Ancient Greek History

The ruins of San Bartolo, Guatemala, contain a sample of Maya hieroglyphic writing dating to the Late Preclassic period (400 B.C. to 200 A.D.). The writing appears on preserved painted walls and plaster fragments buried within the pyramidal structure known as “Las Pinturas,” which was constructed in discrete phases over several centuries. Samples of carbonized wood that are closely associated with the writing have calibrated radiocarbon dates of 200 to 300 B.C. This early Maya writing implies that a developed Maya writing system was in use centuries earlier than previously thought, approximating a time when we see the earliest scripts elsewhere in Mesoamerica.

Thucydides’ detailed description of the Athenian plague, which is esti- mated to have killed from a quarter to a third of Athens’ population has been ap- proached from a variety of scholarly perspectives, yet its memorializing function is still under-explored. This article contends that Thucydides’ plague episode serves an inherent commemorative function and memorializes the plague through narrative emphasis, pathos, ἐνάργεια, and his focus on abortive burial rites.

Keywords: Thucydides, Athenian plague, energeia, memorialization, historiography

The history of courage here refers to the various meanings the term has taken on as a word, concept, and indicator of cultural beliefs during successive periods of history within the Western tradition. Understood in this way, courage is less an easily identifiable type of human action or aspect of character than a concept that has (1) been the object of extensive philosophical and intellectual enquiry, such that it is a branch of the broader history of ideas and (2) has been radically redefined and reconceived at different points in its history in ways that reflect the value system and general worldview of the culture then reckoning with courage in its literature and art, philosophy and science, religion and politics. According to this hermeneutic, each culture defines courage for its own ideological purposes and according to prevailing cultural beliefs and attitudes.

The main concern of this research is the distribution of land carried out by Athens outside Attica during the fifth century BCE, which mostly favoured poor Athenians according to the perspective held in this article. The basic assumption is that most of the colonists and cleruchs came from the Athenian lower classes, which encompassed all the thetes and the bulk of the zeugitai, keeping in mind the Solonian census classes. It is argued that in the colonisation process, a hoplite farm model operated as a reference pattern for the Athenian state to distribute plots and/or collect rents in favour of its citizens. In order to sustain this, it is first defined the situation of the zeugitai and the thetes during the sixth and fifth centuries; secondly, it is presented some rough figures of the total male citizen population and of the number of Athenian hoplites, to imagine the possible number of citizens available to emigrate; thirdly, it is analysed three situations that show, in one way or another, the validity of the hoplite farm model for land allocations in Athenian settlements and the beneficiaries of this founding policy: the colony of Brea, the cleruchy on Lesbos, and the colony of Melos; finally, it is proposed some concluding remarks about the Athenian land distribution policy that favoured the lower classes.

A morte e um tema que unifica as Troades de Seneca. A queda e o saque de Troia determinam a morte da grande cidade.  Em 1.179 versos, os personagens se apresentam: Hecuba, Taltibio, Pirro, Agamemnon, Calcante, Andromaca, um anciao, Astianax, Ulisses, Helena, Polixena, um mensageiro e o coro de troianas.  A peca teatral inicia-se com o lamento de Hecuba,rainha troiana sobre o seu destino e o de Troia (1-65). Um coro das troianas acompanha a destruicao da cidade e a morte de Priamo e de Heitor(67-162). No primeiro episodio (164-408), Taltibio, relata o aparecimento da sombra de Aquiles com o seu pedido: o sangue de Polixena pela mao de Pirro. Agamemnon e contra esse pedido e o filho de Aquiles, Pirro defende a honra de seu pai, discute a necessidade e a validade do assassinato da jovem troiana. O segundo episodio inicia-se com Andromaca, Astianax e um anciao. A cena se estende dos versos 409 a 522. No terceiro episodio (v.861-1008),com a ajuda de Helena, Polixena e preparada como noiv...

with less words. Also, this work does not include all the accounts that he heard and all the things that he had observed, because as even an annalist did, he absorbed his information, made a summary of them rejecting some of them and finally changed the order of what he had heard before proceeding in writing it. He kept in mind the context of the times within which he talked about his thoughts, the prejudices of those that were giving him the information and sought to create a work that could talk about the actions of the men. All these were connected with his sources Lateiner 1991, 8 21 Montanari 2008, 510 Lateiner 1991, 8-9

Several cultural systems in the Aegean, Levant and Near Eastern worlds helped shape the classical age of Greece. These early societies reflected on their past and used records, myths, legends and epics to construct a view of their place in the universe. There is a direct parallel between the social structure of these societies and the way they used different 'information regimes' to control the physical and cultural assets of any society. These methods help distribute resources and social roles, as well as mechanisms that legitimated the use of power and create a sense of ancestral origins. An overview of Minoan, Mycenaean and Archaic Greek societies shows a transition from a scribal-palace system (using Linear A then Linear B writing), towards an oral bardic culture focused around enshrining 'heroic' memory. There is, however, considerable continuity from the Mycenaean period into the classical Greek world, suggesting a need to reconsider simple invasion theories or environmental collapse models. Once the heroic ideal was broadened into a wider spectrum of social values the new uses of writing (based on Phoenician alphabetic scripts) helped support the pluralistic social system needed to create a citizen-based society. Writing was once the tool of the palace, but later on, in different forms, became the tool of public memory and literary creation.

The practice of dressing the cult statue of Artemis in radiant garments was quite widespread in antiquity. During religious festivals, such garments were carried in procession and displayed for the benefit of spectators. By virtue of their contact with the statue, such robes were considered to be bearers of the power of the deity itself. This may provide an intriguing parallel to the strange scene wherein Paul's thaumaturgical activity in Ephesus is undertaken by means of cloths which, upon contact with his skin, acquire a healing and exorcising power. This article tries to develop the comparison. In turn, the effectiveness of the apostle's poor textiles in the face of the splendor of the patroness of Ephesus constitutes a profound theological statement. This statement not only offers an implicit critique of pagan worship, but also firmly establishes in the apostle's hands a humble and unobtrusive, yet highly effective, means of salvation.

While it is generally acknowledged that fascist movements tend to glorify the national past of the country in which they arise, sometimes, fascist regimes seek to resurrect a past even more ancient, and more glorious still; the turn towards ancient Greece and Rome. This phenomenon is particularly marked in the case of the two most powerful and indisputably ‘fascist’ regimes of all: Benito Mussolini’s Italy and Adolf Hitler’s Germany.

This article suggests that this twin turn towards antiquity was no mere accident, but was rather motivated by certain commonalities in national experience. By placing these two fascist regimes alongside each other and considering their seduction by antique myths in tandem, it is argued that – without putting forward some kind of classicizing Sonderweg – we can better appreciate the historic rootedness of this particular form of ‘chronopolitics’ in a complex nexus of political and social causes, many of which lie far deeper than the traumatic events of the Great War and its aftermath.

Focusing upon a specific corpus of articles published in Die Alten Sprachen, the Classics teachers’ periodical produced by the National Socialist Teachers’ League (the Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund or NSLB), this chapter examines some of the ways in which the Classics became politicized for propagandistic purposes under the Nazi regime.

Whether seeking to portray ancient Sparta as a prototype of the Nazi “racial state”, identifying Socrates as an ancient representative of the Jewish intelligentsia, or treating the Roman Empire as a model for Hitler’s own imperial project, Classics teachers in the Third Reich sought to present the ancient past as an explicit “paradigm and warning” for the National Socialist present.

In addition to providing a general overview of the permeation of secondary-school Classics-teaching with National Socialist ideology, the chapter explores one specific case study in greater detail, an essay by Kurt Schmidt entitled ‘The Teaching of Xenophon’s Anabasis in National-Socialist Schools’ (1937).

Schmidt describes in detail how Xenophon’s work should be interpreted in order to instil pupils with the correct political Weltanschauung; prevailing presentism relentlessly demanded that passages in the Anabasis should constantly be connected to events in modern German history, and that Xenophon himself be portrayed as a Führer-personality, a great dictator avant la lettre.

However, the chapter as a whole also aims to demonstrate the surprising variety of the contributions which Die Alten Sprachen accepted, reflecting both the diverse status of those involved – from university professors to trainee teachers – and the extent of their assimilation of National Socialist politics (some articles meet recognized scholarly standards, whilst others are unashamedly demagogic, laced through with racial buzzwords and multiple exclamation marks).

Through a fuller appreciation of the compromises and shades of grey which coloured the journal’s material, we not only avoid being taken in by the post-war canard that Classicists were never true collaborators, but also by the correspondingly one-sided view that Classics-teaching during the Third Reich was always irredeemably ideological.

Since antiquity, the heroic fight to the last of King Leonidas and his three-hundred Spartans against the overwhelming military might of the Persian Empire in 460 B.C. has often been considered the ultimate expression of sacrificial patriotism, and Simonides’ epitaph to the fallen heroes has since graced countless European war memorials, as well as inspiring myriad military orations. More recently, Zack Snyder’s reinvention of the Thermopylae myth in the film 300 (2007) has stimulated controversy and heated debate concerning the politicisation of notions of ‘Western civilisation versus Oriental evil’, and their possible value to the U.S. administration during the aftermath of 9/11 and the continuing war in Iraq.

This article explores the juxtaposition of supposedly ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ notions of patriotic self-sacrifice which were employed in German military propaganda during the twentieth century, focusing on the recurrent trope of the Spartans’ Thermopylaean sacrifice as a paradigm for contemporary martial endeavours, especially during the Second World War. In particular, it considers the extent to which such legitimising propaganda was accepted or rejected by its intended audiences, principally in the context of military education. As Roderick Watt has highlighted in his discussion of the collocation of the Battle of Stalingrad with Thermopylae in Nazi propaganda, many works of post-war German literature betray a marked disillusionment and resentment towards this theme; this pattern also finds recent expression in the autobiographies and recollections of a number of ex-pupils of National Socialist elite schools, for whom the propagandisation of Thermopylae had been a prominent theme, both in academic lessons, and in extracurricular contexts – such as ceremonies for the war-dead.

Using a selection of these late twentieth-century autobiographies as case-studies, this paper evaluates the ways in which ancient ideals of military self-sacrifice have been variously transformed and transmuted to spur soldiers on in modern martial contexts, and the effectiveness – or otherwise – of such attempts to legitimise contemporary appeals to patriotism by claiming a deep affinity with the mores of Greek antiquity.

In National Socialist Germany, radical reinterpretations of Classical texts were always on the agenda. The Reich Education Ministry decreed unequivocally that only those ancient texts which could serve the regime's new 'national-political' education should be taught in schools, and many schoolteachers were all too eager to follow this prime directive. This article will consider a number of articles on Xenophon published in the Nazi Teachers' League (NSLB) Classics journal, Die Alten Sprachen, in order to illuminate the ways in which aspects of Xenophon's thought could become 'politicized'. Thus, one article takes selected passages from Xenophon's Hellenica and weaves them into a treatise on ancient and modern political theory, condemning individualism and providing a systematic indictment of the dangers of democracy, while another elevates aspects of the Spartan constitution to the status of contemporary political principles, placing Sparta (rather than Athens) at the centre of the German political imagination. As a whole, the article seeks to reveal the contingency of political analysis based on the ancient world, and the ways in which, in certain circumstances, almost any aspect of Greek thought can become 'political'. An authoritarian regime can just as easily style itself as an heir to the legacy of ancient politics as a democratic one, and Greek thought can ultimately be mobilized for almost any ends-however attractive or rebarbative these might seem to observers in today's society.

The human leucocyte antigen (HLA) system shows extensive variation in the number and function of loci and the number of alleles present at any one locus. Allele distribution has been analysed in many populations through the course of several decades, and the implementation of molecular typing has significantly increased the level of diversity revealing that many serotypes have multiple functional variants. While the degree of diversity in many populations is equivalent and may result from functional polymorphism(s) in peptide presentation, homogeneous and heterogeneous populations present contrasting numbers of alleles and lineages at the loci with high-density expression products. In spite of these differences, the homozygosity levels are comparable in almost all of them. The balanced distribution of HLA alleles is consistent with overdominant selection. The genetic distances between outbred populations correlate with their geographical locations; the formal genetic distance measur...

The treatise De mundo included within the Aristotelian Corpus contains an elaborate analogy between God – the supreme cosmic principle – and the Great King of Persia. The Author offers a fascinating image of the Achaemenid power apparatus, that the King orders and dominates seated in majesty in the innermost chambers of his palaces. The present paper aims at providing insights as to the historical dimension of the passage, which, so far, has never been the object of a thorough analysis.

Anadolu’da Neolitik dönem MÖ 10500’ler – 5500’ler arasına tarihlenmektedir. Yerleşik düzen, tarım ve hayvancılık, toplumsal yapılanma, sanat, mimari ve zanaat belirgin bir şekilde bu dönemde ortaya çıkmıştır. Bu araştırmanın amacı, Anadolu’da Neolitik Dönemde yapılan seramik figürinlerin saptanarak plastik değerleriyle incelenmesidir. Böylece seramik figürinler yapılma ve kullanılma amaçların yanı sıra biçimsel değerleriyle de incelenmiş olacaktır. Tez kapsamında Neolitik dönem seramik figürin geleneğinde önemli etkileri olan Ana Tanrıça Kültü araştırılmış ve 72 adet seramik figürinin incelenmiştir. Araştırmanın bir diğer amacı da; Anadolu seramiğindeki Neolitik figürinlerin sahip oldukları biçimsel ve kavramsal değerleri eklektik olarak yorumlamaktır. Sanayi Devrimi sonrasında yenilik ve özgünlük arayışına giren sanatçılar sanat dışı nesneler, geçmiş kültürler, farklı disiplinler ve yeni teknikler ile eklektik bir bakış açısı geliştirmişlerdir. Felsefi temellere sahip eklektik eğilim sanat alanında eklektizm olarak adlandırılmıştır. Neolitik döneme ait seramik figürinler ile eklektizm arasındaki bağlantı kişisel seramik uygulamaları ve ilgili manifesto ile tez kapsamında gerçekleştirilmiştir. Araştırmanın sonucunda Anadolu’da Neolitik döneme ait seramik figürinlerin özellikleri maddeler halinde açıklanmış ve bu özellikler ile yapılan eklektik yorumların çağdaş seramik sanatına sağlayabileceği katkılar aktarılmıştır.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Anadolu, Neolitik çağ, Figürin, Eklektik, Eklektizm.

The ancient Greek polis was much more than a central city controlling adjacent hinterland. It was a way of life with strong face-to-face interactions among its members, along with high levels of engagement by citizens across military, political, religious and cultural affairs. As such, it set the preconditions that allowed some of these states to evolve into democracies with a widening segment of the male population gaining more political rights. In Athens, in particular, this included engagement in political deliberation, jury duty and office-holding, as well as mass participation in festivals, sporting and theatrical events. However, the ancient city-state was never fully inclusive, and tensions between aristocratic and democratic forces often led to civil conflict and even civil war. Nonetheless, the modern understanding of political participation and citizenship had its first and most direct iteration in these early Greek city-states, which were unique experiments with enduring legacies.

Patagonia was the last region of the Americas reached by humans who entered the continent from Siberia ∼15,000-20,000 y ago. Despite recent genomic approaches to reconstruct the continental evolutionary history, regional characterization of ancient and modern genomes remains understudied. Exploring the genomic diversity within Patagonia is not just a valuable strategy to gain a better understanding of the history and diversification of human populations in the southernmost tip of the Americas, but it would also improve the representation of Native American diversity in global databases of human variation. Here, we present genome data from four modern populations from Central Southern Chile and Patagonia ( = 61) and four ancient maritime individuals from Patagonia (∼1,000 y old). Both the modern and ancient individuals studied in this work have a greater genetic affinity with other modern Native Americans than to any non-American population, showing within South America a clear struc...

Cases of sexual reassignment in Greco-Roman antiquity, presenting as a pubertal female to male gender transformation, are described in the "classical"literature. Textual evidence concerning a case of androgynism, garnered by Diodorus Siculus, among other similar accounts, as an odd story of gender dispute in a court of justice, is provided in the present study. A medical interpretation of the data pertaining to this case has been attempted and is herein reported. The spontaneous virilization and post-pubertal gender inversion of the specific individual appears to have been caused by a defect either in 5α-reductase type 2 or in 17β hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase genes and consequent deficient enzymatic activity.

Author: Colin Gauld
Publisher: CBE International

This article explores the way Paul sensitively responded to and negotiated the culture of his time. It will be argued that Paul’s prescriptions, in these two passages at least, should be seen as context-dependent applications of Christian principles and, as a result, are not necessarily binding in twenty-first–century homes and churches. Rather, Paul’s negotiating strategies invite us to consider how we too can carefully work our way through our cultural boundaries in the interests of the message of the gospel.

In this article material objects related to sanctuaries are considered in
relation to two main frameworks, namely their spatiality and their perceived
ownership. Land and terrain as locus for more fixed sacredness
provides a starting point to elaborate less fixed sacredness of movable
items which often were profitable also in profane commercial terms.
Changes and fluctuation in the perception of sacredness of such objects
is connected with the changes in the ownership of them and with the
spatial location they were kept or deposited. Material, such as meat and
hides from sacrificial rituals, (hierothyta) was often further sold or used in
the production of utensils, and in such cases the original sacredness was
recognised in a higher esteem of the quality. It is argued that since sacred
was not rendered as a polar opposite to profane and whereas consecration
was a central principle and ritual act in Greek antiquity it did not
manifest in an opposite of ritual of desecration.