Download or read book Ecclesiastical Silver Plate in Sixth century Byzantium written by Susan A. Boyd and published by Dumbarton Oaks. This book was released on 1992 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twenty papers included in this volume were presented at an international symposium held in Baltimore and Washington in May, 1986. Planned to coincide with the exhibition of the two largest treasures of Early Byzantine church silver to survive from antiquity, the Kaper Koraon Treasure (found in Syria) and the Sion Treasure (found in Turkey), the symposium sought to place these and other church treasures in their broader contexts examining them from the point of view of economy, history, society, and manufacture. While a number of the papers focus on specific aspects of these two treasures--including six articles devoted to the Sion Treasure--others examine more general questions regarding silver mining, the manufacture of silver vessels, the state control of silver in Byzantium and the Sasanian Empire, the economic and cultural role of silver objects, and the financial power of the institutional church through its vast holdings of silver plate. The precedent offered by pagan cult treasures is also examined. To ensure a broad interdisciplinary approach, the eighteen authors are authorities in the fields of government administration, economic history, cultural history, art history, archaeology, epigraphy, science and conservation.
Download or read book Word Becomes Image Openwork vessels as a reflection of Late Antique transformation written by Hallie G. Meredith and published by Archaeopress Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2015-07-31 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a diachronic investigation providing a rich case study as well as an approach tracing the contours of a category of Roman material culture defined by the Roman period technique of openwork carving. This work shows how openwork vessels are a reflection of a wide-reaching Roman cultural aesthetic.
Download or read book Silver and Society in Late Antiquity written by Ruth E. Leader-Newby and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The spectacular hoards of late antique silver - Mildenhall, Thetford, Sevso - discovered since the middle of the last century have aroused much interest in this luxury art form. But what did these pieces mean to their owners, and why was silverware so important in late antiquity? Silver and Society in Late Antiquity examines such questions through an integrated, synthetic analysis of the history of silver in the Roman empire between 300 and 650 AD, focusing upon the cultural significance of this luxury art form in all its different manifestations--sacred, imperial and domestic. Ruth Leader-Newby looks at a wide range of objects from both the eastern and western halves of the Roman empire - including Britain - in order to determine silver's role in the wider sphere of late antique visual culture, asking questions about the relative significance of individual forms of artistic production, and their relationship with each other. In doing so, key issues for the artistic and cultural history of late antiquity are raised - the use of the imperial image, the visual construction of the sacred in Christianity, the cohesive social role of elite intellectual culture, and the Christianization of the domestic sphere. As this book demonstrates, when studied in its historical context, silver can substantially enrich our understanding of late Roman art and culture.
Download or read book The Sion Treasure Reconsidered written by Ahmet Arı and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-14 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1963 a collection of fifty-seven silver vessels was discovered during illegal excavations by villagers in Antalya Province, Turkey. The Sion Treasure, named after the inscription ‘Holy Sion’ on several vessels in the hoard, is now divided between five collections: Antalya Museum (Turkey), Dumbarton Oaks (United States), a private collection in Geneva, the Digby-Jones collection and Hewett collection (United Kingdom). This book builds on the studies of the Sion Treasure and examines questions regarding silver mining, manufacture, and the economic and cultural role of the silver vessels. It considers the treasure using the concept of the cultural biography of objects. The vessels from the Sion Treasure have not previously been considered in this context and the book highlights the fact that the value and significance of the objects at the time they were created does not lie exclusively in their visual characteristics and aesthetics since their relationship to, and with, people is also significant. While their functionality lends them one life story, another biography is gained through their users: the producers, patrons, and individuals within the church, not only the clergy, who engaged with the objects. The Sion Treasure Reconsidered will appeal to students and scholars alike interested in Byzantine cultural and material history and medieval material history in general.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Art and Architecture written by Ellen C. Schwartz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This handbook offers a wide-ranging introduction to the richness and diversity of the arts in the Byzantine world. It includes thirty-eight essays by international authors, from prominent researchers to emerging scholars, on various issues and media. Discussions consider art created for religious purposes, to enhance and beautify the Orthodox liturgy and worship space, as well as art made to serve in royal and domestic contexts. While Byzantium is defined as the years 330-1453 CE, some chapters treat the aftermath and influence of Byzantine art on later periods. Arts covered include buildings and objects from the Eastern Mediterranean region, including the Balkans, Russia, North Africa, and the Near East. The volume brings together object-based considerations of themes and monuments which form the backbone of art history, with considerations drawing on many different methodologies-sociology, semiotics, anthropology, archaeology, reception theory, deconstruction theory, among others-all in an up-to-date synthesis of scholarship on Byzantine art and architecture. The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Art and Architecture is a comprehensive overview of a rich field of study, offering a window into the world of this distinct and fascinating period of art"--
Download or read book Asia Minor in the Long Sixth Century written by Ine Jacobs and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asia Minor is considered to have been a fairly prosperous region in Late Antiquity. It was rarely disturbed by external invasions and remained largely untouched by the continuous Roman-Persian conflict until very late in the period, was apparently well connected to the flourishing Mediterranean economy and, as the region closest to Constantinople, is assumed to have played an important part in the provisioning of the imperial capital and the imperial armies. When exactly this prosperity came to an end – the late sixth century, the early, middle or even later seventh century – remains a matter of debate. Likewise, the impact of factors such as the dust veil event of 536, the impact of the bubonic plague that made its first appearance in AD 541/542, the costs and consequences of Justinian’s wars, the Persian attacks of the early seventh century and, eventually the Arab incursions of around the middle of the seventh century, remains controversial. The more general living conditions in both cities and countryside have long been neglected. The majority of the population, however, did not live in urban but in rural contexts. Yet the countryside only found its proper place in regional overviews in the last two decades, thanks to an increasing number of regional surveys in combination with a more refined pottery chronology. Our growing understanding of networks of villages and hamlets is very likely to influence the appreciation of the last decades of Late Antiquity drastically. Indeed, it would seem that the sixth century in particular is characterized not only by a ruralization of cities, but also by the extension and flourishing of villages in Asia Minor, the Roman Near East, and Egypt. This volume's series of themes include the physical development of large and small settlements, their financial situation, and the proportion of public and private investment. Imperial, provincial, and local initiatives in city and countryside are compared and the main motivations examined, including civic or personal pride, military incentives, and religious stimuli. The evidence presented will be used to form opinions on the impact of the plague on living circumstances in the sixth century and to evaluate the significance of the Justinianic period.
Download or read book Byzantine Trade 4th 12th Centuries written by Marlia Mundell Mango and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 28 papers examine questions relating to the extent and nature of Byzantine trade from Late Antiquity into the Middle Ages. The Byzantine state was the only political entity of the Mediterranean to survive Antiquity and thus offers a theoretical standard against which to measure diachronic and regional changes in trading practices within the area and beyond. To complement previous extensive work on late antique long-distance trade within the Mediterranean (based on the grain supply, amphorae and fine ware circulation), the papers concentrate on local and international trade. The emphasis is on recently uncovered or studied archaeological evidence relating to key topics. These include local retail organisation within the city, some regional markets within the empire, the production and/or circulation patterns of particular goods (metalware, ivory and bone, glass, pottery), and objects of international trade, both exports such as wine and glass, imports such as materia medica, and the lack of importation of, for example, Sasanian pottery. In particular, new work relating to specific regions of Byzantium's international trade is highlighted: in Britain, the Levant, the Red Sea, the Black Sea and China. Papers of the 38th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, held in 2004 at Oxford under the auspices of the Committee for Byzantine Studies.
Download or read book Objects in Context Objects in Use written by Luke Lavan and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008-03-31 with total page 754 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book promotes the study of material spatiality in late antiquity: not just the study of buildings, but of the people, dress and objects used within them, drawing on all available source material. It seeks to explore the material world as it was lived in late antiquity, in an interpretative inquiry, rather than simply describing the evidence that has survived until today. The volume presents a series of comprehensive bibliographic essays which provide an overview of relevant literature, along with discussions of the nature of the sources, of relevant approaches and field methods. The main section of the book explores domestic space, vessels in context, dress, shops and workshops, religious space, and military space. Synthetic papers drawing on a wide range of archaeological, art-historical and textual sources are complemented by case-studies of context-rich late antique sites in the East Mediterranean and elsewhere, including Pella, Dura-Europos, Scythopolis, and Sagalassos.
Download or read book Inscribing Texts in Byzantium written by Marc Lauxtermann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-02-05 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In spite of the striking abundance of extant primary material, Byzantine epigraphy remains uncharted territory. The volume of the Proceedings of the 49th SPBS Spring Symposium aims to promote the field of Byzantine epigraphy as a whole, and topics and subjects covered include: Byzantine attitudes towards the inscribed word, the questions of continuity and transformation, the context and function of epigraphic evidence, the levels of formality and authority, the material aspect of writing, and the verbal, visual and symbolic meaning of inscribed texts. The collection is intended as a valuable scholarly resource presenting and examining a substantial quantity of diverse epigraphic material, and outlining the chronological development of epigraphic habits, and of individual epigraphic genres in Byzantium. The contributors also discuss the methodological questions of collecting, presenting and interpreting the most representative Byzantine inscriptional material, and addressing epigraphic material to make it relevant to a wider scholarly community.
Download or read book More than a Church Late Antique Ecclesiastical Complexes in Cyprus written by Catherine T. Keane and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-06-20 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The church annexes of late antique Cyprus were bustling places of industry, producing olive oil, flour, bread, ceramics, and metal products. From its earliest centuries, the church was an economic player, participating in agricultural and artisanal production. More than a Church brings together architecture, ceramics, numismatics, landscape archaeology, and unpublished excavation material, alongside consideration of Cyprus’s dynamic and prosperous 4th–10th-century history. Keane offers a rich picture of the association between sacred buildings and agricultural and industrial facilities—comprehensively presenting, for the first time, the church’s economic role and impact in late antique Cyprus.
Download or read book The Early Christian Book CUA Studies in Early Christianity written by William E. Klingshirn and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by experts in the field, the essays in this volume examine the early Christian book from a wide range of disciplines: religion, art history, history, Near Eastern studies, and classics.
Download or read book Social Change in Town and Country in Eleventh Century Byzantium written by James Howard-Johnston and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-10 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Byzantium pivots around the eleventh century, during which it reached its apogee in terms of power, prestige, and territorial extension, only then to plunge into steep political decline following serious military defeats and extensive territorial losses. The political, economic, and intellectual history of the period is reasonably well understood, but not so what was happening in that crucial intermediary sphere, the social order, which both shaped and was shaped by contemporary ideas and brute economic developments. This volume aims to deepen understanding of Byzantine society by examining material evidence for settlements and production in different regions and by sifting through the far from plentiful literary and documentary sources in order to track what was happening in town and country. There is evidence of significant change: the pattern of landownership continued to shift in favour of those with power and wealth, but there was sustained and effective resistance from peasant villages. Provincial towns prospered in what was an era of sustained economic growth, and, through newly emboldened local elites, took a more active part in public affairs. In the capital the middling classes, comprising much of officialdom and leading traders, gained in importance, while the twin military and civilian elites were merging to form a single governing class. However, despite this social upheaval, careful analysis of these various factors by a range of leading Byzantine historians and archaeologists leads to the overarching conclusion that it was not so much internal structural changes which contributed to the vertiginous decline suffered by Byzantium in the late eleventh century, as the unprecedented combination of dangerous adversaries on different fronts, in the east, north, and west.
Download or read book East and West in the Early Middle Ages written by Stefan Esders and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-04 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary volume re-evaluates the interconnectedness of the Merovingian world with its Mediterranean surroundings.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Art written by Robin M. Jensen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-20 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Art surveys a broad spectrum of Christian art produced from the late second to the sixth centuries. The first part of the book opens with a general survey of the subject and then presents fifteen essays that discuss specific media of visual art—catacomb paintings, sculpture, mosaics, gold glass, gems, reliquaries, ceramics, icons, ivories, textiles, silver, and illuminated manuscripts. Each is written by a noted expert in the field. The second part of the book takes up themes relevant to the study of early Christian art. These seven chapters consider the ritual practices in decorated spaces, the emergence of images of Christ’s Passion and miracles, the functions of Christian secular portraits, the exemplary mosaics of Ravenna, the early modern history of Christian art and archaeology studies, and further reflection on this field called “early Christian art.” Each of the volume’s chapters includes photographs of many of the objects discussed, plus bibliographic notes and recommendations for further reading. The result is an invaluable introduction to and appraisal of the art that developed out of the spread of Christianity through the late antique world. Undergraduate and graduate students of late classical, early Christian, and Byzantine culture, religion, or art will find it an accessible and insightful orientation to the field. Additionally, professional academics, archivists, and curators working in these areas will also find it valuable as a resource for their own research, as well as a textbook or reference work for their students.
Download or read book Through a Glass Brightly written by Chris Entwistle and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2016-09-28 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The twenty-five papers in this volume cover diverse aspects of the material culture of the late Roman, Byzantine and Medieval periods, with particular emphasis on the metalwork and enamel of these times. Individual papers include major reinterpretations of objects in the British Museum's Byzantine collections as well as essays devoted to the Museum's recent acquisitions in this field. The volume celebrates the retirement of David Buckton, for over twenty years the curator of the British Museum's Early Christian and Byzantine collections and the National Icon Collection.
Download or read book Religious Diversity in Late Antiquity written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-05-17 with total page 579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new volume in the well-established Late Antique Archaeology series draws together recent research by archaeologists and historians to shed new light on the religious world of Late Antiquity. A detailed bibliographic essay provides an overview of relevant literature, while individual articles explore the diversity of late antique religion. Rabbinic and non-rabbinic Judaism is traced in Beth Shearim, Dura Europus and Sepphoris, and the Samaritan community in Israel, while Christian concepts of orthodoxy and heresy are examined with a particular focus on the 'Arian' Controversy. Popular piety receives close attention, through the archaeology of pilgrimage and the stylite 'pillar saints', and so too does the complex relationship between religion and magic and between sacred and secular in Late Antiquity. Contributors are David M. Gwynn, Susanne Bangert, Jodi Magness, Zeev Weiss, Shimon Dar, Michel-Yves Perrin, Bryan Ward-Perkins, Lukas Amadeus Schachner, Arja Karivieri, Carla Sfameni, Claude Lepelley, Mark Humphries, Elizabeth Jeffreys, and Isabella Sandwell.
Download or read book Byzantine Art written by Robin Cormack and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully illustrated, new edition of the best single-volume guide to Byzantine art, providing an introduction to the whole period and range of styles.
