This essay marks the centenary of 1922, annus mirabilis of modernism but also the year when my grandparents became child refugees in the Asia Minor Catastrophe. In Mrs. Dalloway and her Diary, Virg...

The Apostle Paul exercised his ministry in the Roman provinces of Galatia and Asia. An unknown presbyter of the second century wrote the Acts of Paul. An important part of this text consists of the Acts of Paul and Thecla. Although sometimes these Acts circulated as a separate text, they recount the vicissitudes of the virgin Thecla, native of the city of Iconium. The events take place mainly in the cities of Iconium of Licaonia and of Antioch of Pisidia, (...) two neighboring regions in the heart of Anatolia in the Roman province of southern Galatia. The article intends to offer the historical, geographical, linguistic and cultural background of the Acts of Paul and Thecla of the second half of the second century. (shrink)

Asia Minor witnessed a resurgence of construction and renovation activities in the Theodosian age, and in particular in the last twenty years of the 4th and the first twenty years of the 5th century AD. In fact, the typical Late Antique city, with its imposing fortification walls, heterogeneous street colonnades and agora porticoes, and monumental churches replacing earlier temples, came into being in these decades. A confrontation of the material remains with contemporaneous historical, political, social and religious events (...) and changes, would suggest that these urbanistic interventions were the result of unrelated factors arising in just a few decades’ time. Despite the absence of a deliberate Theodosian policy of urban renewal, the care for and energy invested in the cityscape does testify to continuance of aesthetic principles and representational concerns, not only at Constantinople, but also in the provincial capitals and even in the smaller cities of the region. (shrink)

Lords of Asia Minor: An Introduction to the Lydians. By Annick Payne and Jorit Wintjes. Philippika, vol. 93. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2016. Pp. x + 144, illus. €29.80.

The inscriptions, with their brevity and their tendency to formulaism, are not so profitable a field for the study of the syntax of the Κοιν as the papyri, and literary documents like the New Testament. Nevertheless, it is possible to glean from them some evidence, which adds to the sum-total of our knowledge; and when the time comes to deal with the Hellenistic language as a whole, they will have their contribution to make. I propose to deal with the evidence (...) for case-usage provided by the popular inscriptions of Asia Minor, particularly those of that inland region, which corresponds roughly with the limits of ancient Phrygia. (shrink)

In mid-imperial Asia Minor, visually unified cityscapes played a critical role in the strategies local elites used to bolster their corporate authority. The construction of formalized public spaces facilitated the display of wealth and status in the traditionally isonomic world of civic politics. The rhetorical practice of describing cities as physical and socio-cultural unities demonstrated a community's – and especially its leading citizens' – possession of qualities instrumental in competition with local rivals. As presented in the context of (...) public ritual, finally, harmonious urban landscapes were used to convince travelling imperial officials that cities and their elites conformed to Roman expectations. (shrink)

Summary The article deals with a complex of issues connected with the campaign waged by the Macedonian expeditionary corps in Asia Minor in 336–335 BC. The author clears up the aims set for the advance-guard, its command structure, strength and composition. He also describes the relevant military operations and reveals the reasons both for the Macedonians’ successes in 336 and their failures in 335. The idea is argued that despite the final failures, it is hardly possible to say (...) that the campaign the expeditionary corps conducted ended in its total defeat. Besides, it is noted that those military operations had major significance for Alexander’s campaign in Asia Minor in 334, because a number of preconditions for its full success had been created right in their course. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 98 Heft: 2 Seiten: 495-525.

Christina G. Williamson [désormais CGW] nous offre une réflexion particulièrement mûrie, aux plans théorique et documentaire, sur l’« urbanizing role » des sanctuaires « extra-urbains » (donc « ruraux » / countryside sanctuaries, définis p. 23) qu’elle scrute au travers des rituels (urban rituals, « e.g. festivals and processions, the scope of their festivals, their economies, their administration and nature of priesthoods, degrees of autonomy, and their symbolic power », p. 51). L’horizon he...

The change of the Greek aspirates into the voiceless spirants of the modern language was already beginning to appear in some of the ancient dialects. The intermediate stage in this development is naturally that of affricates, ph, th, kh, becoming pf, tp, kx respectively, a stage seen in such spellings as μετνλλακχóτα. The evidence of the inscriptions shows that the change was not readily effected in Attic, and the clearest mark of this conservatism is the interchange of aspirates and tenues.

Name der Zeitschrift: Millennium Jahrgang: 10 Heft: 1 Seiten: 435-462.

This review-article of Martha Roth's Law Collections focuses on selected sections in the Laws of Ur-Namma, Eshnunna, Hammurabi, Lipit-Ishtar, and the Neo-Babylonian Laws. It discusses potentially misleading divisions of sections and problems of rendering the term awīlum (lú). It also asserts that students of law will benefit from Roth's translations for generations.

The dam rush in the upper-Brahmaputra River basin and local, minority resistance to it are the result of complex geopolitical and parochial causes. India and China’s competing claims for sovereignty over the watershed depend upon British and Qing Dynasty imperial precedents respectively. And the two nation-states have extended and enhanced their predecessors’ claims on the area by continuing to erase local sovereignty, enclose the commons, and extract natural resources on a large scale. Historically, the upper basin’s terrain forestalled the thorough (...) integration of this region into both nation-states, but recent technological and economic advances have enabled the two states and their agents to dramatically transformed these landscapes. Many of their projects have perpetuated the interventionist hydrological regimes that India and China also inherited from their imperial forebears. Nevertheless, as with their definition of their borders, neither state has highlighted this historical contingency. Instead, both governments have consistently presented their hydropower projects as shining examples of necessary and benevolent development. Their economy-focused, monolithic development paradigms have, not coincidently, also enabled the systemic side-lining of non-majority cultures, religions and histories. The combination of this cultural exclusion and the nation-states’ late integration of this peripheral region has laid the ground for conflict with local groups over the dam rush. Local identities and experiences have evolved around complex religious, cultural and trade networks, many of which were heavily influenced by the now-defunct Tibetan polity, rather than via modern Chinese and Indian nationalist discourses of development. The dam clashes highlight both the basin’s complex cultural matrixes and the ambiguous relationship Asia’s two most populous nation-states have with their respective imperial pasts. And as the situation remains unresolved, the watershed is an ecological catastrophe in waiting. (shrink)