Early Humanities

Located on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock was constructed at the end of the seventh century by order of caliph ‘Abd al-Malik. This seminal structure has been much studied but no definitive interpretation yet exists of the meanings conveyed by the Dome at the time of its completion. This book concentrates on the most important surviving primary text, the long mosaic inscription running around the interior. Comprising a dedication and date (72/691-92) and material of a religious nature, the mosaic inscription provides vital evidence for the reconstruction of the meanings and functions of the Dome of the Rock. The detailed study of the mosaics helps to place them in the context of Late Antique monumental writing, particularly in Greek.

Spanning centuries and the vastness of the Roman Empire, The Last Statues of Antiquity is the first comprehensive survey of Roman honorific statues in the public realm in Late Antiquity. Adopting a detailed comparative approach, the collection explores variation between different regions-including North Africa, Asia Minor, and the Near East-as well as individual cities, such as Aphrodisias, Athens, Constantinople, and Rome.

Housed in the Hermitage Museum along with other institutes, libraries, and museums in Russia and the republics of the former Soviet Union are some of the most magnificent treasures of Persian Art. For the most part, many of these works have been lost, but have been catalogued and published here for the first time with an unsurpassed selection of colour plates. The authors have broadly documented the major developments of Persian Art from the first signs of civilization on the plains of Iran around the 10th century BCE through the early 20th century.

This book examines the rich corpus of mosaics created in Crete during the Roman and Late Antique eras. It provides essential information on the style, iconography and chronology of the material, as well as discussion of the craftspeople who created them and the technologies they used. The contextualized mosaic evidence also reveals a new understanding of Roman and Late Antique Crete. It helps shed light on the processes by which Crete became part of the Roman Empire, its subsequent Christianization and the pivotal role the island played in the Mediterranean network of societies during these periods.

The Yoruba was one of the most important civilizations of sub-Saharan Africa. While the high quality and range of its artistic and material production have long been recognized, the art of the Yoruba has been judged primarily according to the standards and principles of Western aesthetics. In this book, which merges the methods of art history, archaeology, and anthropology, Rowland Abiodun offers new insights into Yoruba art and material culture by examining them within the context of the civilization's cultural norms and values and, above all, the Yoruba language. Abiodun draws on his fluency and prodigious knowledge of Yoruba culture and language to dramatically enrich our understanding of Yoruba civilization and its arts.

Through the use of images, diagrams, and detailed descriptions, this book enables readers to appreciate how the construction, design, and function of famous structures inform our understanding of societies of the past. Buildings and Landmarks of Medieval Europe: The Middle Ages Revealed makes use of significant buildings as representative structures to provide insight into specific cultures, historical periods, or topics of the Middle Ages.

Byron and Hitler were equally entranced by Rome's most famous monument, the Colosseum. Mid-Victorians admired the hundreds of varieties of flowers in its crannies and occasionally shuddered at its reputation for contagion, danger, and sexual temptation. Today it is the highlight of a tour of Italy for more than three million visitors a year, a concert arena for the likes of Paul McCartney, and a national symbol of opposition to the death penalty. Its ancient history is chock full of romantic but erroneous myths. There is no evidence that any gladiator ever said “Hail Caesar, those about to die…” and we know of not one single Christian martyr who met his finish here.Yet the reality is much stranger than the legend as the authors, two prominent classical historians, explain in this absorbing account.

In this landmark survey, distinguished art historian Robert Ousterhout introduces readers to the rich and diverse architectural traditions of the medieval Eastern Mediterranean. The focus of the book is the Byzantine (or East Roman) Empire (324-1453 CE), with its capital in Constantinople, although the framework expands chronologically to include the foundations of Christian architecture in Late Antiquity and the legacy of Byzantine culture after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Geographically broad as well, this study includes architectural developments in areas of Italy, the Caucasus, the Near East, the Balkans, and Russia, as well as related developments in early Islamic architecture.

This is a comprehensive study of the surviving monuments of the Qarakhanids – an important yet little-known medieval dynasty that ruled much of Central Asia between the late 10th and early 13th centuries. Based on extensive fieldwork and many hard-to-find Russian sources, the book places the surviving monuments into the wider cultural context of the region. Many photographs and new ground-plans are included, as well as detailed studies of individual monuments and the wider architectural aesthetic.

An authoritative account by preeminent Egyptologist Miroslav Verner covering over 70 of Egypt's and Sudan's pyramids, their historical and political significance, updated in a magnificent new edition. Lucidly written, with 300 illustrations, and filled with gripping insights, this comprehensive study illuminates an era that is both millennia away and vividly immediate.

What are the origins of the imagery and designs on common jewelry and portable artwork between late antiquity and the Middle Ages? These dynamic centuries encompass the transformation of the Greco-Roman world into the nascent kingdoms and medieval states upon which most modern European nations are based. This new study assists in identifying the types, origins and routes of transmission of personal artwork, particularly finger rings, across Europe and Byzantium, an area of study that has been neglected in previous works. Some of this material represents the first time relevant research from Central and Eastern Europe has been translated and made available to the general reader in the English-speaking world.

Objects of adornment have been a subject of archaeological, historical, and ethnographic study for well over a century. Within archaeology, personal ornaments have traditionally been viewed as decorative embellishments associated with status and wealth, materializations of power relations and social strategies, or markers of underlying social categories such as those related to gender, class, and ethnic affiliation. Providing case studies spanning 10 countries, three continents, and more than 9,000 years of human history, the authors demonstrate the myriad and dynamic ways personal ornaments were intertwined with embodied practice and identity performativity, the creation and remaking of social memories, and relational collections of persons, materials, and practices in the past.

Beads, bracelets, necklaces, pendants and many other ornaments are familiar objects that play a fundamental role in personal expression and communication. This book considers how and why the human relationship with ornaments developed and continued over tens of thousands of years, from hunter-gatherer life in the cave to urban elites, from expedient use of natural resources to complex technologies.

Viking Identities is the first detailed archaeological study of Viking-Age Scandinavian-style female dress items from England. Based on primary archival and archaeological research, including the analysis of hundreds of recent metal-detector finds, it presents evidence for over 500 brooches and pendants worn by women in the late ninth and tenth centuries. Jane F. Kershaw argues that these finds add an entirely new dimension to the limited existing archaeological evidence for Scandinavian activity in the British Isles and make possible a substantial reassessment of the Viking settlements. Kershaw offers an interpretation of the significance of the jewellery in a broader, historical context.

John Arthur Smith presents the first full-length study of music among the ancient Israelites, the ancient Jews and the early Christians in the Mediterranean lands during the period from 1000 BCE to 400 CE. He considers the physical, religious and social setting of the music, and how the music was performed. The extent to which early Christian music may have retained elements of the musical tradition of Judaism is also considered. The book serves as a reliable introduction as well as being an invaluable guide through one of the most complex periods of music history.

The oral factor in Chinese literature, although critically important, has been largely neglected in the scholarship of the last generation. In this study, one of the leading specialists in classical Chinese literature introduces readers to a repertoire of seventy-seven songs and ballads of early imperial China. Each song-text is newly translated and fully annotated and explicated.

This volume presents a collection of the Faroese ballads about the Völsung hero Sjúrður, the pre-eminent dragon-slaying hero of the Germanic Middle Ages, in English translation accompanied by the Faroese original. The ballads show that far from being culturally isolated, the Faroe Islands were an integral part of the Germanic storytelling tradition in the Middle Ages and later. The in-depth introduction explores the Faroese storytelling tradition as preserved in the ballads, which are still danced and performed today, and highlights the vibrancy of the tradition in contemporary culture. The publication and research history of the Faroese ballads is outlined, and summaries of each ballad are provided.

This innovative textbook for learning classical Chinese poetry moves beyond the traditional anthology of poems translated into English and instead brings readers—including those with no knowledge of Chinese—as close as possible to the texture of the poems in their original language. Each chapter begins with an overview of the historical context for the poetry of a particular period and provides a brief biography for each poet. Each of the poems appears in the original Chinese with a word-by-word translation, followed by Michael A. Fuller's unadorned translation, and a more polished version by modern translators. A

Make We Merry More and Less is a comprehensive anthology of popular medieval literature from the twelfth century onwards. Uniquely, the book is divided by genre, allowing readers to make connections between texts usually presented individually. This anthology offers a fruitful exploration of the boundary between literary and popular culture, and showcases an impressive breadth of literature, including songs, drama, and ballads. Familiar texts such as the visions of Margery Kempe and the Paston family letters are featured alongside lesser-known works, often oral.

The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy marks the first comprehensive introduction to and reference work for the unified study of ancient comedy. From the birth of comedy in Greece to its end in Rome, from the Hellenistic diffusion of performances after the death of Menander to its artistic, scholarly, and literary receptions in the later Roman Empire, no topic is neglected. 41 essays spread across Greek Comedy, Roman Comedy, and the transmission and reception of Ancient comedy by an international team of experts offer cutting-edge guides through the immense terrain of the field, while an expert introduction surveys the major trends and shifts in scholarly study of comedy from the 1960s to today.

In this restructured and greatly expanded version of Burton Raffel's out-of-print classic, Poems from the Old English, Raffel and co-editor Alexandra H. Olsen place the oldest English writings in an entirely different perspective. A general introduction provides an up-to-date and detailed historical account of the Anglo-Saxon period, and concise introductions open the literature sections of the book and many of the translations. Raffel's masterly translations of Old English poetry, praised as fine poems in their own right, reproduce much of the flavor as well as the sense of the originals. With more than 1800 newly translated lines and many revised older translations, the poems in this volume are organized into four genres—elegies, heroic poems, religious poems, and wisdom poetry.

Unique among the Icelandic sagas, part-history, part-fiction, the Saga of the Jómsvikings tells of a legendary band of vikings, originally Danish, who established an island fortress of the Baltic coast, launched and ultimately lost their heroic attack on the pagan ruler of Norway in the late tenth century. The saga's account of their stringent warrior code, fatalistic adherence to their own reckless vows and declarations of extreme courage as they face execution articulates a remarkable account of what it meant to be a viking. This translation presents the longest and earliest text of the saga, never before published in English, with a full literary and historical introduction to this remarkable work.

The Tales of the Heike is one of the most influential works in Japanese literature and culture, remaining even today a crucial source for fiction, drama, and popular media. Originally written in the mid-thirteenth century, it features a cast of vivid characters and chronicles the epic Genpei war, a civil conflict that marked the end of the power of the Heike and changed the course of Japanese history. The Tales of the Heike focuses on the lives of both the samurai warriors who fought for two powerful twelfth-century Japanese clans-the Heike (Taira) and the Genji (Minamoto)-and the women with whom they were intimately connected.