Previous Events

October 27: The Horse is Man's Wings (Lecture)

Speaker: Dr. Mim Bower, Cambridge University
Location: Lecture Hall, Second Floor
Date: October 27, 2009
Time: 6:00pm

The Horse is Man's Wings: Archaeological Science and the Changing Nature of the Human-Horse Relationship in Central and East Asia in Prehistory

The relationship between horses and humans reaches far back into prehistory. At first, horses were a source of human food, but at some time in the past, perhaps during the process of domestication, horses took on a much greater role. Not only were they ridden, giving humans the possibility of travelling with great speed over large distances, or harnessed in chariots, which could be used to show status and power, they became venerated in a way that no other domestic animals have been. During the 2nd and 1st millennia BC, all across central and east Asia, in harness or with chariots, in groups, or alone, horses were buried along with their owners and carers, sometimes with the most amazing grave goods. Ultimately, an entirely new way of life developed from these practices: equestrian pastoral nomadism. But the importance of the horse in central and east Asia does not end in prehistory. The horse remains a powerful symbol in many cultures today and is associated with ideas of identity and nationhood. In this presentation, I will report on the results of a large interdisciplinary archaeological science project which explores the evolving relationship between horses and humans, from prehistory to the present day. Using a wide range of cutting edge archaeological science methods, including archaeogenetics (living population genetics and ancient DNA), geometric morphometrics, paleopathology, zooarchaeology and ethnography, we work towards an understanding of the changing relationship between humans and horses across time.

October 20: Visiting Research Scholar Lecture Series

Speaker: David Klotz
Location: Lecture Hall, Second Floor
Date: October 20, 2009
Time: 6:00pm

The Temple of Osiris in Abydos during the Late Period

Although the city of Abydos was one of the most important religious centers of Egypt from the Predynastic Period through the New Kingdom, little remains of its monuments from the Late Period (c. 1000-300 BC). In the early twentieth century, W.F. Petrie discovered meager traces of an Osiris temple dating to the reign of Amasis (Twenty-Sixth Dynasty, c. 570-526 BC), and recent New York University excavations have uncovered another temple built by Nectanebo I and II (Thirtieth Dynasty, c. 378-341 BC). Nonetheless, the intervening period - the era of Persian domination - remains a mystery, and the earlier temple of Amasis seems to have completely vanished.

Two new sources provide valuable information on this obscure chapter in the history of Abydos. The first is a statue in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA 1996.91) belonging to a prominent Egyptian general from the Thirtieth Dynasty. This object includes a difficult autobiographical inscription text in which the owner narrates how he defended Egypt from invading Persian armies and restored massive damage inflicted upon Abydos. At Sohag, meanwhile, the church of St. Shenoute at the White Monastery (c.450 AD) incorporates Pharaonic and Graeco-Roman spolia reused from earlier monuments. The Yale White Monastery Church Documentation Project (2007-2009) recorded over twenty granite blocks from the reign of Amasis, and the decoration indicates they derive from the Osiris temple at Abydos.

The archaeological and epigraphic record suggests the Osiris temple was badly damaged - if not completely destroyed - during the period of Achaemenid rule in Egypt. Similar accounts of Persian looting are attested at multiple Egyptian sites, but they are often dismissed as mere propaganda intended to legitimize the subsequent Ptolemaic dynasty. The case of Abydos leads us to reevaluate our assumptions concerning the religious policies of the Great Kings of Persia.

October 6th: Visiting Research Scholar Lecture Series

Speaker: David Taylor
Location: Lecture Hall, Second Floor
Date: October 6, 2009
Time: 6:00pm

A Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire? The View from New York

The overwhelming majority of the surviving epigraphic texts of the Late Antique Roman provinces of Syria and Mesopotamia are written in Greek, and in a number of recent books and articles it has been argued that Greek was in fact the ordinary daily language of the local populations. By examining examples of the full available range of ancient linguistic evidence, and drawing on sociolinguistic theory about multilingualism and diglossia, this thesis will be challenged, and a more complex pattern of language usage will be sketched out. The consequences of this for issues of local identity and culture will then be explored.

David Taylor is the University Lecturer in Aramaic and Syriac at the University of Oxford, and during 2009-2010 he is a Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU.

October 2-3: The Sarcophagus East and West

Organizers: Wu Hung (University of Chicago), Jas Elsner (Oxford University)
Date: October 2-3, 2009
Time: 9:00am-6:00pm
Friday Reception at 6:00pm

This conference focuses mainly on decorated stone sarcophagi from around the second century BCE to the third century CE, when this type of burial equipment not only continued to develop in the parts of Europe dominated by the Roman Empire, but also enjoyed considerable popularity in East Asia. Whereas the chronological and formal developments of each regional tradition remain an important research goal, this conference encourages comparative observations and interpretations of ancient sarcophagi in broader geo-cultural spheres and more specific ritual/religious contexts. It is hoped that by addressing these two research objectives simultaneously, this conference will help open new ways to think about the development of art and visual culture in a broadly defined ancient world, where the art historical materials available are subject to comparable methodological constraints both from archaeological excavation and from known literary and historical contexts.

September 29, 2009: ISAW Open House

The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World invites you to an open house for NYU faculty and graduate students on Tuesday, September 29, from 6 to 8 p.m. We look forward to showing you the building and the library and offering you some food and drink. You will also have an opportunity to meet this year's Visiting Research Scholars, information about whom can be found on our web site: http://www.nyu.edu/isaw/scholars.htm

Amheida is a vast archaeological site on the western edge of Dakhla Oasis in Egypt. A team of researchers led by Dr. Roger Bagnall, Director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU, began the Amheida Project in 2001 with an intensive investigation and survey of the site.

One of the most spectacular discoveries, near the centre of the town in Area 2, is the house of Serenus, who was part of the city council in the middle of the 4th century. The structure contains fifteen rooms, one of which was painted with classical wall scenes. On the northern wall, to the left of the doorway, a mythological scene depicts the legend of Perseus rescuing the beautiful Andromeda who is about to be devoured by a sea-monster, while to the right of the door is the Homeric scene of the Return of Odysseus to Ithaca, from his long voyage which brought him to Egyptian shores.

The site at Amheida will be part of a long-term scheme for the Dakhla Oasis Project. Please join us for a presentation and discussion on Amheida and its archaeological significance.

Matthew W. Stolper
Another Persian Crisis: the Persepolis Fortification Archive in Chicago
Matthew W. Stolper (Professor of Assyriology, John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies in the Oriental Institute, The University of Chicago) is the Director of the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project. In 1933, Oriental Institute archaeologists working at Persepolis, clearing the ruined palaces of Kings Darius, Xerxes, and their Achaemenid Persian successors, found tens of thousands of clay tablets in a bastion in the fortification wall at the edge of the great stone terrace. These documents were pieces of a single, complex system, the Persepolis Fortification Archive, that proved-after decades of painstaking work-to be the largest and most important single source of information from within the Persian Empire on Achaemenid Persian languages, history, society, religion and art. Now, the Archive faces a legal battle that could well lead to its dismemberment and loss if it is seized and sold, and disappears into the holdings of private collectors around the world. Fueled by this crisis the Persepolis Fortification Archive Project is a new phase in recording and distributing the results of the study of the archive, responding to emergency conditions with electronic equipment and media alongside the conventional tool-kits of philology and scholarship.

A summary of the project is available on the website of the Oriental Institute (http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/pfa/).

Backgroundand news of the project and the controversy are available at the Persepolis Fortification Archive Weblog (http://persepolistablets.blogspot.com/).

Date: April 24, 2009
Time: Noon
Location: ISAW Lecture Room

Dr. Dougald J.W. O'Reilly
Department of Anthropology, Yale University
Unravelling the Mysteries of Ancient Angkor's Water Management System
A presentation on research undertaken by the Greater Angkor Project exploring the development and decline of this ancient civilizations water management network. Since 2001 the University of Sydney (Australia) researchers and their partners have been working to unravel the mysteries of the Angkorian network - an achievement that is often overshadowed by the scores of massive temples that dot the landscape. Dr O'Reilly, a member of the research team, will present the work done to date and present future research at Angkor.

Date: April 28, 2009
Time: 6pm
Location: ISAW Lecture Room

Two Lectures on Publishing Archaeological Data on the Web

Sebastian Heath, Ph.D. (American Numismatic Society)
Eric Kansa, Ph.D. (University of California, Berkeley)

Date: 14 April 2009
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: ISAW Lecture Room

Heath: Digital Publication and Linked Data at Troy:
The Post-Bronze Age Excavations at Troy in Turkey, known as Ilion in the Greek and Roman periods, have begun a program of publishing ceramic vessels and coins from the site in digital format. Our goal is to provide the information in formats that are useful to archaeologists in the field and to students or anybody else interested in this material. Accordingly, all the files that make up these publications are available for download under Creative Commons licenses. Anybody can take this information and redistribute it for free. We are also working to express the inherent links within archaeological information. A user reading about pottery from North Africa found at Troy can easily link to secondary literature and internet resources that will increase their understanding of this material. We likewise hope to make such links discoverable by search engines as well as by researchers working on the digital processing of humanities resources.

Kansa: Open Context: Digital Dissemination of Field Research and Museum Collections
Publishing archaeological field data and primary documentation has received increasing attention and concern. This focus is driven by threats to archaeological sites and the inherently destructive nature of archaeological methods, as well as worries about digital preservation and access. In an attempt to respond to these needs, several initiatives are exploring several approaches toward digital dissemination. Open Context (http://www.opencontext.org) is an open source system that provides a cost-effective dissemination solution for field research and museum collections. The system offers integrated access and services across datasets pooled from multiple research projects and collections. A major challenge with Open Context's approach lies in data integration and mapping different source data sets to Open Context's common global structure. Open Context aims to provide Web-based tool for researchers and collections managers to upload, "markup" and publish diverse archaeological and museum collection datasets. It remains to be seen if this tool can be easy enough to use by individual contributors, or if trained staff will always be required to aid such markup.

Zhefeng Yang, Ph.D.

Transformation of material culture in the Frontier of the Han Empire (205 BC to 250 AD)

Date: April 16, 2009
Time: 6 PM
Location: ISAW Lecture Room

The unification of China by Qin Shi-huangdi in 221 BC marks a new era of Chinese history, that is, the beginning of an imperial age. In response to the political unification of the Qin and the following Han Empires, the social and cultural landscapes of China also changed remarkably. The process of the cultural transformation is observed through the material remains from the different regions within the Empire and in areas that constituted the imperial frontiers. The questions are: to what extent the aggressive political expansion of the Han Empire was reflected in the material culture of the imperial frontiers; what are the mechanism of cultural transmission and transformation in the frontier zone? Professor Yang will dicuss the different ways of the change of material culture in the frontier regions of the Han Empire, as well as the relationship between the transformation of some local cultural traits and the incorporation of the Han material culture into that of the areas bordering the Empire.

GOLD GLASS THROUGH THE AGES
Date: Saturday, March 28th, 2009
Time:10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Location: Institute for the Studies of the Ancient World
15 East 84th Street, New York
RSVP: isawevents@nyu.edu

A Roundtable to be held at The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in conjunction with the current exhibition of an Early Byzantine Gold Glass Panel from Caesarea, Israel, on display in the Mary and Michael Jaharis Galleries of Byzantine Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Participants:
Dr. Christopher Lightfoot
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Associate Curator, the Greek and Roman Department
Gold Glass at the Met: From Classical to Christian Times

Yael Gorin-Rosen
Head of Ancient Glass
Israel Antiquities Authority
Byzantine Gold-Glass from the holy Land

Dr. David Whitehouse
Director, Corning Museum of Glass
Early Islamic Gold Glasses

Moderator:
Dr. Helen C. Evans
Mary and Michael Jaharis Curator of Byzantine Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hosted by The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World/The Metropolitan Museum of Art/The Israel Antiquities Authority
After the roundtable, participants can go to the Metropolitan Museum for further discussion of the Gold Glass Panel. On Sunday March 29 at 3:00 p.m., Yael Gorin-Rosen will give a presentation on "Ancient Glass in the Holy Land". Both events free with Museum admission.

William Y. Adams
Nubia's Other Civilization: the forgotten glories of the medieval kingdoms.
Date: November 20, 2008
Time: 12:00 pm
Location: ISAW, 2nd Floor Common Room

Daniel Potts (University of Sydney and The Institute for Advanced Study)
East of Ur and west of Meluhha, or what Elam, Ansan, Dilmun, Magan, Marhasi and Simaski were up to in the late 3rd millennium BC
Date: November 6, 2008
Time: 6:00 pm
Location: ISAW, Salmon Room on the 2nd Floor

Anne Porter (University of Southern California)
Of Bricks and Bodies: Integrating history, archaeology and an anthropology of art in the study of the ancient Near East
Date: November 10, 2008
Time: 6:00 pm
Location: ISAW, Salmon Room on the 2nd Floor

Beate Pongratz-Leisten (Princeton University)
Astralization of the Gods and the Concept of the Divine in Ancient Mesopotamia
Date: November 11, 2008
Time: 6:00 pm
Location: ISAW, Salmon Room on the 2nd Floor

Sabine Huebner (Columbia University)
Household and Family in Past Time: The Roman East and West
Date: November 12, 2008
Time: 6:00 pm
Location: ISAW, Salmon Room on the 2nd Floor

The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World Annual Leon Levy Lecture
Date: November 13, 2008
Time: 6:00 pm

Lecturer: Professor Mario Liverani, University of Rome "La Sapienza"
Topic:"The History of the Sahara in Antiquity: Mirage or Scientific Project?"
Please RSVP to liverani.lecture@nyu.edu

Romila Thapar (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)
Recognising Historical Traditions in Early India

Prof. Thapar's talk will revolve around three questions: what is the reason for the statement that Indian civilisation lacked a sense of history; in what way do current ideas about history help us to identify historical traditions in early India; and what form did these traditions take?

Monday April 28 at 6pm in the Salmon Room on the 2nd Floor.

Cross-cultural Approaches to Family and Household Structures in the Ancient World

The Fellows at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) at New York University are planning a conference entitled “Cross-cultural approaches to family and household structures in the ancient World”, May 9-10, 2008.This conference seeks to shed new light on the formation patterns and structural differences and similarities between family and household in ancient societies from the western Mediterranean to China. In an attempt to initiate conversations between ancient historians, archaeologists, and social anthropologists of all regions and periods of the ancient world, the conference welcomes papers from across disciplines. Comparative approaches and proposals that use new methods of analysis or interpretation of documentary evidence, are particularly welcome.

Click here for more information

Judith Herrin (King's College London)
The Lure of Byzantium: Medieval Western Attitudes to Princesses 'Born in the Purple'

During the Middle Ages western European rulers displayed a constant awareness of Byzantine princesses 'born in the purple'. Whenever they negotiated political alliances with the Eastern Empire, to be sealed by a marriage, they specified that they wanted such a princess. The epithet 'porphyrogennitos', purple-born, derives from the Porphyra, a purple chamber in the Great Palace of the emperors in Constantinople, where empresses gave birth to their children. In the mid-eighth century Emperor Constantine V built it as a device to perpetuate his ruling dynasty in Byzantium. It reflected his determination, as the son of a usurper, to bestow legitimacy on his eldest son and heir. Children of both sexes carried the title and princesses were regularly sought as 'purple-born' brides for western, Slavic and Russian rulers.

Part of the enduring attraction of such alliances was due to the spectacular Byzantine gifts that accompanied diplomatic embassies to all parts of the known world. Although neither Theophano nor Maria Agyropoulaina were in fact 'born in the purple', their lavish dowries confirmed western appreciation of Byzantine luxury objects: silks, enamels, ivories and jewelry. By the mid-eleventh century, however, Byzantine brides began to provoke anxiety, even condemnation, in the West. In this illustrated talk I will examine the reasons for this shift and set the purple-born princesses in the context of medieval international diplomacy.

Wednesday April 16th, 2008 at 6pm in the Salmon Room on the 2nd Floor.

Glen Bowersock

"The Horizons of Antiquity"
Inaugural Leon Levy Lecture

November 1, 2007