El objetivo del trabajo es analizar el traslado de esculturas y obeliscos a Constantinopla y a su hipódromo como acto de spolia al servicio de la grandeza de la ciudad fundada por Constantino, realizando un examen de las diversas teorías científicas al respecto que nos permita establecer un estado de la cuestión sobre la intencionalidad del traslado.
A Roman-Egyptian mummy portrait of a young woman in a pink tunic is part of the Allard Pierson collection in Amsterdam. The portrait is well-known and a key piece of the collection, but has received little scholarly attention so far. The life and the afterlife of the portrait are therefore poorly understood. The authors approach the portrait from different perspectives: its provenance and acquisition, the artist’s materials and techniques, the dating conventions surrounding mummy portraits and their cultural context. The authors advocate for this in-depth multidisciplinary approach primarily because it spotlights specific areas in mummy portraits (in this case, the pearl earrings) where iconography, materials and techniques and ancient socio-economic developments converge. Provenance research proved important not only for securing the object’s bona fide acquisition, but also for tracing its second-life biography. These converging perspectives effectively cast light on research areas where more work remains desirable. In lieu of secure documentation of the archaeological findspot (which is the case with most mummy portraits) this approach is a powerful tool to nonetheless compose histories that help to understand the meaning of mummy portraits in the past and in the present and provide a durable framework for future research.
AbstractAncient Near Eastern treaties were contractual agreements between two political entities, in most cases between two kings. Numerous treaties survive in written form, and others are known indirectly from other types of source, such as royal inscriptions, historiographic compositions, and letters. They date from the twenty‐fourth until the seventh centurybce, but the best‐preserved and largest group dates to the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1550–1200bce) and was recovered in the archives of Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite kingdom.
Opinion on the concept of state has a deep root in the history of western political thought. Although there have been brief and marginal studies in this area in ancient Greece, we notice more attention to the concept of state and its coordinates since the Renaissance. Germany, during eighteenth century, is one of the most important arenas on this concept. As one of its thinkers and contemporary of Hegel, Schopenhauer has also paid attention to the issue of state during his discussions. The problem of the present study is the nature of state in Schopenhauer's political thought. The hypothesis of the present paper is that Schopenhauer's theory of state as opposed to Hegelian thought, rejects the totalitarian and the Hegelian ideal state on one hand, and, based on the rule of the concept of evil and how he views metaphysics in its philosophical apparatus on the other hand, takes on a minimalist and protective nature.
Political institutions and public administration (General), Political institutions and public administration - Asia (Asian studies only)
Sergio Minelli,1 Pierluca Minelli,2 Maria Rosa Montinari3 1Department of Cardiology, Local Health Unit Lecce, Lecce, Italy; 2Faculty of Medicine and Surgery “A. Gemelli”, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Rome, Italy; 3Department of Biological and Environmental Science and Technology, University of Salento, Lecce, ItalyCorrespondence: Maria Rosa MontinariDepartment of Biological and Environmental Science and Technology, University of Salento, Complex Ecotekne, Way Monteroni, Lecce 73100, ItalyTel +39 083 229 8855Email mariarosa.montinari@unisalento.itAbstract: The clinical manifestations of atherosclerosis are nowadays the main cause of death in industrialized countries, but atherosclerotic disease was found in humans who lived thousands of years ago, before the spread of current risk factors. Atherosclerotic lesions were identified on a 5300-year-old mummy, as well as in Egyptian mummies and other ancient civilizations. For many decades of the twentieth century, atherosclerosis was considered a degenerative disease, mainly determined by a passive lipid storage, while the most recent theory of atherogenesis is based on endothelial dysfunction. The importance of inflammation and immunity in atherosclerosis’s pathophysiology was realized around the turn of the millennium, when in 1999 the famous pathologist Russell Ross published in the New England Journal of Medicine an article entitled “Atherosclerosis – an inflammatory disease”. In the following decades, inflammation has been a topic of intense basic research in atherosclerosis, albeit its importance has ancient scientific roots. In fact, in 1856 Rudolph Virchow was the first proponent of this hypothesis, but evidence of the key role of inflammation in atherogenesis occurred only in 2017. It seemed interesting to retrace the key steps of atherosclerosis in a historical context: from the teachings of the physicians of the Roman Empire to the response-to-injury hypothesis, up to the key role of inflammation and immunity at various stages of disease. Finally, we briefly discussed current knowledge and future trajectories of atherosclerosis research and its therapeutic implications.Keywords: atherosclerosis, history of medicine, cardiovascular disease, inflammation
Este trabajo analiza dos fragmentos de inscripciones romanas procedentes de la zona de Lara de los Infantes (Burgos). El primero de ellos es un fragmento anepigráfico con representación de una figura humana femenina. El segundo corresponde a un fragmento de estela romana en el que se intuye una denominación mediante doble idiónimo. En definitiva, se trata de dos nuevos testimonios epigráficos a añadir al profuso corpus de una zona rica en hallazgos epigráficos pero pobre en intervenciones arqueológicas que los contextualicen.
This work analyzes two fragments of roman inscriptions from the area of Lara de los Infantes (Burgos). The first one is an anepigraphic fragment with a representation of a female human figure. The second fragment come from a roman stele in which a denomination by double idionym could be deduced. Ultimately, these are two new epigraphic testimonies to be added to the extense corpus of a very rich area in epigraphic findings but poor in archaeological works which contextualize them.
History (General) and history of Europe, History (General)
Maize (Zea mays L.) is one of the most important cereal crops and a model for the study of genetics, evolution, and domestication. To better understand maize genome organization and to build a framework for genome sequencing, we constructed a sequence-ready fingerprinted contig-based physical map that covers 93.5% of the genome, of which 86.1% is aligned to the genetic map. The fingerprinted contig map contains 25,908 genic markers that enabled us to align nearly 73% of the anchored maize genome to the rice genome. The distribution pattern of expressed sequence tags correlates to that of recombination. In collinear regions, 1 kb in rice corresponds to an average of 3.2 kb in maize, yet maize has a 6-fold genome size expansion. This can be explained by the fact that most rice regions correspond to two regions in maize as a result of its recent polyploid origin. Inversions account for the majority of chromosome structural variations during subsequent maize diploidization. We also find clear evidence of ancient genome duplication predating the divergence of the progenitors of maize and rice. Reconstructing the paleoethnobotany of the maize genome indicates that the progenitors of modern maize contained ten chromosomes.
The idea that the Avant-garde and Classicism are placed at the antipodes of art history is a commonly accepted opinion. However, a deeper analysis proves it to be inconsistent and superficial. The key features of the contemporary artwork are normally taken to be the “dogma of aesthetic indifference” – that is, the decision to abandon the canon of ideal beauty – and the centrality of the artwork’s conceptual meaning at the expense of form and technique. Yet, these categories turn out to be familiar even to the classical world – no stranger to the interest towards the bad and the grotesque – and to ancient art, which was radically conceptual (think of the pyramids or Stonehenge). So the classical approach reveals its closeness to the modern, and the latter – in its sacral seriality, in its transfiguration of the common object into art and in its consecration of the museum – reveals its closeness to Classicism. Classicism (it turns out) is very hard to be actually done away with.
Recently, an important Mithraic relief was rediscovered and republished by the author of these lines in collaboration with George Bounegru and Victor Sava. The relief, known in the literature as CIMRM 1938 was for a long time considered a „disappeared” monument, the only laconic description being that of Marteen J. Vermaseren from his monumental corpus. Due to the recently rediscovered photographs of the relief and the detailed analysis of the correspondence between Béla Cserni and Franz Cumont, the CIMRM 1938 is now became available for further research. In this article, I will add some further historiographic and iconographic notes on one of the biggest Mithraic reliefs found in Dacia, solving also another mysterious piece in Vermaseren’s catalogue, the CIMRM 1986. The article is also the first publication of Béla Cserni’s photograph about the relief.
<p>La Iberia de Estrabón es un espacio en construcción; varios procesos históricos divergentes al sur, al centro al norte, y que de?nen espacios muy determinados, terminan convergiendo en una realidad nueva, que justo ahora comienza: la romanización. Esa perspectiva históricogeográ?ca de larga duración es muy característica de la geografía histórica de tradición griega, que cobra un sentido nuevo con Augusto.</p>