Zeugma at Pleiades and ISAW

In honor of Kutal Gorkay's upcoming talk at ISAW (Recent Archaeological Research in Zeugma: March 21, 2011), I've taken the opportunity to update the Zeugma resource at Pleiades. It now has:

• a precise location (taken from the visible remains of the theater)
• Greek orthography for the name Zeugma (Ζεύγμα) -- I couldn't quickly find a verifiable ancient reference for the other name we inherited from the Barrington: Seleukeia pros to Euphrate
• an updated description and place type (settlement)
• a modestly expanded "details" section in which I link to Zeugma resources elsewhere (including the official excavation website, Wikipedia, Livius.org and some digital publications by David Walker at the University of Western Australia)

I hope you'll check out both the lecture notice and the Pleiades resource. I'd of course be grateful for comments, corrections and additions to the latter. 

And if you think you could do something like this for another Pleiades place resource, by all means, please join up and give it a try. You'll find how-to instructions in my Valentine's Day Pleiades Post. If you've got Irish interests or ancestry, why not pick an ancient site in Ireland to spruce up in celebration of St. Patrick's Day!

Zeugma on Pleiades: http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/658636
Ancient sites in Ireland link courtesy of the spatial search functions Sean Gillies recently added to Pleiades.

Temple Treasury Records and Local Politics in Ur III Mesopotamia

February 16: ISAW Visiting Research Scholar Lecture

Speaker: Xiaoli Ouyang
Location: 2nd Floor Lecture Room
Date: Tuesday, February 16
Time: 6:00 p.m.
*reception to follow

Temple Treasury Records and Local Politics in Ur III Mesopotamia

This lecture targets a group of Umma texts dated to the Ur III dynasty (c. 2112-2004 BCE), probably the best documented period in Mesopotamian history. Umma is the province with the largest number of texts, accounting for almost one third of the 90,000 or so records from this period. This group of texts documents the delivery of ...

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Bringing the Frontier to the Center: Empires and Nomads from Achaemenid Persia to Tang China

a lecture, presented by:

Wu Xin
Visiting Research Scholar
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University

This paper presents a comparative consideration of the ideological strategies used by Achaemenid and the Tang empires to manage relations with their subjects living in Central Asia and on the Central to Eastern Eurasian steppe. For both empires, the nomadic communities to the north were an especially important constituency that was complicated by strong dynastic hereditary ties. In each case, a conscious program specifically addressing this complex and mobile community was developed and was expressed through the official language (text and images) of the imperial court. An exploration of those programs reveals striking parallels in their approach to maintaining imperial control and cooperation.

Monday, 6:00 pm
November 30, 2009

Lecture Hall
ISAW Building
15 East 84th Street
New York, NY 10028
isaw@nyu.edu

this event is free and open to the public

The Horse is Man's Wings: Archaeological Science and the Changing Nature of the Human-Horse Relationship in Central and East Asia

Dr. Mim Bower (Cambridge University) will give a free, public lecture at ISAW on 27 October 2009 at 6:00 p.m.

More information, including an abstract of the talk, is available on the ISAW events page.

The Historian in the Future of the Ancient World: A View from Central Eurasia

ISAW has announced the third annual Leon Levy Lecture, to be held on November 5, 2009 at 6 p.m in the Oak Library, 2nd floor of the ISAW building, located at 15 East 84th Street in New York. The speaker will be Professor Nicola Di Cosmo of the Institute for Advanced Study. The lecture is free and open to the public but seating is limited. Interested individuals are requested to RSVP by calling 212.992.7818, or emailing isaw@nyu.edu.

More information (including abstract) is available on the ISAW events page. There is also an NYU press release with more details.

David Klotz: The Temple of Osiris in Abydos during the Late Period

2009-2010 Visiting Research Scholar Lecture Series
The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU

The Temple of Osiris in Abydos during the Late Period
Presented by: David Klotz, Visiting Research Scholar

Although the city of Abydos was one of the most important religious centers of Egypt from the Predynastic  Period through the New Kingdom, little remains of its monuments from the Late Period (c. 1000-300 BC).  In the early twentieth century, W.F. Petrie discovered meager traces of an Osiris temple dating to the reign of Amasis (Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, c. 570-526 BC), and recent New York University excavations have uncovered another temple built by Nectanebo I and II (Thirtieth Dynasty, c. 378-341 BC). Nonetheless, the intervening period - the era of Persian domination - remains a mystery, and the earlier temple of Amasis seems to have completely vanished.

Two new sources provide valuable information on this obscure chapter in the history of Abydos.  The first  is a statue in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA 1996.91) belonging to a prominent Egyptian general from the Thirtieth Dynasty.  This object includes a difficult autobiographical inscription text in which the owner narrates how he defended Egypt from invading Persian armies and restored massive damage inflicted upon Abydos. At Sohag, meanwhile, the church of St. Shenoute at the White Monastery (c.450 AD) incorporates Pharaonic and Graeco-Roman spolia reused from earlier monuments.  The Yale White Monastery Church Documentation Project (2007-2009) recorded over twenty granite blocks from the reign of Amasis, and the decoration indicates they derive from the Osiris temple at Abydos.

The archaeological and epigraphic record suggests the Osiris temple was badly damaged - if not completely destroyed - during the period of Achaemenid rule in Egypt.  Similar accounts of Persian looting are attested at multiple Egyptian sites, but they are often dismissed as mere propaganda intended to legitimize the subsequent Ptolemaic dynasty.  The case of Abydos leads us to reevaluate our assumptions concerning the religious policies of the Great Kings of Persia.

Date: Tuesday, October 20th
Time: 6:00pm
Location: Lecture Hall
The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
15 East 84th St.
New York, NY  10028
212-992-7843
isaw@nyu.edu

*This event is free and open to the public

David Taylor: A Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire?

A Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire? The View from New York
presented by
David Taylor,
Visiting Research Scholar
   
2009-2010 Visiting Research Scholar Lecture Series
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World

Tuesday, 6:00 pm
October 6th, 2009

Lecture Hall
ISAW Building
15 East 84th Street
New York, NY 10028
212.992.7818

*This lecture is free and open to the public

The overwhelming majority of the surviving epigraphic texts of the Late Antique Roman provinces of Syria and Mesopotamia are written in Greek, and in a number of recent books and articles it has been argued that Greek was in fact the ordinary daily language of the local populations. By examining examples of the full available range of ancient linguistic evidence, and drawing on sociolinguistic theory about multilingualism and diglossia, this thesis will be challenged, and a more complex pattern of language usage will be sketched out. The consequences of this for issues of local identity and culture will then be explored.

David Taylor is the University Lecturer in Aramaic and Syriac at the University of Oxford, and during 2009-2010 he is a Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU.

The next lecture of the series will be given by David Klotz on October 20th.

Conference this weekend: The Sarcophagus East and West

October 2-3, 2009

The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
15 E. 84th Street
New York, NY 10028
(212) 992-7800

RSVP: isaw@nyu.edu (please indicate day(s) attending)

This conference, organized by Wu Hung and Jas' Elsner, focuses mainly on decorated stone sarcophagi from around the second century BCE to the third century CE, when this type of burial equipment not only continued to develop in the parts of Europe dominated by the Roman Empire, but also enjoyed considerable popularity in East Asia. Whereas the chronological and formal developments of each regional tradition remain an important research goal, this conference encourages comparative observations and interpretations of ancient sarcophagi in broader geo-cultural spheres and more specific ritual/religious contexts. It is hoped that by addressing these two research objectives simultaneously, this conference will help open new ways to think about the development of art and visual culture in a broadly defined ancient world, where the art historical materials available are subject to comparable methodological constraints both from archaeological excavation and from known literary and historical contexts.

This event is free and open to the public, please RSVP.

Program

Friday, October 2, 2009

9:00 Opening remarks: Roger Bagnall (Director of ISAW)

Panel 1   Chair: Roger Bagnall

9:20 Introductory Lecture 1
    Wu Hung (University of Chicago) - “Consistency and Variations in Han Sarcophagi”

10:00 Introductory Lecture 2:
    Jas Elsner (Oxford University) - “Rhetoric in Pagan and Christian Sarcophagi”

10:40   Coffee Served in Oak Library

Panel 2   Chair: Jonathan Hay (IFA, New York University)

11:10 Paul Zanker (Scuole Normale Superiore di Pisa) - “Understanding Images Without Texts”

11:50 Alain Thote (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes) - “The Chinese coffins from the first millennium BC and the early images of the after world”

12:30   Lunch Break

Panel 3   Chair: T. J. Clark (U.C. Berkeley)

2:15 Richard Neer (University of Chicago) - "The Polyxena Sarcophagus from Ilion"

3:00 Eugene Wang (Harvard University) - “The Jouissance of Death: Mapping the Bodily Cosmos on Chinese Sarcophagi”

3: 40 Tea Served in Oak Library

Panel 4   Chair: Wu Hung

4:10  Discussion: Barry Flood (IFA, New York University)

4:40  Discussion: Chris Hallett (U. C. Berkeley)

5:10  Open floor discussion

6:00   Reception

***

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Panel 5   Chair: Barry Flood

9:00 Verity Platt (University of Chicago) - "Horror Vacui: Framing the Dead on Roman Sarcophagi"

9:40 Zheng Yan (Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing) - “Sarcophagus Tombs in Eastern China and the Transformation of Han Funerary Art”

10:30   Coffee Served in Oak Library

Panel 6   Chair: Chris Hallett

11:00 Janet Huskinson (Open University, UK) – “Roman Strigillated Sarcophagi and 'How Societies Remember'”

11:40 Bjoern Ewald (University of Toronto) – “Sarcophagi in the Roman World: a Comparative Approach”

12:30   Lunch Break

Panel 7   Chair: Jas Elsner

2:15 Lillian Tseng (Yale University) - “Funerary Spatiality: Wang Hui’s Sarcophagus in Han China”

3:00  Edmund Thomas (Durham Center for Roman Culture) – “Inside and Outside: Roman Sarcophagi as Public and Private Monuments”

3:40   Tea Served in Oak Library

Panel 8   Chair: Jas Elsner

4:10  Discussion: Jonathan Hay

4:40 Discussion: T.J. Clark

5:10 Open floor discussion

ISAW Exhibition: Lost World of Old Europe (opens 11 November)

ISAW has announced its next exhibition (and associated public programming schedule).

The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley, 5000-3500 BC
November 11, 2009 -April 25, 2010
The Lost World of Old Europe brings to the United States for the first time more than 160 objects recovered by archaeologists from the graves, towns, and villages of Old Europe, a cycle of related cultures that achieved a precocious peak of sophistication and creativity in what is now southeastern Europe between 5000 and 4000 BC, and then mysteriously collapsed by 3500 BC. Long before Egypt or Mesopotamia rose to an equivalent level of achievement, Old Europe was among the most sophisticated places that humans inhabited. Some of its towns grew to city-like sizes. Potters developed striking designs, and the ubiquitous goddess figurines found in houses and shrines have triggered intense debates about women’s roles in Old European society. Old European copper-smiths were, in their day, the most advanced metal artisans in the world. Their intense interest in acquiring copper, gold, Aegean shells, and other rare valuables created networks of negotiation that reached surprisingly far, permitting some of their chiefs to be buried with pounds of gold and copper in funerals without parallel in the Near East or Egypt at the time. The exhibition, arranged through loan agreements with 20 museums in three countries (Romania, The Republic of Bulgaria and the Republic of Moldova), brings the exuberant art, enigmatic ‘goddess’ cults, and precocious metal ornaments and weapons of Old Europe to American audiences.

Get complete information and schedule at http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/exhibitions.htm. Other ISAW-sponsored events at http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/events.htm.

Bagnall on Amheida Excavations (NYC, 17 June 2009)

The American Research Center in Egypt Presents:
Roger Bagnall
NYU Excavations at Amheida
Date: Wednesday, June 17th
Time: 6:00 pm
Location: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, 15 E 84th St., New York, NY 10028, Second Floor Lecture Room

Amheida is a vast archaeological site on the western edge of Dakhla Oasis in Egypt. A team of researchers led by Dr. Roger Bagnall, Director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU, began the Amheida Project in 2001 with an intensive investigation and survey of the site.

One of the most spectacular discoveries, near the center of the town in Area 2, is the house of Serenus, who was part of the city council in the middle of the 4th century. The structure contains fifteen rooms, one of which was painted with classical wall scenes. On the northern wall, to the left of the doorway, a mythological scene depicts the legend of Perseus rescuing the beautiful Andromeda who is about to be devoured by a sea-monster, while to the right of the door is the Homeric scene of the Return of Odysseus to Ithaca, from his long voyage which brought him to Egyptian shores.

The site at Amheida will be part of a long-term scheme for the Dakhla Oasis Project. Please join us for a presentation and discussion on Amheida and its archaeological significance.

This lecture is free and open to the public, but please be sure to RSVP to isaw@nyu.edu. For more information on the lecture and other ISAW events, please visit: http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/events.htm. You may also contact the ISAW events office directly at 212.992.7818. For press inquiries, please contact Suzan Toma at suzan.toma@nyu.edu.

Unraveling the Mysteries of Ancient Angkor's Water Management System

Tuesday, April 28, 6 pm
2nd floor lecture room
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
15 East 84th St.
New York, NY 10028

Dr. Dougald J.W. O'Reilly
Department of Anthropology, Yale University

A presentation on research undertaken by the Greater Angkor Project exploring the development and decline of this ancient civilizations water management network. Since 2001 the University of Sydney (Australia) researchers and their partners have been working to unravel the mysteries of the Angkorian network - an achievement that is often overshadowed by the scores of massive temples that dot the landscape. Dr O'Reilly, a member of the research team, will present the work done to date and present future research at Angkor.

This lecture is free and open to the public, but please be sure to RSVP to isawevents@nyu.edu. For more information on other ISAW events, please visit: http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/events.htm You may also contact the ISAW events office directly at 212.992.7818.

Another Persian Crisis: the Persepolis Fortification Archive in Chicago

A public lecture

Friday, April 24, 12 noon
2nd floor lecture room
Institute for the Study of the Ancient World
15 East 84th St.
New York, NY 10028

Matthew W. Stolper
Professor of Assyriology, John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies in the Oriental Institute, The University of Chicago

Matthew W. Stolper is the Director of the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project. In 1933, Oriental Institute archaeologists working at Persepolis, clearing the ruined palaces of Kings Darius, Xerxes, and their Achaemenid Persian successors, found tens of thousands of clay tablets in a bastion in the fortification wall at the edge of the great stone terrace. These documents were pieces of a single, complex system, the Persepolis Fortification Archive, that proved-after decades of painstaking work-to be the largest and most important single source of information from within the Persian Empire on Achaemenid Persian languages, history, society, religion and art. Now, the Archive faces a legal battle that could well lead to its dismemberment and loss if it is seized and sold, and disappears into the holdings of private collectors around the world. Fueled by this crisis the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project is a new phase in recording and distributing the results of the study of the archive, responding to emergency conditions with electronic equipment and media alongside the conventional tool-kits of philology and scholarship.

A summary of the project is available on the website of the Oriental Institute (http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/pfa/).

Background and news of the project and the controversy are available at the Persepolis Fortification Archive Weblog (http://persepolistablets.blogspot.com/).

This lecture is free and open to the public, but please be sure to RSVP. For more information on other ISAW events, please visit: http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/events.htm You may also contact the ISAW events office directly at 212.992.7818.

Publishing Archaeological Data on the Web (New York, 14 April)

Two Public Lectures on Publishing Archaeological Data on the Web

Sebastian Heath, Ph.D. (American Numismatic Society)
Eric Kansa, Ph.D. (University of California, Berkeley)

Date: 14 April 2009
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, 15 E 84th St., New York, NY  10028, U.S.A. (lecture room)

Heath: Digital Publication and Linked Data at Troy

The Post-Bronze Age Excavations at Troy in Turkey, known as Ilion in the Greek and Roman periods, have begun a program of publishing ceramic vessels and coins from the site in digital format. Our goal is to provide the information in formats that are useful to archaeologists in the field and to students or anybody else interested in this material. Accordingly, all the files that make up these publications are available for download under Creative Commons licenses. Anybody can take this information and redistribute it for free. We are also working to express the inherent links within archaeological information. A user reading about pottery from North Africa found at Troy can easily link to secondary literature and internet resources that will increase their understanding of this material. We likewise hope to make such links discoverable by search engines as well as by researchers working on the digital processing of humanities resources.

Kansa: Open Context: Digital Dissemination of Field Research and Museum Collections

Publishing archaeological field data and primary documentation has received increasing attention and concern. Archaeological sites are threatened and archaeological methods themselves are often destructive. Often, excavation and survey records represent the only aspect of the archaeological record that can be preserved. This is especially worrisome, since so much of this documentation is in vulnerable, volatile digital formats. In addition to cultural heritage preservation issues, archaeologists often want to use pooled primary field documentation as a resource for investigation. Research may be enhanced by simplifying and speeding access to such documentation, or even by comparing across the results of multiple studies.

In an attempt to respond to these needs, several initiatives are exploring several approaches toward digital dissemination. Open Context (http://www.opencontext.org) is an open source system that provides a cost-effective dissemination solution for field research and museum collections. The system offers integrated access and services across datasets pooled from multiple research projects and collections. A long-term development goal is to help link field research and museum collections with active discussions and creative reuses, making these collections a much richer and integral part of continued cultural and scholarly production. Citation features and editorial control encourage researchers to consider publication in Open Context as a valid form of scholarly communication. At the same time, Creative Commons licenses give explicit permissions for users to freely and legally use the material so long as they properly attribute the original creator and abide by a few other optional terms.

A major challenge with Open Context’s approach lies in data integration and mapping different source data sets to Open Context’s common global structure. Open Context aims to provide Web-based tool for researchers and collections managers to upload, "markup" and publish diverse archaeological and museum collection datasets. It remains to be seen if this tool can be easy enough to use by individual contributors, or if trained staff will always be required to aid such markup.

ISAW Newsletter (January 2008)

The January 2008 ISAW Newsletter has just been posted to the web (it's a 4.1MB PDF file incorporating the page formatting of the original print version).

Given that it's a monolithic PDF, I thought I'd provide a listing of contents here:

From the Director (Roger Bagnall)

• Introduction
  
• Faculty
• Physical Facilities
• Graduate Program
• Events
• Excavation

Academic Programs: Visiting Research Scholars, 2007-2008 (Anna Boozer)

• Anne Porter
• Giovanni Ruffini
• Kevin van Bladel

Exhibitions and Public Programs (Jennifer Y. Chi)

Library (Charles E. Jones)

Digital Programs (Tom Elliott)

• Text of Digital Programs portion
  

William Adams: Nubia's Other Civilization: the forgotten glories of the medieval kingdoms.

A lecture in New York:

William Y. Adams
Nubia's Other Civilization: the forgotten glories of the medieval kingdoms.
Date: November 20
Time: 12:00 pm
Location: ISAW, 2nd Floor Common Room

Mario Liverani: The History of the Sahara in Antiquity: Mirage or Scientific Project?

A lecture in New York:

The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World Annual Leon Levy Lecture
Date: November 13
Time: 6:00 pm

Lecturer: Professor Mario Liverani, University of Rome "La Sapienza"
Topic:"The History of the Sahara in Antiquity: Mirage or Scientific Project?"
Please RSVP to liverani.lecture@nyu.edu

Sabine Huebner: Household and Family in Past Time: The Roman East and West

A lecture in New York:

Sabine Huebner (Columbia University)
Household and Family in Past Time: The Roman East and West
Date: November 12
Time: 6:00 pm
Location: ISAW, Salmon Room on the 2nd Floor

Beate Pongratz-Leisten: Astralization of the Gods and the Concept of the Divine in Ancient Mesopotamia

A lecture in New York:

Beate Pongratz-Leisten (Princeton University)
Astralization of the Gods and the Concept of the Divine in Ancient Mesopotamia
Date: November 11
Time: 6:00 pm
Location: ISAW, Salmon Room on the 2nd Floor

Anne Porter: Of Bricks and Bodies: Integrating history, archaeology and an anthropology of art in the study of the ancient Near East

A lecture in New York:

Anne Porter (University of Southern California)
Of Bricks and Bodies: Integrating history, archaeology and an anthropology of art in the study of the ancient Near East
Date: November 10
Time: 6:00 pm
Location: ISAW, Salmon Room on the 2nd Floor

Daniel Potts: East of Ur and west of Meluhha, or what Elam, Ansan, Dilmun, Magan, Marhasi and Simaski were up to in the late 3rd millennium BC

A lecture in New York:

Daniel Potts (University of Sydney and The Institute for Advanced Study)
East of Ur and west of Meluhha, or what Elam, Ansan, Dilmun, Magan, Marhasi and Simaski were up to in the late 3rd millennium BC
Date: November 6
Time: 6:00 pm
Location: ISAW, Salmon Room on the 2nd Floor