Late Antiquity Research Articles

«Ipse Perspicis Scilicet»: The Relation between Army and Religion in Constantinian Propaganda

This study aims to explore the connection between religious and military spheres in Constantinian propaganda. The extensive use of propaganda and the notorious public discourse which involves the dynamics of power during Late Antiquity show how religion and the military played a key role. This principle reaches a singular meaning in the case of emperor Constantine I. To this extent, this paper considers several kinds of sources, which include legal, literary, and numismatic, among others. An analysis of the political uses of imperial constitutions by the emperor (especially CTh 7.20.2) can be of particular interest in order to address the ideas of self-representation and the politics of legitimation. Ultimately, the paper highlights the importance of imperial propaganda in Later Roman society, as well as the transformations in Constantine’s public discourse, where the connection between army and religion shows an evolution from the previous ways of understanding imperial power and where the bond of the ruler with a supreme divinity is a central issue.

The Apostles Peter, Paul, John, Thomas and Philip with their companions in late antiquity. Edited by Tobias Nicklas, Janet E. Spittler and Jan N. Bremmer. (Studies in Early Christian Apocrypha, 17.) Pp. xiv + 340 incl. 7 colour and black-and-white ills and 2 tables. Leuven: Peeters, 2021. €74 (paper). 978 90 429 4553 1

The Apostles Peter, Paul, John, Thomas and Philip with their companions in late antiquity. Edited by Tobias Nicklas, Janet E. Spittler and Jan N. Bremmer. (Studies in Early Christian Apocrypha, 17.) Pp. xiv + 340 incl. 7 colour and black-and-white ills and 2 tables. Leuven: Peeters, 2021. €74 (paper). 978 90 429 4553 1 - Volume 74 Issue 2

Sacred Shivering

Two tenth-century Byzantine ivories depict the freezing trial of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste with an unprecedented physical immediacy. If, in late antiquity, the convention was to depict martyrs in states of disassociation from suffering, these ivories capture their passion as an anguished, psychosomatic experience. This essay proffers new evidence to account for this shift. It demonstrates that the martyrs’ shivering posed a dual meaning previously unrecognized by medievalists, namely that the condition could be, in addition to a literal reaction to the cold, also an expression of spiritual dread and divine alienation. In the fourth century, Basil of Caesarea first gave therapeutic value to the Forty Martyrs’ voluntary shivering as a means of attaining psychosomatic purification (katharsis) before divine judgment. This essay traces the sacralization of this condition from the fourth to the tenth century. It follows its role in the patristic conversion of ancient medicine to its cultivation in the ritual life of medieval Constantinople. The ivories attest to how objects came to recreate states of co-suffering by establishing orientations of empathic engagement. These ivories occasion a new account of Middle Byzantine art and affect, specifically the cathartic mediation of fear.

Editorial Material in the Babylonian Talmud and Its Sasanian Context

In the study of Jews in late antiquity, scholarship of the past half century has increasingly recognized the significance of the anonymous editors of the Babylonian Talmud. Whereas earlier scholars argued that the Babylonian Talmud was redacted and completed by the last generation or so of the Amoraim, scholars now accept that substantial sections of the anonymous editorial layer(s) postdate the final named Amoraim. However, basic historical questions about these editors and their activities remain unanswered. This paper will offer several case studies that argue that certain anonymous sections in the Talmud refer to known historical events that transpired in the Sasanian Empire in the sixth century, and reveal how the editors were acquainted with, affected by, and participated in broader contemporaneous historical trends.

ON THE LOCALIZATION OF THE LATE ANTIQUITY JEWISH NECROPOLIS NEAR CAPE PAVLOVSKY IN KERCH

The study deals with the discovery of a Late Antiquity necropolis on Cape Pavlovsky in Kerch, the Republic of Crimea. The tombstones and their fragments found in 2020 mark the territory of the ancient necropolis. The main question under discussion is whether the newly identified area of the necropolis belonged to the Jewish community of Panticapaeum or the community of the settlement (fortification) Ak-Burun II of the first centuries AD located to the west of Cape Ak-Burun. 27 Jewish tombstones were found, some of them have survived only in fragments. Twelve tombstones have preserved images of the menorah. Two stones have one of the surfaces carefully processed. Probably, an inscription and images were made on these surfaces with paint. Judging by the studies of the 19th–20th centuries, in the vicinity of cape Ak-Burun there were probably at least two Jewish necropolises: one of them located near Cape Pavlovsky and the other – at the infirmary of the Kerch fortress near Cementnaya Slobodka, where Jewish tombstones were discovered. Based on the analysis of the found tombstones and epitaphs the newly discovered area of the necropolis can be preliminarily dated to the 2nd–4th centuries AD.

Aramaic: A History of the First World Language by Holger Gzella

Reviewed by: Aramaic: A History of the First World Language by Holger Gzella Jessie Degrado holger gzella, Aramaic: A History of the First World Language (trans. Benjamin D. Suchard; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021). Pp. xii + 359. $70. Aramaic: A History of the First World Language is the recent translation with updated bibliography of a volume first published in Dutch in 2017. In the work, Gzella sets himself a monumental task: to present the history of Aramaic over three thousand years without presuming prior knowledge of any Semitic language. Since the work is a popularization of G.'s A Cultural Atlas of Aramaic (HdO 111; Leiden: Brill, 2015), readers with a background in Semitic languages may prefer to consult that volume and, especially, important reviews by Charles Häberl (JAOS 139 [2019] 714–17) and Steven Kaufman ("Notes on A Cultural History of Aramaic" [Aramaic Studies Today, 2017, https://blog.huc.edu/cal/a-culturalhistory-of-aramaic/]). Given the popular focus of the work, this review will focus primarily on its conceptual and historical claims. In chap. 1, G. provides an overview of the history of academic Aramaic studies and some basic features of early Aramaic. In this section, the difficulty of writing a popular history of Aramaic becomes clear: readers with no background in Aramaic will likely struggle to parse the technical details. On the other hand, more experienced readers may be frustrated by the lack of support for several claims, such as the assertion that the lowering of the short vowel i to e obtains in all Aramaic dialects. In fact, the Aramaic name Māti'-'il is consistently written as {ma-ti-' -dingir} (with ti rather than te) in a ninth-century treaty (SAA 2 2), indicating that this phonological process likely postdates Old Aramaic. The next two chapters trace the development and uses of Aramaic in the first millennium b.c.e. Chapter 2 covers the initial phases of the written language, Old Aramaic (OA)—first attested in monumental inscriptions from Syrian kingdoms in the ninth and eighth centuries b.c.e. Chapter 3 outlines the use of Aramaic by first-millennium empires, from its role as a lingua franca in the Neo-Assyrian and Babylonian periods to the development of Imperial Aramaic, a standardized dialect with its own orthographic conventions, employed as the administrative language of the Achaemenid empire. These two chapters highlight an important trend in the history of Aramaic, namely, processes that lead to standardization of dialects in writing. G. gives the impression that this was a highly organized and agentive process, attributable to the reign of a single ruler or even a specific year. For OA, G.'s reconstruction requires sidelining texts that do not adhere to the alleged standardization (Neirab stelae, Deir Alla, and Tell Fekheriye). In addition, Sam'alian, a dialect from Zincirli, is not considered Aramaic (cf. the more recent treatment in Federico Giusfredi and Valerio Pisaniello, "The Population, the Language and the History of Yadiya/Sam'al," in Beyond All Boundaries: Anatolia in the 1st Millennium BC [OBO 295; Leuven: Peeters, 2021] 189–223). In other words, OA appears homogeneous only when all texts attesting to its heterogeneity have been dismissed as anomalous or reclassified as not Aramaic. The next two chapters on Aramaic in late antiquity illustrate the reverse process of linguistic standardization, that is, the movement toward recording the diversity of vernacular speech. G. covers the use of Aramaic in the southern Levant (biblical texts and Qumran), and the development of distinct dialects including Palmyrene, Hatran, and Arascid Aramaic. A substantial portion of chap. 4 is devoted to the assertion that Hebrew was no longer spoken as a vernacular after 400 b.c.e. and had lost all communicative function by the second [End Page 337] century c.e. This requires special pleading, given corpora such as the Bar Kokhba letters and tomb inscriptions from Bet Shearim and Jaffa, which indicate that Hebrew was likely spoken through the second century and used in inscriptions through the fourth century (see Y. Elitzur, "Epigraphic Hebrew: Roman and Byzantine Period," in Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics [ed. Geoffrey Khan; 4 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 2003] 1:843–51). More significantly...

Conquest to Conversion

North Africa (west of Egypt) is a compelling locale to explore how and when a Muslim minority became the Muslim majority. Previous scholarly approaches to medieval religious change rely almost exclusively on much later written sources, and as a result, little is understood about the religious landscape in which believers operated in. This article examines critically the material evidence for mosque construction and church abandonment and proposes certain tipping points in the process by which Islam become the dominant religion. While mosque construction reveals more about state and elite religious investment than the believers who may have used them, other forms of evidence, including funerary evidence, dietary practices and inscribed material culture, occasionally give us an intimate glimpse into the practices of simple believers. The evidence shows that the chronology of religious change differs between those regions under Byzantine rule (eastern Algeria, Tunisia, coastal Libya), and those ruled by Berber chiefdoms in late antiquity. Much of the latter converted in the 8th century, whereas the late 9th century marks the mass conversion of town dwellers from the Byzantine core and a first period of crisis for Christianity. This early conversion was an important factor in the collapse of the caliphate in North Africa and the emergence of successor states that used Islam as the main idiom through which to establish and legitimize their right to rule.

Searching for a Semantic Parallel to the Concept of Depression

Abstract This paper examines whether a semantic parallel to the modern use of the word depression can be identified in ancient Greek. To that end, it retraces the development of the lexical family of the verb θλίβω, ‘to press’, and the abstract noun θλῖψις to gain the emotional and psychological meaning of ‘pressure’ or ‘affliction’. An analysis of the collected data suggests that a similar valence may be found in Hellenistic and Imperial Greek. However, this development is disregarded by authors with greater stylistic ambitions. Even physicians such as Galen continue to use θλῖψις solely in a physical, concrete sense. Conversely, the conceptualization in the singular of the word de-pression is lacking in ancient Greek. An antecedent may be identified in the formation of the prefixed verb καταθλίβω and the derived noun κατάθλιψις, found only from Late Antiquity onward, but this retains a concrete valence.

Spirituality, Illness, and the Bible in Late Antique Gaza

The spiritual implications of illness were a significant interest for monks of late antiquity, whose concerns reflect common experiences in illness and ways of speaking about illness observable yet today. At the root of the many letters from the sixth-century Gazan monastery of Thavatha is a concern about the meaning of illness, not so much a diagnosis of a medical problem as a discernment of how natural and demonic influences intertwine, and how bodily and mental afflictions make sense within the spiritual “progress” of the monk. For Barsanuphius and John, the great old men of Gaza, the Bible offered models to reframe suffering in line with their ascetic spirituality.

Review article: Small futures. sortilege, divination and prognostication in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages

Early Medieval EuropeEarly View Review Article Review article: Small futures. sortilege, divination and prognostication in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages Carine van Rhijn, Carine van Rhijn Utrecht UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Carine van Rhijn, Carine van Rhijn Utrecht UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 20 March 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/emed.12620Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue RelatedInformation

Between the living and the dead: use, reuse, and imitation of painted portraits in Late Antiquity – CORRIGENDUM

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Henrik Ibsen, Emperor Julian, and the crisis of faith in modernity

AbstractAlthough it is one of his lesser known and performed plays, Henrik Ibsen considered Emperor and Galilean to be his Hovedverk—his ‘main’ or ‘pivotal’ work—in which he finally presented his positive worldview. It remains comparatively little studied in scholarship, though one scholar has recently argued that it is the key to unlocking his entire corpus. The present study builds upon past scholarship uncovering the works Ibsen drew upon in writing the play but goes beyond the mere question of its historical sources and accuracy to consider Ibsen’s purpose for including the specific and precise pieces of historical texture he chose in the particular order and configuration he devised. In short, we aim to identify the creative purposes for his curating of the historical details he took from his sources. What emerges from our analysis is that, even when Ibsen is following the sources, his protagonist stands out as a strikingly modern figure, more at home in the nineteenth century than the fourth. Ibsen portrays his Julian struggling with doubt and uncertainty of a distinctly modern caste; he puts in his mouth criticisms of Christianity that stem from modernity rather than the historical figure; and he suggests that, just as Christianity had to prove victorious over paganism in late antiquity, so Christianity itself must be superseded in the modern era, though perhaps some aspects of it are worth preserving in the yet-to-arrive third empire.

Encountering Goddesses in Late Antiquity: Notes on Metamorphoses of Mythic Figures in Religious Storytelling

ABSTRACT: The imagined universe of the people of Late Antiquity was heavily populated by gods. Even the broader philosophical trends and monotheistic foundation of Judaism and Christianity had failed to entirely diminish their power. How then did Jews and Christians cope with such a backdrop presence of “other gods”? Earlier research suggested that Jewish attitudes, which found their way into early Christian sources as well, fluctuate between accommodation and rejection. Following analysis of Jewish and Christian Late Antique literary traditions dealing with gods, and more specifically, goddesses, this article aims to demonstrate that such “fluctuation” resulted – in addition to the extreme positions – in a variety of middle of the road strategies. These strategies point to a keen harmonizing impulse to absorb—via domestication—motifs with mythic religious vitality from the broader cultural repository.

Michael E. Pregill, The Golden Calf between Bible and Qur’an. Scripture, Polemic, and Exegesis from Late Antiquity to Islam

Michael E. Pregill, The Golden Calf between Bible and Qur’an. Scripture, Polemic, and Exegesis from Late Antiquity to Islam

:La villa dopo la villa 2: Trasformazione di un sistema insediativo ed economico nell’Italia centrale tra tarda Antichità e Medioevo

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Grain Mills from the Late Roman Legionary Camp in Palmyra

The Late Antique grain mills from the Roman army camp in Palmyra (Syria) are the first archaeologically documented examples of Roman geared mills in the Levant. Their discovery in the 1980s by the Polish Expedition excavating the Camp of Diocletian provided a body of data that has proved to be of significance for students of both military architecture in Late Antiquity and ancient milling technology. This paper presents the evidence for an advanced type of geared mill and discusses its implications in reference to the existing theoretical reconstruction of the Vitruvian mill.

Historiography and Identity, VI: Competing Narratives of the Past in Central and Eastern Europe, c.1200–c.1600, ed. Pavlína Rychterová with David Kalhous

The book under review is the sixth volume of the Historiography and Identity sub-series published by Brepols as part of the Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages series. Just like the previous volumes, the present one, edited by Pavlína Rychterová, brings together a collection of case-studies focused on the strategies of identification and visions of community as preserved in the local historiographical narratives of the past between c.1200 and c.1600 in ‘Eastern Central Europe’. The seventeen chapters, written by scholars from Czechia, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Germany and Lithuania, focus on selected narrative sources from Eastern Central Europe. Royal, courtly, national, urban and monastic chronicles were chosen for scrutiny, while universal histories have been purposely left out. The editor candidly admits that it was not possible to find suitable scholars to write on some important sources (Johann of Viktring, Chronicon Aulae Regiae, Peter Eschenloer) and, therefore, these works have also been left out of the volume.

Palaeoeconomy and Palaeoenvironment of Halmyris—A Roman Settlement in Southeast Romania: Archaeozoological and Phytolith Evidences

Halmyris (Murighiol, Tulcea County, Romania) is one of the most important Roman settlements located in the inferior sector of the Danube Delta, in the easternmost part of Scythia province during the Late Antiquity. Halmyris was the most easterly fort of the Danubian border in Roman times and probably served as a supply centre for the imperial fleet; Roman inscriptions inform on the existence of a ‘mariner’s village’ named vicus classicorum. Given that the written information about this settlement is extremely incomplete, the study of animal and plant remains can answer important questions related to economic life (e.g., human use of biological resources) and the relationship between community and environment. This study contributes to understanding the process of Roman domination in the area (e.g., highlighting the improved type of cattle, brought and reproduced here by the Romans), as well as to the knowledge of environmental changes under anthropic pressure (e.g., animal extinction, such as aurochs). In 2014, extensive archaeological research took place in the extramural area of the fort. During research, a total area of 234 sqm was investigated through five trenches west–east oriented and perpendicular to vallum II but not intersecting with it. Phytolith samples were taken from the habitation levels dated to the 5th–6th centuries AD, and faunal remains were collected from four trenches dated to the 4th–6th centuries AD. Phytolith assemblages from the Halmyris site are composed mainly of grass phytoliths. We noticed important amounts of Elongate dendritic forms and a high proportion of silica skeletons. Phytolith analysis resulting from the processing of 12 samples shows that cereals were a relevant part of the subsistence economy of the site, revealing an important signal of cereal processing. Flax fibers, which are the strongest natural fibers, were also identified in samples from Halmyris. The exploited animal resources are varied, including molluscs, fish, birds, and mammals. Most of the skeletal remains belong to the group of mammals. Animal husbandry represented an important occupation; the identified domestic mammals are cattle, sheep, goat, pig, horse, donkey, and dog. The predominant species were cattle and sheep/goat, both by the number of identified remains and by the minimal number of individuals. Hunting had small importance for the settlement under study, red deer and wild boar having the highest proportion of wild mammals.

Al-ʿūd, pípá, Lute: An Ancient Greek Perspective on Their Prehistory

Abstract Starting from early Arabic sources, the absolute pitch of the Early Abbasid ʿūd is considered and related to evidence on pitch usage in Roman-period sources. Similar instruments, it is argued, must have existed already in late antiquity. Iconographic evidence takes us back to late Classical Greece, whose music would have provided especially fertile ground for designing such a lute. In contrast to the traditional tuning in fifths and fourths throughout, lutes with equidistant design had also existed for a long time, likely also on precursors of the ʿūd. The association of this style with the name of Manṣūr Zalzal must therefore be reassessed.

From the Editor

From the Editor Sabine R. Huebner This issue was produced in part under the aegis of my predecessor, Professor Andrew Cain, who steered the ship expertly over the past five years, and I cannot thank him enough for his generous and patient introduction to the complex business of being editor-in-chief. I am also delighted to have gathered around me a stellar editorial board that will support this journal in the years ahead. The Journal of Late Antiquity is composed of veteran editors, as well as younger members in our field, whose expertise covers a wide variety of areas, regions, and topics of the discipline. I feel very honored to be following in the footsteps of Ralph W. Mathisen, Noel Lenski, and most recently Andy Cain, and hope to do the journal justice in the years to come. The Journal of Late Antiquity, which has already won several awards in its fifteen-year history, will continue to encourage cutting-edge and interdisciplinary research on all methodological, geographical, and chronological facets of Late Antiquity, defined roughly as the period from ca. 250–800 ad. The entire field of late antique studies will be represented—bridging disciplines and late antique peoples from the late Roman, western European, Byzantine, Sassanid, and early Islamic worlds and their direct exchanges with their respective neighboring peoples and trading partners, without slipping into the arbitrariness of a thematic global setting. This cross-disciplinary cooperation in ancient studies has become a matter of course over the past few decades: from my first days as a student, I myself worked in supra-departmental interdisciplinary research networks that, in addition to the traditional text- and material-based subjects of classical studies—such as ancient history, classical philology, Egyptology, archaeology—had also already included Arabic studies, Jewish studies, art history, ethnology, law, and comparative religious studies. My doctoral studies in the interdisciplinary doctoral program in Jena on "Leitbilder der Spätantike," my postdoctoral work at, amongst other institutions, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW), and currently as head of the Department of Ancient Civilizations at the University of Basel, have shaped my impression of late antique studies in its widest sense. Although appearing small in scope, late antique studies encompasses the cosmos of the university (universitas), pioneering the possibilities of interdisciplinarity and the challenges and opportunities of true consilience. My goal is to further the Journal of Late Antiquity's heartfelt mission of an all-encompassing, multidisciplinary treatment of Late Antiquity in all its multiregional and multilingual facets, while also affording a wide scope to new trends, particularly, collaborative opportunities with the natural sciences. [End Page 1] The range of disciplines working on Late Antiquity has expanded further since the first edition of the Journal of Late Antiquity in 2008. Without exerting influence, as an editor has no control over the nature of submissions, moving forward I would like to see even broader consideration of the so-called palaeosciences—e.g., palaeoclimatology, palaeogenetics, bioarchaeology—as well as digital technologies. These evidentiary pools are increasingly taking up important space in our transdisciplinary dialogue on late antiquity, and are providing new data and fascinating insights into ancient genomes, migrations of peoples, livestock and crops, the spread of infectious diseases, and ancient climatic variability and change, by which some text-focused reasoning has already been upended. I am thrilled that this issue gives consideration to these new methods, such as David Devore's and Scott Kennedy's contribution to the pestilence during the reign of Emperor Maximinus II Daia—arguably not a pandemic, but a regionally-limited epidemic in Syria and adjacent areas—and a review of Kyle Harper's new book Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History. Similarly, I hope for greater consideration of research from countries outside the western-oriented, European-Anglo-American context, as this journal also devotes attention to the history of the Near and Middle East, and North and East Africa. This spring issue of the Journal of Late Antiquity collects eight innovative contributions on multiple regions and aspects of the late antique world. The issue opens with a contribution from Adrastos Omissi on "Hamstrung Horses: Dating Constantine's...