Hasil untuk "Ancient history"

Fernando M. Carvajal‐Vallejos, Flavio Gallo‐Cardozo, Matías Careaga et al.

ABSTRACT Weight‐Length Relationships (WLRs) provide a basis for comparing life history strategies and morphological differentiation among fish species, potentially linking slope variations to evolutionary divergences in size and weight. This study presents the WLRs of nine Serrasalmus piranha species from the Amazon and La Plata basins in Bolivia, assessing whether WLRs slopes are influenced by phylogenetic relationships using a phylogenetic mixed model analysis on the mitochondrial DNA COI (barcoding) locus. All species demonstrated an exponential (power‐type) growth pattern, with most showing positive allometric growth. The species showing the greatest differentiation in both WLRs and genetic variation was S. elongatus. We detected a strong phylogenetic signal in WLR slopes, though clustering techniques for WLRs slopes and molecular data revealed only partial concordance. We discuss how these concordances and discrepancies between WLRs and genetic data may reflect ancient and intermediate speciation events, shaped by habitat conditions and stochastic evolutionary processes. Such processes appear to influence swimming mechanisms and ecological niche navigation in these closely related Serrasalmus species.

E. V. Alexandrova

The idea that fear of death forms the basic motivation for cultural and religious practices has gained attention of cognitive science and has been experimentally tested in recent decades. It is now known as the terror management theory (TMT). However, the idea itself was influential in scholarship at least since the 19th century and has had a significant impact on Egyptology throughout its history. In this article classical and modern works on ancient Egyptian religion and funeral practices are analyzed in order to highlight peculiarities of Egyptological reliance on the topos of fear of death. It can be noted that the use of the category of beneficiary for analysis of funerary literature and ritual is connected with the notion of benefit as a deliverance from fear of death. This perspective on benefits played its role in the formulation of the “democratization of the Afterlife” theory. The model centered on the idea of the orderliness of the world, proposed by J. Assmann, is considered as an alternative approach. It can be further developed in light of the compensatory control theory (CCT). Assmann limited himself to the study of religion as communication with gods. This paper explores funerary practices within the framework of ‘religion as propagation of Maat’. Finally, such specific traits of Egyptian funerary practices as threat-formulae, letters to the dead and heart amulets are analyzed as modes of execution of personal and compensatory control.

Tajana Trbojević Vukičević, Kim Korpes, Martina Đuras et al.

A special part of archaeology, so-called archaeozoopathology or veterinary paleopathology is dedicated to studies of paleopathological changes in animal remains and contributes to the knowledge of ancient veterinary medicine and the history of diseases. In our study, we analyze paleopathological changes determined by gross observation and diagnostic imaging in the animal material originating from eight archaeological sites in Croatia. A standard archaeozoological analysis was carried out and specimens with visually detected macrostructural changes were radiographed. In total, 50 animal remains with altered macrostructure were identified in the archaeozoological material excavated from 2010 to 2022 at eight archaeological sites in Croatia. According to the taxonomic analysis, most of the bones with macrostructural changes originated from cattle (N = 27, 54% of the total number of bones with macrostructural changes), followed by the bones of small ruminants (N = 12, 24%) and pigs (N = 8, 16%). The horse, carnivore and chicken were represented with one bone each (2%). Radiological examination showed that three samples (6%) had a regular bone macrostructure, i.e., no pathological changes were visible upon radiological examination. The majority (64%) of pathologically altered bones are a consequence of keeping/working, followed by traumatic causes (20%). Changes in the oral cavity were found in 10% of specimens. Our study showed that gross examination will continue to be the primary method for the identification of pathologically altered remains in archaeozoological material. However, diagnostic imaging techniques such as radiography should be implemented to confirm or exclude suspected alterations and to help the classification of the specimen by etiology.

Joseph M. Bryant

In Part I of this study, the Decian Persecution and the crisis of mass apostasy it provoked within mainstream Christianity was identified as a “turning point” moment in the history of the ancient Hellenistic-Roman world. A negotiated decision by moderate and pragmatic bishops to overturn the established ban on the pardoning of apostates incited a major schismatic rupture, as disciplinary hardliners and traditionalists promptly formed an oppositional communion dedicated to full compliance with the purity requirements contained in scripture. Here, in Part II, we will show how Catholics and Katharoi were caught up in a “schismogenic” process of bilateral transformation, their identities adaptively refashioned over the course of intense polemical struggle that had the decisive effect of accelerating and deepening the Catholic embrace of penitential lenity. Thus fortified by a new pastoral-disciplinary regime that restored grievous sinners to sanctity and brought the prospects of eternal salvation within reach of those less capable of sustained zeal and holiness, the Church/Orthodox Church would experience significant membership growth in ensuing decades, setting the stage for the fateful compact with Empire that lay in its future.

Roma Bončkutė

The article discusses the sources used by the national Lithuanian historian Simonas Daukantas (1793–1864) which determined the inclusion of Odin in the ranks of Lithuanian/Baltic cultural heroes in the work BUDĄ Senowęs-Lëtuwiû Kalnienû ĩr Ƶámajtiû (en. The Character of the Ancient Lithuanians–Highlanders and Lowlanders, 1845). The first source discussed is the article “De l’ère primitive des législations sacerdotales” (“On the legislative power of the priests of primeval times”) published in the magazine “Le Catholique” in 1826, on which S. Daukantas mainly relied when discussing the figure of Odin. Upon investigation, this source does not consider Odin to be the hero of the Baltic people, either. It is speculated that S. Daukantas was impressed by the laconic biography of Odin and the note added at the end that the royal families of Saxony and Denmark, the Merovingian dynasty and the Lombard princes included Odin in their genealogy. S. Daukantas analogously states that Odin is also a Lithuanian hero because, even ‘now’, there are people with the surname Odinas living in Lithuania and Samogitia. Actually, S. Daukantas’s mother was née Odinaitė. This article further discusses two other sources: Geschichte Preußens (1827, vol. 1) by Johannes Voigt (1786–1863), and Geschichte von Littauen, Kurland und Liefland (1785) by Ludwig Albrecht Gebhardi (1735–1802). It was determined that only J. Voigt briefly indicated that Odin founded Asgard near Daugava. S. Daukantas adopted this opinion in his work. On February 12, 1845, in a letter to Teodoras Narbutas (1784–1864), S. Daukantas reproached him for not including Odin in the ranks of Lithuanian cultural heroes and mentioned Le Catholique and Jntrodukcyi Maleta do historyi Dunskiej as important sources for the research pertaining to the possible Baltic origins of Odin. This inspires a hypothesis that S. Daukantas made a mistake in specifying the name of the Swiss-born historian Paul Henri Mallet because he did not write about Odin as a Lithuanian/Baltic hero in his work on Danish history. The article investigates which author’s introduction to a book on Danish history led S. Daukantas to a belief that he found information about the Lithuanian/Baltic Odin. It must have been an authoritative historian because S. Daukantas did not change his opinion about Odin when he wrote Pasakojimas apej Wejkałus Lietuwiû tautos senowie (Stories about Events in Ancient Lithuania, 1850) and emphasized that Northern writers refer to Odin as having lived and worked in Lithuania. After getting acquainted with Peter Friedrich Suhm’s introduction (Einleitung oder kritische Muthmaſsungen über die teste Abstammung und Geschichte der Nordischen Nation) to Geschichte der Dänen (1803), the study reaches the conclusion that it determined S. Daukantas’s decision about Odin’s Baltic origins. It is likely that an interdisciplinary study of the figure of Odin would finally allow us to confirm or reject this belief of S. Daukantas.

Stefanie de Bodt, Steven Maere, Y. Van de Peer

Emre ERDAN , Fatih ERSAN, Kubilay GÜÇLÜ

One of the most difficult professions in history, sponge diving/fishing was widely practiced in the Mediterranean World in 19th and 20th century by Turkish, Greek, Italian and North African divers. Natural sea sponges are the main materials of the profession which extends from here to the North America in mid-20th century. Our earliest data indicate that the sponge, which is well known by many ancient texts used in ancient times, especially in cleaning, medicine, carpentry, mining, chemical industry, and military equipment, was provided by mankind to 4500 BC. The ancient texts are rich in terms of information about the usage of sponges as well as information about sponge-divers. There is a consistent similarity between the centers of the Modern Age and the centers in these ancient texts which convey information about how and where the profession is practiced. The main reason for this situation should be related to the distribution map of the valuable sponge species that human beings can use in their daily life in the Mediterranean World. The information conveyed by the modern age sponge-divers and their families show that these people wandered the Mediterranean along the sponge resources. It shows that these sponge-divers are not only interested in sponges but also supply valuable textile products especially from the Eastern Mediterranean ports and market them in their countries. In this respect, the contribution of the sponge-divers -who can be defined not only as a professional group but also as a merchant- to the acculturation process of the Mediterranean has not been realized except for a few studies. The absolute, compulsory, and continuous supply of sponges needed by the common toilets and bathrooms that serve millions of people, especially in the Greek-Roman Periods, is the most important proof that sponge diving/fishing was an important profession. When we examine the sponge fishing history from the ancient times to the Ottoman Period and almost today for some amateur sponge divers, there is an invariant technique for the sponge divers. When the sponge divers reached to the bottom of the sea, they spout the olive oil from their mouth. According to Oppian and Evliya Çelebi, the sponge divers use this method for the similar purpose, however the explanations of Oppian and Çelebi are too different from each other’s. In this study, by considering physical and chemical laws, we analysis these two different examination for the oil-expuition. We determined that the people who lived in ancient ages realized the refraction of waves, and Snell’s law before the mathematical equations found.

Audrey Ferlut

Germanic tribes from the other bank of the Rhine River progressively settled where the Eburones, annihilated by Caesar in 53 BCE., lived. Among them, the Ubii. Migrating by waves after 38 BCE. to the frontier of the Roman Empire, they built new political and social structures and new religious practices while they appropriated roman culture and habits. Among the cults in the newly created Civitas Ubiorum, the cult to the Matronae, concentrated in the east of the Civitas, became central and dominant. The militaries and the elites were key agents in the circulation of the Matronae. Other social groups, inserted in the curiae, participated in the municipalisation of the cult while those social groups became civic institutions in the civitas then.Born in rural communities in the 1st century CE. before reaching the Roman colonies at the very end of that century, the cult to Matronae spread on a double scheme: some very local cults to some Matronae in small sanctuaries which sometimes revealed a massive amount of inscriptions and a provincial cult to the Matronae Aufaniae that spreads from Bonn and Köln. Through that process, the Matronae were the most revered deities in Germania Inferior, without any other cult able to equal them.

Caitlin Mudge, Rebecca Dallwitz, Bastien Llamas et al.

Natural history collections provide a critical temporal view of past biodiversity and are instrumental in the study of extinct populations. However, the value of historical specimens relies on correct species identification, collection date and collection locality. The Australian National Maritime Museum (ANMM) holds an unusual artifact – an electric lamp made from a dried whale penis – with unknown age, species-of-origin and collection locality. We used ancient DNA methods to generate a partial mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genome sequence to establish the identity and provenance of the whale, and accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating to determine the approximate year of death. Mitochondrial DNA sequences from the 16S rRNA gene and the control region indicate that the specimen belonged to a sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) and a modern radiocarbon age suggests it was collected post-1950s. We were unable to determine the collection locality of the whale due to the very broad geographic distribution of its mtDNA haplotype. Our results suggest the specimen was possibly collected as a souvenir during post-war whaling, where nearly 30,000 male sperm whales were killed annually. This study supports and extends previous research that applies ancient DNA and radiocarbon dating techniques to enhance the value of natural history collections, by identifying the species-of-origin and age of historical specimens.

D. Scott

William Schopf

Rada Varga, Annamária-Izabella Pázsint

<p>The present research, though a stand-alone from many points of view, is the second part of our enterprise dealing with the reflection of individual and collective tragedy in Roman epigraphy. While the first part took into consideration individual tragedies, with death occurred by the hand of <em>latrones</em>, bandits or pirates, the current investigation is focused on what we have defined as traces of collective tragedies. By collective tragedies we understand those events which touched a larger sector of the population, resulted especially following attacks of enemies, or wars. Responsible for these acts of violence is especially the ‘other’, which falls in to the category of ‘barbarian’, or enemy. The Dacian wars, the Marcommanic wars, the Parthian expeditions, were some of the military events which lead to large scale acts of violence, and which left epigraphic traces of collective tragedies.</p>

Ireneusz Milewski

The objective of this paper is to discuss accounts related to money in Apophthegmata Patrum, a collection of sayings attributed to famous Egyptian monks. The collection as we know it was produced in the 6th century. By describing the organisation of monastic centres in Egypt in the 4th and 5th century Apophthegmata also offer us some information about the period’s economic aspects. However, by and large, the data is very general. It pertains to: prices, wages, tax issues as well as money that was given to monks by pilgrims. Limited as it is, the data confirms that money was present in the everyday lives of Egyptian monks in late antiquity. Naturally, the major consideration behind whether a monk possessed money was whether he had contact with the outside world. This included selling self-made handcraft at markets, particularly woven mats and ropes, clay pots and sometimes also more specialised items (such as copied codices of the Bible). In Apophthegmata Patrum, similarly to what is the case with other Early Byzantium hagiographic texts, we find little information about moral evaluation of money or about the “appropriate” way to manage it.

Ndikho Mtshiselwa, Lerato Mokoena

The Old Testament projects not only a Deity that created the world and human beings but also one that is violent and male. The debate on the depiction of the God of Israel that is violent and male is far from being exhausted in Old Testament studies. Thus, the main question posed in this article is: If re-read as ‘Humans created God in their image’, would Genesis 1:27 account for the portrayal of a Deity that is male and violent? Feuerbach’s idea of anthropomorphic projectionism and Guthrie’s view of religion as anthropomorphism come to mind here. This article therefore examines, firstly, human conceptualisation of a divine being within the framework of the theory of anthropomorphic projectionism. Because many a theologian and philosopher would deny that God is a being at all, we further investigate whether the God of Israel was a theological and social construction during the history of ancient Israel. In the end, we conclude, based on the theory of anthropomorphic projectionism, that the idea that the God of Israel was a theological and social construct accounts for the depiction of a Deity that is male and violent in the Old Testament.

Rada Varga, Annamária-Izabella Pázsint

<p>The present paper is the first part of a series of articles dedicated to the concept of tragedy in the Roman Empire. While the first article will focus on personal tragedies, as seen through the epigraphic attestations of violence, the second article will focus on collective tragedies, bringing together, and matching both the epigraphic evidence and the literary sources, in an attempt to reconstruct, through the lenses of the Empire’s population, the violent events of that time. By personal tragedies we understand any act of violence which lead to the harm, or death of an individual inflicted by other humans, and not by natural disasters. In this category we are not including those events which have a tragic input on one’s life (i.e. the death of family members), only those which are the result of a violent act.</p><p>The sample we have worked on proved to be moderate quantitatively, but it provided interesting information on Roman epigraphic habits, social life and even social psychology, offering a glimpse into the perils of the Roman world and people’s responses when faced with them and with the losses they inflicted.</p>

A. V. Ivanov, I. V. Levitsky, V. I. Levitsky et al.

The Siberian craton consists of Archean blocks, which were welded up into the same large unit by ca 1.9 Ga [Gladkochub et al., 2006; Rojas-Agramonte et al., 2011]. The history of the constituent Archean blocks is mosaic because of limited number of outcrops, insufficient sampling coverage because of their location in remote regions and deep forest and difficulties with analytical studies of ancient rocks, which commonly underwent metamorphic modifications and secondary alterations. In this short note, we report data on discovery of unusual for Archean mafic rocks of ultimate fresh appearance. These rocks were discovered within southwestern Siberian craton in a region near a boundary between Kitoy granulites of the Sharyzhalgai highgrade metamorphic complex and Onot green-schist belt (Fig. 1). Here we present preliminary data on geochronology of these rocks and provide their geochemical characterization.

Paul Beaulieu, J. Postgate, G. Algaze

Andrea Pieroni, Hiwa M. Ahmed, Hawre Zahir

Kurdistan represents a crucial region in the Middle East for understanding patterns of human evolution in the use of food plants and especially wild vegetables as well as for assessing the influences of the major, surrounding bio-cultural macro-area. In this research, an ethnobotanical filed study focusing on wild vegetables traditionally gathered and consumed during the spring was conducted in a few villages of the Western Hawraman area, in South Kurdistan (Iraq), both among Sunni Muslims and Yarsanis (Ahl-e Haqq), the latter of which represent followers of a tiny, threatened, ancient monotheistic religion. Through interviews with 25 elderly informants, the folk uses of 34 botanical and mycological taxa were recorded. A few of the recorded species have never, or very rarely, been described in the ethnobotanical literature of the Middle East and for some of them (most notably Allium koelzii, Bongardia chrysogonum, Dorema aucheri, and Johrenia aromatica) their sensory chemistry and nutraceutical properties are largely unknown. No differences were found between the folk taxa mentioned by Sunni Muslims and those reported by Yarsanis. The high cultural value and consumption of raw young shoots of Imperata cylindrica should be further investigated considering the history of the development of agriculture in the area, as explanations for the domestication of wild grasses have never considered the hypothesis of gastronomic appreciation of their young aerial parts. Moreover, some of the most mentioned vegetables are also considered food-medicines. A comparison with all the pre-existing food ethnobotanical literature of the Middle East shows that the most culturally salient wild vegetables recorded in the Hawraman area are shared with Arabic, Turkish, Caucasian, and especially Persian food heritages. These findings suggest that investigating the ethnobiology of Kurdistan is more than ever urgent in order to document folk plant uses at a crucial crossroad of historical and cultural trajectories in the Middle East.

V. Katz

E. Langner, S. Greifenberg, J. Gruenwald