Hasil untuk "History of the Greco-Roman World"

Adeline Hoffelinck

This is a review of Gabii through its Artefacts, edited by Laura M. Banducci and Mattia D'Acri, published in 2023 by Archaeopress. 

This is a review of Beyond the River, Under the Eye of Rome by Timothy C. Hart, published in 2024 by University of Michigan Press.

O. Strelko, O. Pylypchuk, Yu.A. Berdnychenko

Dear Readers, We are pleased to present the latest issue of our scholarly journal, which brings together the results of interdisciplinary research aimed at understanding the historical stages in the development of science and technology, technological innovations, and their impact on society. This publication continues our commitment to fostering dialogue between historians, engineers, scientists, and cultural theorists, offering a platform for rethinking the intersections of knowledge systems across time and disciplines. By highlighting both well-established and emerging fields of inquiry, we strive to demonstrate the enduring relevance of historical analysis in addressing contemporary challenges. This issue reflects our belief that science and technology are not only engines of progress but also complex cultural phenomena. Each article invites readers to explore how inventions, practices, and theories were shaped by – and in turn shaped – the societies in which they emerged. Through critical engagement with sources, methods, and narratives, we seek to illuminate the human dimension of scientific and technical change, encouraging reflection on its ethical, social, and philosophical implications. The central focus of this issue is a fundamental study devoted to the work of Ukrainian geneticist Oleksii Sozinov (1930–2018), one of the key figures in 20th-century agricultural science. The article explores the development and implementation of phytotron technologies in plant breeding at the All-Union Selection and Genetics Institute (now the National Center for Seed Science and Variety Research). The authors not only reconstruct Sozinov’s scientific career but also introduce a new array of archival sources into academic circulation, allowing for a reassessment of the innovative methods used to increase crop yields. This study convincingly demonstrates that an interdisciplinary approach – combining microhistory, source studies, history of science, and agrotechnology – can reveal the contributions of individual scientists to global transformations. The theme of technological evolution continues with a timely study on the development of supercharging systems for piston aircraft engines. The authors meticulously reconstruct the chronology of these technologies, from the earliest days of aviation, focusing on technical innovations that significantly improved engine altitude performance. By combining technical analysis with historical context, the study offers insight not only into engineering features but also their impact on military aviation in the first half of the 20th century – a rare fusion of engineering precision and historical depth. Another remarkable example of a technological breakthrough that influenced the course of history is radar technology during World War II. The related article discusses not only engineering solutions (such as Chain Home, Freya, SCR-270) but also the strategic role of radar in crucial battles including the Battle of Britain, the Atlantic campaign, and the Pacific theater. The authors also examine how the postwar development of radar influenced air defense systems, meteorology, and modern navigation. This analysis shows that technical innovation can become a bifurcation point in history – impacting both military strategy and civil progress. The history of medicine is represented by an engaging comparative study of medieval Georgian medical culture and European practices. Special attention is given to the treatise Ustsoro Karabadini, which reveals the influence of Greco-Roman traditions on Georgian medicine. The article explores the four humors theory, dietary advice, childcare approaches, and seasonal diagnostics, offering a comprehensive view of the scientific culture of the time. It also highlights parallels between agricultural traditions, viticulture, and medical knowledge in Georgia and Europe, showing deep integration of cultural knowledge with natural medicine. A completely different dimension of scientific progress is reflected in the review of the evolution of forensic bloodstain analysis. From visual inspection to the use of AI, this evolution mirrors the broader trend of science digitalization. The article traces how modern methods – such as spectroscopy, hyperspectral imaging, chromatography, and machine learning algorithms – enable accurate determination of stain age, opening new frontiers for forensic science. Despite these advances, the authors emphasize ongoing challenges such as standardization, environmental factors, and substrate differences. This study stands at the intersection of bioinformatics, analytical chemistry, and law. Among contemporary issues, cybersecurity receives particular attention. The article on computer viruses provides a historical overview from the legendary Morris Worm to WannaCry, showing how technical threats became the subject of scientific inquiry. The focus is on the evolution of countermeasures: from signature-based antivirus software to machine learning, behavioral models, and deep neural networks. The study underscores the dual nature of this field: increasing complexity of threats alongside constant improvements in AI-based defense. The authors argue that the future of cybersecurity lies in the synthesis of historical experience and technological adaptability. In the following article, the Authors presents an interdisciplinary study combining historical analysis and experimental research to examine the vulnerability of military drones made from carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) to laser destruction. It explores the historical development of CFRP use in military drones, highlighting its adoption due to the need for lightweight, durable, and radar-evading materials, influenced by geopolitical and technological factors. Concurrently, the study investigates the rise of high-energy laser systems as precise countermeasures against fast, small, and stealthy drones, driven by concerns over swarm attacks and limitations of traditional defenses. Experimentally, CFRP samples were tested under controlled laser radiation to identify damage mechanisms and energy thresholds causing material failure. By integrating historical context with laboratory results, the article offers a comprehensive view of how past material choices have created current vulnerabilities and how modern laser weapons exploit these weaknesses, advancing more effective counter-drone strategies for present and future military applications. This article examines the design, fabrication, and long-term operation of Kyiv’s Evgeny Paton Bridge, the world’s first all-welded highway bridge completed in 1953. Named after welding pioneer Evgeny Paton, the bridge marked a key advance in civil engineering and Soviet postwar reconstruction, showcasing the shift from riveted to welded structures through innovations in metallurgy, structural analysis, and automatic submerged arc welding. Using archival and technical sources, the study places the bridge within its political and economic context, highlighting its dual role as functional infrastructure and a symbol of Soviet scientific progress. The article reviews over seven decades of operational experience, focusing on the bridge’s durability, maintenance, and influence on later engineering worldwide. Serving as a living laboratory, the Paton Bridge demonstrates the practical application of scientific research in welded steel structures and remains relevant to modern infrastructure and engineering education. A study of the electrification of Tashkent from 1914 to 1918 presents significant historical interest. Against the backdrop of geopolitical instability and the colonial approach of the imperial center, the development of energy infrastructure in the region appears as an attempt at modernization despite unfavorable conditions. While the number of power stations increased, a lack of industrial support and investment outflow hindered further progress. The analysis reveals how energy policy influenced the region’s economic potential and exposed untapped infrastructural resources. Traditional technologies that have retained their relevance are highlighted in the article on wood-fired kiln ceramics. This topic offers a fresh interpretation of technology as a form of aesthetic and emotional experience. The authors trace the evolution of the practice from utilitarian craft to a philosophy of fire interaction. An analysis of kiln types, firing regimes, ash impact, and temperature variations helps explain why this technique continues to inspire contemporary artists. A fascinating socio-technical case study is the history of automotive engineering in Francoist Spain. Through the lens of the Revista de la STA, researchers uncover the image of the engineer as a bearer of technical progress within an authoritarian state. Technological breakthroughs described by engineers themselves are presented as part of a collective imagination – a space where technology, the state, and professional pride coexist in a complex dynamic. This study demonstrates how cultural history shapes the history of technology. Finally, the issue concludes with a study on the emergence of cinema as a technical and social phenomenon. It captures the transition from optical illusions and mechanical devices to digital technologies and virtual reality. The authors examine not only the technical foundations of cinema-mechanics, vision physiology, photochemistry – but also its cultural contexts: fairs, cinemas, and the public consumption of visuality. Cinema emerges as both a product of scientific knowledge and social demand, a communicative platform, and a technological system. Taken together, this issue is a vivid illustration of the current state of historical and scientific studies. The articles transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, rethink the human role in technical transformations, and emphasize the importance of local contexts in global processes. A s

Leonardo Castellani, Anna Gabetti

The formalism of generalized quantum histories allows a symmetrical treatment of space and time correlations, by taking different traces of the same history density matrix. We recall how to characterize spatial and temporal entanglement in this framework. An operative protocol is presented, to map a history state into the ket of a static composite system. We show, by examples, how the Leggett-Garg and the temporal CHSH inequalities can be violated in our approach.

Lars Ullrich, Alex McMaster, Knut Graichen

Trajectory planning in autonomous driving is highly dependent on predicting the emergent behavior of other road users. Learning-based methods are currently showing impressive results in simulation-based challenges, with transformer-based architectures technologically leading the way. Ultimately, however, predictions are needed in the real world. In addition to the shifts from simulation to the real world, many vehicle- and country-specific shifts, i.e. differences in sensor systems, fusion and perception algorithms as well as traffic rules and laws, are on the agenda. Since models that can cover all system setups and design domains at once are not yet foreseeable, model adaptation plays a central role. Therefore, a simulation-based study on transfer learning techniques is conducted on basis of a transformer-based model. Furthermore, the study aims to provide insights into possible trade-offs between computational time and performance to support effective transfers into the real world.

Wang Bill Zhu, Deqing Fu, Kai Sun et al.

Existing recommendation systems either rely on user interaction logs, such as online shopping history for shopping recommendations, or focus on text signals. However, item-based histories are not always accessible, and are not generalizable for multimodal recommendation. We hypothesize that a user's visual history -- comprising images from daily life -- can offer rich, task-agnostic insights into their interests and preferences, and thus be leveraged for effective personalization. To this end, we propose VisualLens, a novel framework that leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to enable personalization using task-agnostic visual history. VisualLens extracts, filters, and refines a spectrum user profile from the visual history to support personalized recommendation. We created two new benchmarks, Google-Review-V and Yelp-V, with task-agnostic visual histories, and show that VisualLens improves over state-of-the-art item-based multimodal recommendations by 5-10% on Hit@3, and outperforms GPT-4o by 2-5%. Further analysis shows that VisualLens is robust across varying history lengths and excels at adapting to both longer histories and unseen content categories.

Sarah Midford

When Europeans settled on the Australian continent, Britain’s connections to the Greco-Roman classical tradition were being actively promoted as an inherent component of the empire’s cultural heritage. Since the foundation of the Australian colony of New South Wales, comparisons between the British dominion and classical antiquity were made in the hope that one day soon the history and literature of the new settlement would rival that of their cultural ancestors. Colonial Australian literature often focussed on the great potential the young civilization might enjoy. Because the geographical distance between Australia and Europe was so vast, connections to European cultural heritage were often laboriously constructed. This article focusses on the work of Michael Massey Robinson, a freed convict employed to write poetry by the New South Wales Governor, Lachlan Macquarie, from 1810. Drawing on the British legend of Brutus of Troy, recorded by the twelfth-century cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae , Robinson casts the British decedents of Aeneas as the founders of the Australian continent, and ancestors of the Trojan people. By emphasizing Australia’s connections to the ancient world through ancestral lineage, the great potential of the young civilization could be celebrated, and by linking Australia’s European settlement to the foundation of both Rome and Britain, colonial Australia was characterized as being at the beginning of a very long history that, based on historical precedent, would eventually result in a great and esteemed empire.

E. Hermans

Marta González González

The Chorus in Seven against Thebes is made up of maidens who have the important task of supplicating the gods in the crucial moment before battle, and they must do so correctly for their plea to be effective. This is one of the central themes in Aeschylus’ play: what is the correct way to supplicate? Here, I suggest that the Chorus maidens’ behaviour is both rational and effective, and that an examination of the statues of the gods occupying the stage and the manner in which the Chorus invokes them is highly illuminating as regards the maidens’ religiosity.

Cannatà Fera, Maria

Recensione di Jufresa, M.; Mestre, F. (eds) (2021). ΑΠΟΙΝΑ / àpoina. Estudis de literatura grega dedicats a Carles Miralles. Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 772 pp. Societat Catalana d’Estudis Clàssics.

Carl-Johan Berglund, John-Christian Eurell, Magnus Evertsson et al.

Följande böcker recenseras: Aasgaard, Reidar, Ona Maria Cojocaru och Cornelia B. Horn (red), Childhood in History: Perceptions of Children in the Ancient Medieval Worlds (Mikael Larsson) Ben Zvi, Ehud and Diana Vikander Edemann, Imagining the Other and Constructing Israelite Identity in the Early Second Temple Period (Karin Tillberg)  Biblica, nuBibeln (Per-Olof Hermansson) Brodersen, Alma, The End of the Psalter: Psalms 146–150 in the Masoretic Text, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Septuagint (David Willgren) Dodson Joseph R. and David E. Briones (eds.), Paul and Seneca in Dialogue (Adam Sabir) Dodson, Joseph R. and Andrew W. Pitts (eds.), Paul and the Greco-Roman Philosophical Tradition (Adam Sabir) Eidsvåg, Gunnar Magnus, The Old Greek Translation of Zechariah (Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer) Fredriksen, Paula, Paul: The Pagan’s Apostle (Lukas Hagel) Frevel, Christian, Gottesbilder und Menschenbilder: Studien zu Anthropologie und Theologie im Alten Testament, samt Wagner, Andreas, Menschenverständnis und Gottesverständnis im Alten Testament: Gesammelte Aufsätze 2 (Richard Pleijel) Gertz, Jan C., Bernhard M. Levinson, Dalit Rom-Shiloni och Konrad Schmid (red.), The Formation of the Pentateuch: Bridging the Academic Cultures of Europe, Israel, and North America (Josef Forsling)  Graybill, Rhiannon, Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets (Mikael Larsson) Gundry, Robert H., Peter – False Disciple and Apostate according to Saint Matthew (John-Christian Eurell) Hays, Richard B., Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (James Starr)  Heilig, Christoph, Paul’s Triumph: Reassessing 2 Corinthians 2:14 in Its Literary and Historical Context (Ludvig Svensson) Himmelfarb, Martha, Between Temple and Torah: Essays on Priests, Scribes, and Visionaries in the Second Temple Period and Beyond (Stefan Green) Hurtado, Larry W., Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World (Mikael Tellbe) Keener, Craig S., Spirit Hermeneutics: Reading Scripture in Light of Pentecost (Bo Krister Ljungberg) Keener, Craig S. and John H. Walton (gen. eds.), NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible: Bringing to Life the Ancient World of Scripture (Bo Krister Ljungberg) Kok, Michael J., The Gospel on the Margins: The Reception of Mark in the Second Century (Joel Kuhlin) Licona, Michael R., Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography (Tobias Ålöw) Lin, Yii-Jan, The Erotic Life of Manuscripts: New Testament Criticism and the Biological Sciences (Joel Kuhlin) Lied, Liv Ingeborg och Hugo Lundhaug (red.), Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity and New Philology (Kamilla Skarström Hinojosa) Mermelstein, Ari and Shalom E. Holtz (eds.), The Divine Courtroom in Comparative Perspective (Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer) Miller, Stuart S., At the Intersection of Texts and Material Finds: Stepped Pools, Stone Vessels, and Ritual Purity Among Jews of Roman Galilee (Cecilia Wassén) Moxon, John R. L., Peter’s Halakhic Nightmare: The “Animal” Vision of Acts 10:9–16 in Jewish and Graeco-Roman Perspective (Carl Johan Berglund) Neudecker, Reinhard, Moses Interpreted by the Pharisees and Jesus: Matthew’s Antitheses in the Light of Early Rabbinic Literature (Tobias Ålöw) Penner, Todd and Davina C. Lopez, De-Introducing the New Testament: Texts, Worlds, Methods, Stories (Martin Wessbrandt) Schellenberg, Ryan S., Rethinking Paul’s Rhetorical Education: Comparative Rhetoric and 2 Corinthians 10–13 (Johannes Leckström) Schreiner, Patrick, The Body of Jesus: A Spatial Analysis of the Kingdom in Matthew (Tobias Ålöw)  Sprinkle, Preston (red.), Two Views on Homosexuality, the Bible, and the Church (Bo Krister Ljungberg) Stökl, Jonathan and Caroline Waerzeggers (eds.), Exile and Return: The Babylonian Context (Karin Tillberg) Thurén, Lauri, Parables Unplugged: Reading the Lukan Parables in Their Rhetorical Context (Lennart Thörn) Thörn, Lennart, Ordets tillblivelse. Lukasevangeliet (Magnus Evertsson) Weima, Jeffrey A. D., Paul the Ancient Letter Writer: An Introduction to Epistolary Analysis (Adam Sabir) Winninge, Mikael (red.), Dödahavsrullarna – i svensk översättning (Søren Holst)

J. L. Wright

Why did no other ancient society produce a text remotely like the Bible? That a tiny, out of the way community, could have produced a text so determinative for peoples across the globe seems improbable.For Jacob Wright, the Bible is not only a testimony of survival, but also an unparalleled achievement in human history. Forged during Babylonian exile after the shattering destruction of Jerusalem, it makes not victory but total humiliation the foundation of a new idea of belonging. Lamenting the destruction of their homeland, scribes who composed the Bible turned to the golden ages of the past, reflecting deeply on abject failure. More than just religious scripture, the Bible is a resonant blueprint for the inspiring creation of a nation. As a response to catastrophe, it offers a powerful, message of hope and restoration that is unique in the Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman worlds. Wright's Bible is thus a social, political, and even economic roadmap – one that enabled a small and obscure community located on the periphery of leading civilizations and empires, not just to come back from the brink, but ultimately to shape the world's destiny. The Bible speaks ultimately of being a united, yet diverse people, and its pages present a manual of pragmatic survival strategies in response to societal collapse.

Jéssica Frutuoso Mello, Charlene Martins Miotti

As representações que Jasão recebeu ao longo da tradição literária grega e latina permitiram que o herói assumisse muitas facetas, mas, ao se considerar os aspectos relacionados ao fim de seu relacionamento com Medeia, é frequente sua caracterização como inconstante. Tendo isso em mente, propõe-se uma análise de sua construção no Epítome das Histórias Filípicas de Pompeio Trogo, obra dos primeiros séculos de nossa era. Considera-se que a narrativa de seu retorno à Cólquida com o objetivo de devolver o trono a Eetes poderia apresentá-lo como um modelo de virtude ao leitor de Justino.

F. Lomoc, A. P. Boette, N. Canosa et al.

We analyze the application of the history state formalism to quantum walks. The formalism allows one to describe the whole walk through a pure quantum history state, which can be derived from a timeless eigenvalue equation. It naturally leads to the notion of system-time entanglement of the walk, which can be considered as a measure of the number of orthogonal states visited in the walk. We then focus on one-dimensional discrete quantum walks, where it is shown that such entanglement is independent of the initial spin orientation for real Hadamard-type coin operators and real initial states (in the standard basis) with definite site parity. Moreover, in the case of an initially localized particle it can be identified with the entanglement of the unitary global operator that generates the whole history state, which is related to its entangling power and can be analytically evaluated. Besides, it is shown that the evolution of the spin subsystem can also be described through a spin history state with an extended clock. A connection between its average entanglement (over all initial states) and that of the operator generating this state is also derived. A quantum circuit for generating the quantum walk history state is provided as well.

Carson Bay

Abstract Scholarly narratives of the development of Christian anti-Jewish thinking in antiquity routinely cite a number of standard, well-known authors: from Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Justin Martyr in earlier centuries to Eusebius, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine in the fourth and early fifth centuries. The anonymous author known as Pseudo-Hegesippus, to whom is attributed a late fourth-century Latin work called On the Destruction of Jerusalem (De Excidio Hierosolymitano), rarely appears in such discussions. This has largely to do with the fact that this text and its author are effectively unknown entities within contemporary scholarship in this area (scholars familiar with Pseudo-Hegesippus tend to be specialists in medieval Latin texts and manuscripts). But “Pseudo-Hegesippus” represents a critical contribution to the mosaic of Christian anti-Jewish discourse in late antiquity. De Excidio's generic identity as a Christian piece of classical historiography makes it a unique form of ancient anti-Jewish propaganda. This genre, tied to De Excidio's probable context of writing—the wake of the emperor Julian's abortive attempt to rebuild the Jerusalem Temple, resurrect a robust Judaism, and remove Christians from public engagement with classical culture—renders De Excidio an important Christian artifact of both anti-Judaism and pro-classicism at the same time. This article situates Pseudo-Hegesippus in a lineage of Christian anti-Jewish historical thinking, argues that De Excidio codifies that discourse in a significant and singular way, frames this contribution in terms of its apparent socio-historical context, and cites De Excidio's later influence and reception as testaments to its rightful place in the history of Christian anti-Judaism, a place that modern scholarship has yet to afford it. As a piece of classical historiography that mirrors not Christian historians—like Eusebius and others—but the historians of the broader “pagan” Greco-Roman world—like Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus—De Excidio leverages a cultural communicative medium particularly well equipped to undergird and fuel the Christian historiographical imagination and its anti-Jewish projections.

Catherine Dobias-Lalou, Alice Bencivenni, Hugues Berthelot et al.

Questo articolo presenta alcuni aspetti relativi al progetto Inscriptions of Libya (InsLib) sviluppato in Francia, Italia e Gran Bretagna e dedicato alla pubblicazione online ad accesso libero delle iscrizioni della Libia antica e di altre risorse ad esse correlate. Il gruppo italo-francese ha la responsabilità dell'edizione, in formato EpiDoc, sia delle iscrizioni del periodo preromano (IG Cyrenaica) sia delle iscrizioni metriche di tutte le epoche (IG Cyrenaica Verse), come pure dei relativi materiali d'archivio e prosopografia. Dopo un breve quadro sulla storia e sulla metodologia del progetto, ognuno dei quattro autori del contributo illustra un tema correlato al suo lavoro. Autore 1 spiega il metodo scelto per raccogliere e classificare la bibliografia. Dato che l'edizione digitale offre traduzioni in più lingue moderne, Autore 2 riflette sulle modalità di traduzione delle iscrizioni in relazione alla pubblicazione online e al pubblico eterogeneo degli utenti. Autore 3 presenta il progetto relativo alla digitalizzazione dei calchi delle iscrizioni. Autore 4 spiega come stia completando la Prosopographia Cyrenaica del compianto André Laronde che rimane ad oggi inedita, evidenziando la metodologia che dovrebbe essere utilizzata per la pubblicazione online, anche in connessione con altri progetti in corso.

Udi Boker, Karoliina Lehtinen

Automata models between determinism and nondeterminism/alternations can retain some of the algorithmic properties of deterministic automata while enjoying some of the expressiveness and succinctness of nondeterminism. We study three closely related such models -- history determinism, good for gameness and determinisability by pruning -- on quantitative automata. While in the Boolean setting, history determinism and good for gameness coincide, we show that this is no longer the case in the quantitative setting: good for gameness is broader than history determinism, and coincides with a relaxed version of it, defined with respect to thresholds. We further identify criteria in which history determinism, which is generally broader than determinisability by pruning, coincides with it, which we then apply to typical quantitative automata types. As a key application of good for games and history deterministic automata is synthesis, we clarify the relationship between the two notions and various quantitative synthesis problems. We show that good-for-games automata are central for "global" (classical) synthesis, while "local" (good-enough) synthesis reduces to deciding whether a nondeterministic automaton is history deterministic.

Somil Gupta, Neeraj Sharma

The rise of intelligent assistant systems like Siri and Alexa have led to the emergence of Conversational Search, a research track of Information Retrieval (IR) that involves interactive and iterative information-seeking user-system dialog. Recently released OR-QuAC and TCAsT19 datasets narrow their research focus on the retrieval aspect of conversational search i.e. fetching the relevant documents (passages) from a large collection using the conversational search history. Currently proposed models for these datasets incorporate history in retrieval by appending the last N turns to the current question before encoding. We propose to use another history selection approach that dynamically selects and weighs history turns using the attention mechanism for question embedding. The novelty of our approach lies in experimenting with soft attention-based history selection approach in an open-retrieval setting.

Raphael Watschinger, Günther Of

While an integration by parts formula for the bilinear form of the hypersingular boundary integral operator for the transient heat equation in three spatial dimensions is available in the literature, a proof of this formula seems to be missing. Moreover, the available formula contains an integral term including the time derivative of the fundamental solution of the heat equation, whose interpretation is difficult at second glance. To fill these gaps we provide a rigorous proof of a general version of the integration by parts formula and an alternative representation of the mentioned integral term, which is valid for a certain class of functions including the typical tensor-product discretization spaces.

G. Filippi, G. Filippi, The Hoax et al.