarchs became lost—that is, not considered noteworthy—when their rule …
Why Phaedrus? Plato in Virginia Woolf’s novel <i>Jacob’s Room</i>
2012
Recent criticism has addressed the Platonic and ancient Greek influences on Virginia Woolf’s writings generally, and her novel Jacob’s Room specifically, but there has been no accounting of the motivation for the specific use of Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus in the latter novel. This essay will address how Jacob’s Room engages closely with this dialogue not only with regard to thematic focal points of love and rhetoric, but also in terms of more encompassing structures of space and literary form. In the process, a less ironic approach to Plato and his philosophy than that argued for in much recent criticism comes to light in Woolf’s complex negotiations with the precedent of Victorian Hellenism.
The Anti-Samaritan Attitude as Reflected in Rabbinic Midrashim
2021
Samaritans, as a group within the ranges of ancient ‘Judaisms’, are often mentioned in Talmud and Midrash. As comparable social–religious entities, they are regarded ambivalently by the rabbis. First, they were viewed as Jews, but from the end of the Tannaitic times, and especially after the Bar Kokhba revolt, they were perceived as non-Jews, not reliable about different fields of Halakhic concern. Rabbinic writings reflect on this change in attitude and describe a long ongoing conflict and a growing anti-Samaritan attitude. This article analyzes several dialogues between rabbis and Samaritans transmitted in the Midrash on the book of Genesis, Bereshit Rabbah. In four larger sections, the f…
Being Itself and the Being of Beings : Reading Aristotle’s Critique of Parmenides (Physics 1.3) after Metaphysics
2018
The essay studies Aristotle’s critique of Parmenides (Physics 1.3) in the light of the Heideggerian account of Platonic-Aristotelian metaphysics as an approach to being (Sein) in terms of beings (das Seiende). Aristotle’s critique focuses on the presuppositions of the Parmenidean thesis of the unity of being. It is argued that a close study of the presuppositions of Aristotle’s own critique reveals an important difference between the Aristotelian metaphysical framework and the Parmenidean “protometaphysical” approach. The Parmenides fragments indicate being as such in the sense of the pure, undifferentiated “is there” (τὸ ἐόν)—as the intelligible accessibility of meaningful reality to think…
Il Dioniso delle "Baccanti" e i "piegatori di pini". Polivalenza di un'immagine leggendaria
2021
This paper investigates the mythical and ritual background of Dionysus’ representation as “fir-bender” in Euripides’ "Bacchae" (ll. 1061 ff.), in an attempt to shed light not only on the dramaturgical aspects of the tragic plot, but also on the cultural categories that make this representation intelligible to the Athenian audience at the end of the fifth century BC. Following Louis Gernet’s historical-anthropological approach based on the notion of "polyvalence des images", this paper aims to define a mythical pattern – the connection between the bending of a tree and the dismemberment of a human victim – already attested in the Attic legend of Theseus and Sinis, in which both characters se…
Pig domestication and human-mediated dispersal in western Eurasia revealed through ancient DNA and geometric morphometrics.
2013
Zooarcheological evidence suggests that pigs were domesticated in Southwest Asia ∼8,500 BC. They then spread across the Middle and Near East and westward into Europe alongside early agriculturalists. European pigs were either domesticated independently or more likely appeared so as a result of admixture between introduced pigs and European wild boar. As a result, European wild boar mtDNA lineages replaced Near Eastern/Anatolian mtDNA signatures in Europe and subsequently replaced indigenous domestic pig lineages in Anatolia. The specific details of these processes, however, remain unknown. To address questions related to early pig domestication, dispersal, and turnover in the Near East, we …
Dinamiche di popolamento e processi di trasmissione culturale nel comprensorio madonita attraverso la ricostruzione della viabilità antica
2020
La ricerca sulle Madonie nasce con l’intenzione di approfondire l’evoluzione storica del popolamento sulla regione montana della Sicilia nord-occidentale. Il territorio, che solo in anni recenti è divenuto oggetto di più approfondite ricerche storico-archeologiche, si presenta estremamente ricco di risorse naturali e caratterizzato da un sostrato culturale variegato che abbraccia territori d’alta montagna, dediti ad una economia silvo-pastorale prettamente conservativa, e insediamenti costieri fortemente proiettati allo scambio e al commercio. A fine di comprendere lo sviluppo delle dinamiche d’insediamento di un’area molto estesa, si è proceduto anzitutto con la restituzione ipotetica dei …
The Greeks in the West: genetic signatures of the Hellenic colonisation in southern Italy and Sicily
2015
Greek colonisation of South Italy and Sicily (Magna Graecia) was a defining event in European cultural history, although the demographic processes and genetic impacts involved have not been systematically investigated. Here, we combine high-resolution surveys of the variability at the uni-parentally inherited Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA in selected samples of putative source and recipient populations with forward-in-time simulations of alternative demographic models to detect signatures of that impact. Using a subset of haplotypes chosen to represent historical sources, we recover a clear signature of Greek ancestry in East Sicily compatible with the settlement from Euboea during the…
Inferring heterozygosity from ancient and low coverage genomes
2016
Abstract While genetic diversity can be quantified accurately from high coverage sequencing data, it is often desirable to obtain such estimates from data with low coverage, either to save costs or because of low DNA quality, as is observed for ancient samples. Here, we introduce a method to accurately infer heterozygosity probabilistically from sequences with average coverage &lt;1× of a single individual. The method relaxes the infinite sites assumption of previous methods, does not require a reference sequence, except for the initial alignment of the sequencing data, and takes into account both variable sequencing errors and potential postmortem damage. It is thus also applicable to …
The beaker phenomenon and the Genomic transformations of Northwest Europe
2018
Bell Beaker pottery spread across western and central Europe beginning around 2750 BCE before disappearing between 2200–1800 BCE. The mechanism of its expansion is a topic of long-standing debate, with support for both cultural diffusion and human migration. We present new genome-wide ancient DNA data from 170 Neolithic, Copper Age and Bronze Age Europeans, including 100 Beaker-associated individuals. In contrast to the Corded Ware Complex, which has previously been identified as arriving in central Europe following migration from the east, we observe limited genetic affinity between Iberian and central European Beaker Complex-associated individuals, and thus exclude migration as a signific…