Introduction: more than sports—the politics of the Olympics from the ancient times to Paris 2024

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Interpreting Magic and Divination in the Ancient Near East and Magic and Divination in Ancient Israel

Did the ancient Greeks and Romans use psychoactive cannabis? Scholars say that hemp was commonplace in the ancient world, but there is no consensus on cannabis usage. According to botany, hemp and cannabis are the same plant and thus the ancient Greeks and Romans must have used it in their daily lives. Cultures parallel to the ancient Greeks and Romans, like the Egyptians, Scythians, and Hittites, were known to use cannabis in their medicine, religion and recreational practices. Cannabis in the Ancient Greek and Roman World surveys the primary references to cannabis in ancient Greek and Roman texts and covers emerging scholarship about the plant in the ancient world. Ancient Greek and Latin medical texts from the Roman Empire contain the most mentions of the plant, where it served as an effective ingredient in ancient pharmacy. Cannabis in the Ancient Greek and Roman World focuses on the ancient rationale behind cannabis and how they understood the plant’s properties and effects, as well as its different applications. For the first time ever, this book provides a sourcebook with the original ancient Greek and Latin, along with translations, of all references to psychoactive cannabis in the Greek and Roman world. It covers the archaeology of cannabis in the ancient world, including amazing discoveries from Scythian burial sites, ancient proto-Zoroastrian fire temples, Bronze Age Chinese burial sites, as well as evidence in Greece and Rome. Beyond cannabis, Cannabis in the Ancient Greek and Roman World also explores ancient views on medicine, pharmacy, and intoxication.

It’s a question we have always been asking: what was life like in the ancient world? But just as interesting and important is a slightly different one: how have we, over the past centuries, chosen to examine and answer that question? This lecture will focus on the changing attitudes to telling the story of the ancient past, and particularly the weird and wonderful world of ancient Greece. It will investigate the questions we have asked, the ways in which we have gone about answering them, and the resulting pictures of life in the ancient Greek world that we have created, from the first characterizations of ancient Greece by the Romans to the latest cutting-edge 21st century scholarship. In a year when the Olympics come to Britain, and our minds turn inescapably towards the connection between the ancient Greek world and our own, there is no more important time to think about just how we know what life was like in the ancient world. By telling such a story, and by demonstrating how we are always implicated in creating the picture of our past, this lecture will argue that the question ‘what was life like in the ancient world’ tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the ancients.

Magic in the Ancient Greek World

The domestic population has paid increasing attention to ancient Chinese history and culture with the continuous improvement of people’s living standards, the rapid economic growth, and the rapid advancement of information science and technology. The use of information technology has been proven to promote the spread and development of historical culture, and it is becoming a necessary means to promote our traditional culture. This paper will build a knowledge graph of ancient Chinese history and culture in order to facilitate the public to more quickly and accurately understand the relevant knowledge of ancient Chinese history and culture. The construction process is as follows: firstly, use crawler technology to obtain text and table data related to ancient history and culture on Baidu Encyclopedia (similar to Wikipedia) and ancient Chinese history and culture related pages. Among them, the crawler technology crawls the semi-structured data in the information box (InfoBox) in the Baidu Encyclopedia to directly construct the triples required for the knowledge graph, crawls the introductory text information of the entries in Baidu Encyclopedia, and specialized historical and cultural websites (history Chunqiu.com, On History.com) to extract unstructured entities and relationships. Secondly, entity recognition and relationship extraction are performed on an unstructured text. The entity recognition part uses the Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory-Convolutional Neural Networks-Conditions Random Field (BiLSTM-CNN-CRF) model for entity extraction. The relationship extraction between entities is performed by using the open source tool DeepKE (information extraction tool with language recognition ability developed by Zhejiang University) to extract the relationships between entities. After obtaining the entity and the relationship between the entities, supplement it with the triple data that were constructed from the semi-structured data in the existing knowledge base and Baidu Encyclopedia information box. Subsequently, the ontology construction and the quality evaluation of the entire constructed knowledge graph are performed to form the final knowledge graph of ancient Chinese history and culture.

Reviewed by: Drawing down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World by Radcliffe G. Edmonds III David B. Levy Radcliffe G. Edmonds III. Drawing down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 474. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-6911-5693-4. Publishers are invited to submit new books to be reviewed to Professor Michael Arnush, Skidmore College, 815 N. Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866; email: marnush@skidmore.edu. This is a fresh approach and welcome comprehensive account of phenomena of magic in ancient Greece and Rome. It will undoubtedly become a benchmark in the field of ancient magic scholarship alongside the studies by David Frankfurter (Guide to the Study of Ancient Magic, 2019), Lindsay Watson (Magic in Ancient Greece and Rome, 2019), Fritz Graf (Magic in the Ancient World, 1997), Georg Luck (Arcana Mundi: Sources, 1985), Daniel Ogden (Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts, 2002), and Christopher Faraone and Dirk Obbink (Magika Hiera, 1991). Edmonds analyzes from nearly a millennium, from fifth century ce in ancient Greece to the fourth century bce. He also investigates a range of Mediterranean cultures, including Egypt and the Near East, and how the formation of magical practices differed across these cultures through time and geographic space. The book contains eight thematic chapters that are sandwiched by book-ends, including two theoretical introductions and a conclusion. The meat of the book explores a variety of genres, drawing upon literary sources and material culture. Edmonds examines images of witches, ghosts, and demons, as well as powers of metamorphosis, erotic attraction, reversals and alterations of nature. Ancient tablets, spell books, bindings and curses, love charms, healing potions, amulets, and talismans constitute the kinds of evidence treated. Twenty-one figures and eight colored plates testify to the material aspect of emic ritual practices. The theoretical introductions define magic in the ancient Greco-Roman world, differentiating between a non-normative or emic approach, and a normative or etic approach to ritual discourse. This is a question of whether magic should be viewed from the perspective of an insider-practitioner, who has often undergone initiation into mystery cults, versus an outsider scholarly analyst with objective criteria. The practitioner believes in the efficacy of enchantment and incantation to spellbind, while the academic views it as a sociological phenomenon as does P. Bourdieu (Revue francaise de sociologie, 12, [1972], 295–334). For example, Vergil as a literary artist seems to view the magical arts to encapsulate this power as when he writes carmina vel caelo possunt deducere Lunam (“incantations have the power to draw the moon down from the sky,” Ecl 8.69). Normative implies institutions related to religion, medicine, healing, and ritual that carry the authority of what Foucault calls power-knowledge regimes that socially sanction legitimacy. For Edmonds, magic is non-normative in emic terms. That is to say, with Durkheim, it is often anti-socially practiced by those at the margins of society who have been excluded from institutional power. While institutions rely on compliance that is submissive and supplicatory, magic often works outside the conventional social systems. Edmonds adopts criteria (efficacy, aims, social location, style of performance) which provide a litmus test for whether a magical act operates within the language discourse, a parlance web of magic terminology that often operates by symbolic encryptions of esoteric [End Page 355] keyed communication—what Malinowski calls obtaining to a “coefficient of weirdness.” Edmonds helps the reader better understand how certain practices, images, and ideas were labeled as magic and were set apart from normative practices, thereby shedding light on the shifting variable process of ancient normal religion in different ways by different groups. In this way, Edmonds is better able to attempt to define and conceptualize magic—its origins, nature, and functions. The eight illuminating and substantive chapters deal thematically with genres of magic. Chapter 3 is on defixiones or cursing malefic magic. Chapter 4 treats love charms and erotic magic. Chapter 5 considers protective magic as a defense against the dark arts. Chapter 6 considers prayer magic. Chapter 7 looks at some varieties of divination sometimes facilitated by necromancy. Chapter 8 contemplates astrology and its uses. Chapter 9 turns itself...

: What utility does ancient military history have for the development of modern theories of warfare? This monograph discusses the development of warfare theory from ancient history by examining the theories and writings of United States Air Force Colonel (retired) John Boyd. Ancient history is useful for developing modern military theories of war. Ancient history played a significant role in the development of Colonel Boyd's theories on maneuver warfare. The abstract concepts he synthesized provide valuable instruction to modern operational artists on how to use ancient history in the development of their own theories and doctrine. Boyd arrived at the past with his theories in mind and then went searching for proof. He effectively linked concepts from the Battle of Cannae and the Mongol invasion of Europe. From these historical examples, Boyd shows how maneuver and moral warfare developed, and how inferior forces used these styles of warfare to defeat superior opponents.

FROGS AROUND THE POND SYLLECTA CLASSICA 14 (2003): iii–xi PREFACE In March, 2000, the Classical Association of the Canadian West and the Classical Association of the Pacific Northwest met in Victoria, British Columbia, for a thematic conference on cultural diversity in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. In this volume, we have collected the keynote speech by Sarah Morris and ten papers chosen from the eighty presented at the conference. We selected these papers to reflect the enormous chronological and geographic span of the history of cultural interactions around the Mediterranean, and also as a sampling of the variety of critical approaches useful to their study. Our own era can learn much from the study of cultural interaction in the ancient Mediterranean, even though the cultures that produced the texts, artwork, and archeological evidence examined here flourished three millennia and more ago. We live in a shrinking world; contact with other cultures, through travel, trade, and communication, is a constant feature in our lives. The challenges of living in a world in which cultures, globally and within each community, necessarily and constantly interact may seem to us a product of modern technology. But in fact, ancient Mediterranean cultures likewise faced the challenges of living in a small and crowded world, cheek by jowl with other peoples, each group another’s “foreigners.” The study of how these ancient cultures interacted, negotiated their boundaries and differences, dealt with their inevitable conflicts, influenced one another and dealt with those influences, and saw and constructed each other in their own discourse, provides us with an illuminating perspective on these questions as we engage them ourselves. We hope this volume will provide a useful tool for those interested both in the study of cultural interaction in the ancient world and the lessons our own can derive from these ancient exempla. iv SYLLECTA CLASSICA 14 (2003) As editors, we recognize the recent explosion in volumes devoted to the exploration of cultural diversity in the ancient Mediterranean arena.1 We make no claim ourselves to complete coverage: this small contribution to the field presents a disparate selection and no univocal or dogmatic theoretical stance or theme. It is a volume which we expect to repay equally the reader with general or specific interests in the mosaic of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. We derive the title and the introduction for this collection from Sarah Morris’ stimulating and thought-provoking keynote speech, “Frogs around the Pond?” (pp. 1–21). Morris, an archeologist and art historian , interrogates a series of artifacts from the Bronze Age and archaic Greek world which appear to exhibit multi-cultural Mediterranean heritages .These objects combine artistic, mythological, or political elements from Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt, and North Africa. Although they are the most distant chronologically, these artifacts evoke issues of relevance to considerations of inter-cultural exchange throughout the ancient world and in our time; John Kearns’ comparison of linguistic interpenetration and eventual loss in Asia Minor with the loss of the native Hawaiian dialect in the face of the expansion of Western culture explicitly makes these historical connections. Morris does not offer us a simplistic, conclusory reading of the three artefacts which she evokes, but poses questions and allows that the discovery of “mixed origins, multi-directional influences, and constant exchange” in much of the Mediterranean “deeply complicates our analyses.” She also warns us against the practice of Hellenocentrism, which may blind us to the importance of other cultures around the Mediterranean in the creation of artefacts. In the case of the statue of Artemis at Ephesus, which scholars have regularly described as strange to Hellenic culture, Morris challenges our notions of what might have seemed alien to Greeks themselves. Morris also addresses the role of the profession of Classics in understanding how ancient cultures experienced their “proximity and intimacy .”The approach in her key-note speech employs an informed crossdisciplinarity , encouraging young scholars not to become inured against the solid contributions which linguistics or history can make to an archaeological argument. She concludes with a discussion of the challenges of teaching the classical world from a cross-cultural perspective. 1 Clarke; Cohen; Dougherty; Goldhill; Gruen; E. Hall; J. Hall; Huskinson...

"Thomas, Prof. Rosalind, (born 1 Oct. 1959), Professor of Ancient Greek History, University of Oxford, since 2011; Fellow in Ancient History, Balliol College, Oxford, since 2004" published on by Oxford University Press.

The maintenance and restoration of monuments is not a new concept, it has been known since the ancient times when man got to know the value and importance of such, which led him to protect and preserve them. The motives behind restoration of monuments; religious, cultural or social ones, varied according to the age and the human culture, but the ultimate goal has always been protecting the monuments from damage and preventing them from extinction. The ancient Egyptian knew monument maintenance and restoration; King Khaemwaset, son of King Ramesses II, was famous for restoring the monuments of his ancestors. After the age of the Pharaohs, Greek and Roman kings attached importance to maintaining and restoring their religious facilities and its murals, the Karnak Temple is a clear evidence of this. This in-depth research tackles methods and techniques of maintaining and restoring sculpture for cultural and religious motives aiming at preserving history and its social implication as well as the national identity in the face of new intellectual and cultural currents that seek eradicating the people's culture and identity. The research gives two examples of maintained and restored monuments in ancient and modern time in Egypt; Sphinx and the Karnak Temples. Research problem: The research problem lies in observing the diversity of the main motives for maintaining and restoring artistic monuments in ancient and modern times in Egypt, despite the fact that the purpose has always been protecting the monument and maintaining it in good conditions. These questions then arise; Do the distinct motives for maintaining and restoring monuments in Egypt during different ages affect the restoration methods and techniques? Do restorations operations on monuments help preserve peoples’ identity and nationalism against new cultural currents? Research objective: The research aims at highlighting the importance of maintenance and restoration operations in ancient and modern times to preserve the national heritage through generations. It also sheds a light on the modern restoration methods that adapt the latest scientific techniques and underlines the importance of the motives that led to the emergence of the restoration science. Research methodology: Historical comparative and analytical approach. Conclusions: The researcher concluded that: Unsuitable restoration materials for stones were wrongly used in the past; this was recently avoided by applying modern scientific methods and techniques. Artistic and aesthetic values of the monument are tightly attached to the historical ones of such, even if this requires replacing the missing parts of the monument, so long as it do not hinder its authenticity, taking into consideration the peculiarity of the elements and that of the added parts.

In Death Not Divided: Gender, Family, and State on Classical Athenian Grave Stelae

Intoxication in the Ancient Greek and Roman World considers the psychotropic plants used in the ancient world and ancient attitudes towards intoxication. Alan Sumler surveys primary Greek and Roman sources for noteworthy mentions of ancient intoxicants like hellebore, mandrake, deadly nightshade, thorn apple, opium poppy, cannabis, wine, and other substances and reveals how psychoactive drugs were used in ancient Greek and Roman religion, medicine, magic, artistic inspiration, and recreation. Interpreted through the lens of modern-day scholarship from Classics, philosophy, and ethnobotany, the primary sources illuminate how commonplace psychotropic plants and drugs were in the ancient Greek and Roman world and—given different contexts for psychotropic drug usage—what attitudes these societies held about the appropriateness of intoxication.

This chapter explores some methodological questions concerning the study of poverty in the ancient Greek world by using debt and debt bondage as a means for theoretical reflection. It examines questions relating to evidence survival and the conceptualisation and characterisation of poverty, particularly in contexts of debt, before exploring the different forms of debt bondage that are attested in the ancient world, how they overlapped with slavery and the slave trade across time and space, and how they created systems of dependency that structure social and economic relations. By using debt and debt bondage as a lens through which to explore ancient Greek poverty, this chapter raises a number of theoretical and methodological issues inherent within the study of subaltern groups, explores the relationships between social structures and historical agency, and suggests that historians think more carefully about the gendered implications of debt bondage in the ancient Greek world.

This article serves as introduction to a special double issue of the journal, comprised of seven articles that center on the theme of space and place in the ancient world. The essays examine the ways in which borders, frontiers, and the lands beyond them were created, defined, and maintained in the ancient world. They consider such themes within the context of the Old Assyrian period, the Hittite empire, and the Neo-Assyrian empire, as well as within the broader scope of Biblical texts and the Graeco-Roman world. As we only see evidence of a documented, physical, and thus fixed map in the later stages of Mesopotamian history, the ancient world primarily conceived of space through mental maps rather than physical ones. Thus, while the societies of the ancient Near East integrated knowledge gained by actual contact with distant lands into their world view, it was also informed by the literary conceptions of those same spaces. These mental maps were unsurprisingly prone to shifting over time, changing as the social conceptions of the world itself, its border and frontiers, the lands that lay beyond them and how those places might be defined, also changed. These papers question the intersection of concrete and fantastical, or real and imagined, that existed in both the ancient and pre-modern world, where distant locations become elaborately embroidered by fantastical constructions, despite the concrete connections of travel, trade, and even military enterprise.

This article builds on the work of David F. Watson, who has recently argued that major features of Mark's so-called messianic secret should not be understood in terms of at all, but rather should be understood in terms of intentional resistance to honor. While I agree with Watsons evaluation of the (as intentional resistance to honor), I find Watsons claim that the Markan evangelist inverts standard honor/shame conventions to be unsatisfactory. The article explores alternative explanations for the Markan Jesus' resistance to honor and proposes that a possible explanation might be found in Roman political ideology. While examples of resisting achieved and proscribed honor are few and far between in the ancient Mediterranean world, they are frequently found in the lives of first-century Roman emperors, particular emperors who were remembered favorably. I propose that this Roman political background might be a useful way forward in understanding Jesus' resistance to honor in Mark's Gospel. To support this argument, three spheres of evidence are considered: (1) the clear presentation in Mark's Gospel of Jesus as a world ruler; (2) the strong possibility of a Roman provenance for Mark; and (3) numerous features in Mark's Gospel suggesting that it is challenging Roman imperial power.(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)Just over a century ago, William Wrede left an indelible mark on the field of NT studies when he demonstrated the presence of a distinct secrecy motif in Mark's Gospel. Yet a century of scholarship has not produced a consensus regarding the motif's meaning and significance. In his recent monograph, Honor among Christians: The Cultural Key to the Messianic Secret, David F. Watson has taken a decisive step forward, a step I attempt to build on here.1 While Watson rightfully reads the text in light of the first-century honor/shame value system, I believe his reading only partially resolves the conundrum of Mark's secrecy motif. This article complements Watson's work by adding a political dimension to his insights. In particular, Jesus' actions will be viewed through the lens of Roman political ideology and will be compared to the actions of Roman emperors. The results will be combined with Watson's insights on the Markan secrecy motif in an attempt to explain the motif's significance for Mark's first-century readers.I. David F. Watson: Honor or Secrecy?Watson uses the tools of social-scientific criticism to explore the meaning of secrecy in the ancient Mediterranean world as well as in the Markan pericopes that are so often associated with secrecy in modern scholarship. Regarding the former, he argues that the language and function of secrecy are virtually absent in Mark's Gospel. Words closely associated with secrecy (particularly in religious texts) such as ... and (... are rare or absent in Mark.2 In fact, Watson demonstrates that in the whole of Mark's Gospel, the language of secrecy occurs only four times, three of which come in two verses of ch. 4. Watson demonstrates that secrecy functioned in three primary ways in the ancient world: to protect from danger, to preserve community boundaries, and to defend an individual's or a group's reputation. According to Watson, none of these prominent functions of secrecy stands out in Mark's Gospel. Ultimately, Watson concludes that what is often described as a motif in Mark is misleading and that the intended readers of the Gospel would not have understood the pericopes that form such a motif in terms of secrecy.But if Mark's readers would not understand these pericopes in terms of secrecy how would they understand them? Watson proposes that these pericopes must be understood in light of the honor/shame value system that dominated the ancient Mediterranean world.3 He first considers pericopes in which Jesus performs a healing and commands the recipient not to report or speak of the healing (Mark 1:40-45; 5:21-24, 35-43; 7:31-37; 8:22-26). …