Download or read book Ancient Memory written by Katharine Mawford and published by . This book was released on 2021-06-30 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the recent 'memory boom' has led to increasing interdisciplinary interest, there is a significant gap relating to the examination of this topic in Classics. In particular, there is need for a systematic exploration of ancient memory and its use as a critical and methodological tool for delving into ancient literature. The present volume provides just such an approach, theorising the use and role of memory in Graeco-Roman thought and literature, and building on the background of memory studies. The volume's contributors apply theoretical models such as memoryscapes, civic and cultural memory, and memory loss to a range of authors, from Homeric epic to Senecan drama, and from historiography to Cicero's recollections of performances. The chapters are divided into four sections according to the main perspective taken. These are: 1) the Mechanics of Memory, 2) Collective memory, 3) Female Memory, and 4) Oblivion. This modern approach to ancient memory will be useful for scholars working across the range of Greek and Roman literature, as well as for students, and a broader interdisciplinary audience interested in the intersection of memory studies and Classics.

Download or read book Ancient Memory written by Katharine Mawford and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-07-05 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the recent ‘memory boom’ has led to increasing interdisciplinary interest, there is a significant gap relating to the examination of this topic in Classics. In particular, there is need for a systematic exploration of ancient memory and its use as a critical and methodological tool for delving into ancient literature. The present volume provides just such an approach, theorising the use and role of memory in Graeco-Roman thought and literature, and building on the background of memory studies. The volume’s contributors apply theoretical models such as memoryscapes, civic and cultural memory, and memory loss to a range of authors, from Homeric epic to Senecan drama, and from historiography to Cicero’s recollections of performances. The chapters are divided into four sections according to the main perspective taken. These are: 1) the Mechanics of Memory, 2) Collective memory, 3) Female Memory, and 4) Oblivion. This modern approach to ancient memory will be useful for scholars working across the range of Greek and Roman literature, as well as for students, and a broader interdisciplinary audience interested in the intersection of memory studies and Classics.

Download or read book Historical and Religious Memory in the Ancient World written by Beate Dignas and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-15 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Book celebrates the work of Simon Price.

Download or read book The Divided City written by Nicole Loraux and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-03 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the roles of conflict and forgetting in ancient Athens. Athens, 403 B.C.E. The bloody oligarchic dictatorship of the Thirty is over, and the democrats have returned to the city victorious. Renouncing vengeance, in an act of willful amnesia, citizens call for---if not invent---amnesty. They agree to forget the unforgettable, the "past misfortunes," of civil strife or stasis. More precisely, what they agree to deny is that stasis---simultaneously partisanship, faction, and sedition---is at the heart of their politics. Continuing a criticism of Athenian ideology begun in her pathbreaking study The Invention of Athens, Nicole Loraux argues that this crucial moment of Athenian political history must be interpreted as constitutive of politics and political life and not as a threat to it. Divided from within, the city is formed by that which it refuses. Conflict, the calamity of civil war, is the other, dark side of the beautiful unitary city of Athens. In a brilliant analysis of the Greek word for voting, diaphora, Loraux underscores the conflictual and dynamic motion of democratic life. Voting appears as the process of dividing up, of disagreement---in short, of agreeing to divide and choose. Not only does Loraux reconceptualize the definition of ancient Greek democracy, she also allows the contemporary reader to rethink the functioning of modern democracy in its critical moments of internal stasis.

Download or read book Ancient and Medieval Memories written by Janet Coleman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1992-01-30 with total page 670 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an analysis of thinking, remembering and reminiscing according to ancient authors, and their medieval readers. The author argues that behind the various medieval methods in interpreting texts of the past lie two apparently incompatible theories of human knowledge and remembering, as well as two differing attitudes to matter and intellect. The book comprises a series of studies which take ancient texts as evidence of the past, and show how medieval readers and writers understood them. The studies confirm that medieval and renaissance interpretations and uses of the past differ greatly from modern interpretation and yet betray many startling continuities between modern and ancient and medieval theories.

Download or read book Memory and Agency in Ancient China written by Francis Allard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-20 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Applies the 'life history' of objects approach to China's prehistoric, early dynastic and more recent material culture.

Download or read book Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East written by Ömür Harmanşah and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-18 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the founding and building of cities in the ancient Near East. The creation of new cities was imagined as an ideological project or a divine intervention in the political narratives and mythologies of Near Eastern cultures, often masking the complex processes behind the social production of urban space. During the Early Iron Age (c.1200–850 BCE), Assyrian and Syro-Hittite rulers developed a highly performative official discourse that revolved around constructing cities, cultivating landscapes, building watercourses, erecting monuments and initiating public festivals. This volume combs through archaeological, epigraphic, visual, architectural and environmental evidence to tell the story of a region from the perspective of its spatial practices, landscape history and architectural technologies. It argues that the cultural processes of the making of urban spaces shape collective memory and identity as well as sites of political performance and state spectacle.

Download or read book Music and Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds written by Lauren Curtis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-28 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combines multiple theoretical perspectives and diverse media to examine the relation between music and memory in ancient Greece and Rome.

Download or read book The Memory Code written by Lynne Kelly and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In ancient, pre-literate cultures across the globe, tribal elders had encyclopedic memories. They could name all the animals and plants across a landscape, identify the stars in the sky, and recite the history of their people. Yet today, most of us struggle to memorize more than a short poem. Using traditional Aboriginal Australian song lines as a starting point, Dr. Lynne Kelly has since identified the powerful memory technique used by our ancestors and indigenous people around the world. In turn, she has then discovered that this ancient memory technique is the secret purpose behind the great prehistoric monuments like Stonehenge, which have puzzled archaeologists for so long.The henges across northern Europe, the elaborate stone houses of New Mexico, huge animal shapes in Peru, the statues of Easter Island—these all serve as the most effective memory system ever invented by humans. They allowed people in non-literate cultures to memorize the vast amounts of information they needed to survive. But how?For the first time, Dr. Kelly unlocks the secret of these monuments and their uses as "memory places" in her fascinating book. Additionally, The Memory Code also explains how we can use this ancient mnemonic technique to train our minds in the tradition of our forbearers.

Download or read book The Edge of Memory written by Patrick Nunn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How much of the folk tales of our ancestors is rooted in fact, and what can they tell us about the future? In today's society it is the written word that holds the authority. We are more likely to trust the words found in a history textbook over the version of history retold by a friend – after all, human memory is unreliable, and how can you be sure your friend hasn't embellished the facts? But before humans were writing down their knowledge, they were passing it on in the form of stories. The Edge of Memory celebrates the predecessor of written information – the spoken word, tales from our ancestors that have been passed down, transmitting knowledge from one generation to the next. Among the most extensive and best-analysed of these stories are from native Australian cultures. These stories conveyed both practical information and recorded history, describing a lost landscape, often featuring tales of flooding and submergence. Folk traditions such as these are increasingly supported by hard science. Geologists are starting to corroborate the tales through study of climatic data, sediments and land forms; the evidence was there in the stories, but until recently, nobody was listening. In this book, Patrick Nunn unravels the importance of these tales, exploring the science behind folk history from around the world – including northwest Europe and India – and what it can tell us about environmental phenomena, from coastal drowning to volcanic eruptions. These stories of real events were handed down the generations over thousands of years, and they have broad implications for our understanding of how human societies have developed through the millennia, and ultimately how we respond collectively to changes in climate, our surroundings and the environment we live in.

Download or read book Memories of Odysseus written by Hartog Francois Hartog and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about identity, about how the ancient Greeks saw themselves and others, and what this tells us in turn about Greek mentality and culture. It looks at voyagers and explorers, at travels in reality and in the mind, and shows what these reveal at key points in Greek history from the creation of Homer's monumental epic around 700 BC to the high Roman imperial period some eight hundred years later. The author takes us first to the journeyings of Odysseus, considering the returning warrior's concerns of witness and memory and finding in the epic the themes that will preoccupy the Greeks over the centuries. He then travels to Egypt with Herodotus, to the problematically 'barbarian' world of Persia and the Near East with Alexander the Great, to old Greece with the fictional Scythian Anacharsis, to the new Greek world under Roman domination with Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassos and Strabo, and finally to the Asia Minor of the first-century AD sage Apollonius of Tyana in the company of Philostratos. He examines both what their representations of these lands meant in their own day and how they were received in later times. He looks in particular at the importance of the invention of the barbarian and the "e;other"e;, first in the theoretical process of desribing and accounting for the outside world, and secondly at the justification it gives for the practical reshaping of alien space through conquest and assimilation - themes which have had, as he points out, a more recent resonance. Francois Hartog draws widely on ancient and modern authors to create a cultural history of ancient Greece that sheds a new and revealing light on the Greeks and the history of humankind more generally.

Download or read book Performance Memory and Processions in Ancient Rome written by Jacob A. Latham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The pompa circensis, the procession which preceded the chariot races in the arena, was both a prominent political pageant and a hallowed religious ritual. Traversing a landscape of memory, the procession wove together spaces and institutions, monuments and performers, gods and humans into an image of the city, whose contours shifted as Rome changed. In the late Republic, the parade produced an image of Rome as the senate and the people with their gods - a deeply traditional symbol of the city which was transformed during the empire when an imperial image was built on top of the republican one. In late antiquity, the procession fashioned a multiplicity of Romes: imperial, traditional, and Christian. In this book, Jacob A. Latham explores the webs of symbolic meanings in the play between performance and itinerary, tracing the transformations of the circus procession from the late Republic to late antiquity.

Download or read book Memory and the City in Ancient Israel written by Diana V. Edelman and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2014-10-31 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient cities served as the actual, worldly landscape populated by “material” sites of memory. Some of these sites were personal and others were directly and intentionally involved in the shaping of a collective social memory, such as palaces, temples, inscriptions, walls, and gates. Many cities were also sites of social memory in a very different way. Like Babylon, Nineveh, or Jerusalem, they served as ciphers that activated and communicated various mnemonic worlds as they integrated multiple images, remembered events, and provided a variety of meanings in diverse ancient communities. Memory and the City in Ancient Israel contributes to the study of social memory in ancient Israel in the late Persian and early Hellenistic periods by exploring “the city,” both urban spaces and urban centers. It opens with a study that compares basic conceptualizing tendencies of cities in Mesopotamia with their counterparts in ancient Israel. Its essays then explore memories of gates, domestic spaces, threshing floors, palaces, city gardens and parks, natural and “domesticated” water in urban settings, cisterns, and wells. Finally, the studies turn to particular cities of memory in ancient Israel: Jerusalem, Samaria, Shechem, Mizpah, Tyre, Nineveh, and Babylon. The volume, which emerged from meetings of the European Association of Biblical Studies, includes the work of Stéphanie Anthonioz, Yairah Amit, Ehud Ben Zvi, Kåre Berge, Diana Edelman, Hadi Ghantous, Anne Katrine Gudme, Philippe Guillaume, Russell Hobson, Steven W. Holloway, Francis Landy, Daniel Pioske, Ulrike Sals, Carla Sulzbach, Karolien Vermeulen, and Carey Walsh.

Download or read book Remembering Defeat written by Andrew Wolpert and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2003-05-22 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 404 b.c. the Peloponnesian War finally came to an end, when the Athenians, starved into submission, were forced to accept Sparta's terms of surrender. Shortly afterwards a group of thirty conspirators, with Spartan backing ("the Thirty"), overthrew the democracy and established a narrow oligarchy. Although the oligarchs were in power for only thirteen months, they killed more than 5 percent of the citizenry and terrorized the rest by confiscating the property of some and banishing many others. Despite this brutality, members of the democratic resistance movement that regained control of Athens came to terms with the oligarchs and agreed to an amnesty that protected collaborators from prosecution for all but the most severe crimes. The war and subsequent reconciliation of Athenian society has been a rich field for historians of ancient Greece. From a rhetorical and ideological standpoint, this period is unique because of the extraordinary lengths to which the Athenians went to maintain peace. In Remembering Defeat, Andrew Wolpert claims that the peace was "negotiated and constructed in civic discourse" and not imposed upon the populace. Rather than explaining why the reconciliation was successful, as a way of shedding light on changes in Athenian ideology Wolpert uses public speeches of the early fourth century to consider how the Athenians confronted the troubling memories of defeat and civil war, and how they explained to themselves an agreement that allowed the conspirators and their collaborators to go unpunished. Encompassing rhetorical analysis, trauma studies, and recent scholarship on identity, memory, and law, Wolpert's study sheds new light on a pivotal period in Athens' history.

Download or read book Reset in Stone written by Sarah A. Rous and published by University of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient Athenians were known to reuse stone artifacts, architectural blocks, and public statuary in the creation of new buildings and monuments. However, these construction decisions went beyond mere pragmatics: they were often a visible mechanism for shaping communal memory, especially in periods of profound and challenging social or political transformation. Sarah Rous develops the concept of upcycling to refer to this meaningful reclamation, the intentionality of reemploying each particular object for its specific new context. The upcycling approach drives innovative reinterpretations of diverse cases, including column drums built into fortification walls, recut inscriptions, monument renovations, and the wholesale relocation of buildings. Using archaeological, literary, and epigraphic evidence from more than eight centuries of Athenian history, Rous's investigation connects seemingly disparate instances of the reuse of building materials. She focuses on agency, offering an alternative to the traditional discourse on spolia. Reset in Stone illuminates a vital practice through which Athenians shaped social memory in the physical realm, literally building their past into their city.

Download or read book Poetic and Performative Memory in Ancient Greece written by Claude Calame and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ancient Greeks not only spoke of time unfolding in a specific space, but also projected the past upon the future in order to make it active in the social practice of the present. This book shows how the Ancient Greeks' collective memory was based on a remarkable faculty for the creation of ritual and narrative symbols.

Download or read book Social Memory in Ancient and Colonial Mesoamerica written by Amos Megged and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-26 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Social Memory in Ancient and Colonial Mesoamerica, Amos Megged uncovers the missing links in Mesoamerican peoples' quest for their collective past. Analyzing ancient repositories of knowledge, as well as social and religious practices, he uncovers the unique procedures and formulas by which social memory was communicated and how it operated in Mesoamerica prior to the Spanish conquest. Megged's volume also suggests how social and cultural historians, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists can rethink indigenous representations of the past while taking into account the deep transformations in Mexican society during the colonial era.