Between Text And Artifact

These essays by archaeologists and biblical scholars teaching in undergraduate, graduate, and seminary settings provide biblical studies teachers all the tools needed to integrate the most recent archaeological literature and audio-visual material into their teaching and scholarship. Paperback edition available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org).

Provides teachers of biblical studies all the tools needed to integrate the most recent archaeological information into their teaching and scholarship. Practical advice about the best available literature and audio-visual material in the field of archaeology related to the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and early Judaism, women in the ancient world, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. The authors examine how visual and material data can help us understand political and social motivations for events described in the text; artifacts can remind us of the voices left out of texts and alert us to biases that authors and editors exhibit. When viewed alongside biblical literature, the archaeological record can help create new knowledge that leads to a richly textured set of historical reconstructions of the cultures of the biblical world.

Can archaeological remains be made to “speak” when brought into conjunction with texts? Can written remains, on stone or papyrus, shed light on the parables of Jesus, or on the Jewish view of afterlife? What are the limits to the use of artifactual data, and when is the value overstated? Text and Artifact addresses the complex and intriguing issue of how primary religious texts from the ancient Mediterranean world are illuminated by, and in turn illuminate, the ever-increasing amount of artifactual evidence available from the surrounding world. The book honours Peter Richardson, and the first two chapters offer appreciations of this scholarship and teaching. The remaining chapters focus on early Christianity, late-antique Judaism and topics germane to the Roman world at large. Many of the essays relate to features of Jewish life — the epigraphic evidence for gentile converts to Judaism or for Jewish defectors, ancient accounts of the Essenes or of the siege of Masada, and the material context of the first great rabbinic work, the Mishnah. Other essays connect early Christian texts with the social and cultural realia of their day — modes of travel, notions of gender, patronage and benefaction, the relation of tenants and owners — or reflect on the aesthetics of Christian architecture and the relation between building and ritual in Constantinian churches. One study relates the writing of the famous novelist Apuleius to a household mithraeum in Ostia, while another explores the changing appropriation of religious realia as the Roman world became Christian. These wide-ranging and original studies demonstrate clearly that texts and artifacts can be mutually supportive. Equally, they point to ways in which artifacts, no less than texts, are inherently ambiguous and teach us to be cautious in our conclusions.

Books do not just contain texts: books themselves are cultural artefacts, which convey many meanings in their own right, meanings which interact with the texts they contain. Awareness of the many significances of books as cultural and textual objects reshapes the traditional disciplines of textual theory, analytic bibliography, codicology and palaeography, while the advent of electronic books, and digital methods for representing print books, is introducing a new dimension to our understanding. Seven essays in this volume, ranging over medieval Portuguese and Swedish manuscripts, eighteenth-century Icelandic editions, Australian playtexts, Thackeray and Anita Brookner, and Stefan George, consider these questions from the broad perspective of textual scholarship. Texts may exist on the borderland of word and not-word; or they may spring from borderlands of nation or culture; or they may be considered from the margins of neighbouring disciplines. So readers must set the texts within contexts, to see the play of text against border. Essays in this volume explore different texts against varying backgrounds -- Pound's Cantos, Joyce's Ulysses, Trollope's An Eye for an Eye, Woolf's The Waves -- while essays by McGann and Lernout argue the dimensionality of text on the intersection of print and digital media. Implicit in all these essays is the contention, that textual scholarship must influence literary interpretation. Two final essays focus directly on this, in the cases of Melville's Moby-Dick and Emily Dickinson's late fragments. An extensive reviews section completes this volume.

Is it possible to trace the footprints of the historical Sokrates in Athens? Was there really an individual named Romulus, and if so, when did he found Rome? Is the tomb beneath the high altar of St. Peter’s Basilica home to the apostle Peter? To answer these questions, we need both dirt and words—that is, archaeology and history. Bringing the two fields into conversation, Artifact and Artifice offers an exciting excursion into the relationship between ancient history and archaeology and reveals the possibilities and limitations of using archaeological evidence in writing about the past. Jonathan M. Hall employs a series of well-known cases to investigate how historians may ignore or minimize material evidence that contributes to our knowledge of antiquity unless it correlates with information gleaned from texts. Dismantling the myth that archaeological evidence cannot impart information on its own, he illuminates the methodological and political principles at stake in using such evidence and describes how the disciplines of history and classical archaeology may be enlisted to work together. He also provides a brief sketch of how the discipline of classical archaeology evolved and considers its present and future role in historical approaches to antiquity. Written in clear prose and packed with maps, photos, and drawings, Artifact and Artifice will be an essential book for undergraduates in the humanities.

Explores the relationship between literature and international relations and considers how writing resists norms and puts any fixed or final idea of community in question. Part I examines the European context (1860 to 1945) and Part II analyses the traditions of disruptive writing that emerged out of sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia after 1945.

5,000 years in the future, humankind has spread across thousands of worlds, and more than a dozen different governments exist in an uneasy truce. But human beings have found no signs of other life anywhere approaching human intelligence. This changes when scientists discover a sunless planet they name Danann, travelling the void just beyond the edge of the Galaxy at such a high speed that it cannot be natural. Its continents and oceans have been sculpted and shaped, with but a single megaplex upon it--close to perfectly preserved--with tens of thousands of near-identical metallic-silver-blue towers set along curved canals. Yet Danann has been abandoned for so long that even the atmosphere has frozen solid. Within a few years Danann will approach an area of singularities that will make exploration and investigation impossible. Orbital shuttle pilot Jiendra Chang, artist Chendor Barna, and history professor Liam Fitzhugh are recruited by the Comity government and its Deep Space Service, along with scores of other experts as part of an unprecedented and unique expedition to unravel Danann's secrets. And there are forces that will stop at nothing to prevent them, even if it means interstellar war. Other Series by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. The Saga of Recluce The Imager Portfolio The Corean Chronicles The Spellsong Cycle The Ghost Books The Ecolitan Matter The Forever Hero Timegod's World Other Books The Green Progression Hammer of Darkness The Parafaith War Adiamante Gravity Dreams The Octagonal Raven Archform: Beauty The Ethos Effect Flash The Eternity Artifact The Elysium Commission Viewpoints Critical Haze Empress of Eternity The One-Eyed Man Solar Express At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Is it possible to trace the footprints of the historical Sokrates in Athens? Was there really an individual named Romulus, and if so, when did he found Rome? Is the tomb beneath the high altar of St. Peter’s Basilica home to the apostle Peter? To answer these questions, we need both dirt and words—that is, archaeology and history. Bringing the two fields into conversation, Artifact and Artifice offers an exciting excursion into the relationship between ancient history and archaeology and reveals the possibilities and limitations of using archaeological evidence in writing about the past. Jonathan M. Hall employs a series of well-known cases to investigate how historians may ignore or minimize material evidence that contributes to our knowledge of antiquity unless it correlates with information gleaned from texts. Dismantling the myth that archaeological evidence cannot impart information on its own, he illuminates the methodological and political principles at stake in using such evidence and describes how the disciplines of history and classical archaeology may be enlisted to work together. He also provides a brief sketch of how the discipline of classical archaeology evolved and considers its present and future role in historical approaches to antiquity. Written in clear prose and packed with maps, photos, and drawings, Artifact and Artifice will be an essential book for undergraduates in the humanities.

Writing as Material Practice grapples with the issue of writing as a form of material culture in its ancient and more recent manifestations, and in the contexts of production and consumption. Fifteen case studies explore the artefactual nature of writing — the ways in which materials, techniques, colour, scale, orientation and visibility inform the creation of inscribed objects and spaces, as well as structure subsequent engagement, perception and meaning making. Covering a temporal span of some 5000 years, from c.3200 BCE to the present day, and ranging in spatial context from the Americas to the Near East, the chapters in this volume bring a variety of perspectives which contribute to both specific and broader questions of writing materialities. The authors also aim to place past graphical systems in their social contexts so they can be understood in relation to the people who created and attributed meaning to writing and associated symbolic modes through a diverse array of individual and wider social practices.

Six scholars explore the nature of history and historical reconstruction and the place of history within biblical studies. The uncritical use of both text and artifact that continues to dominate histories of Israel and Judah testifies to the need for a wider grassroots awareness of the basic issues involved in doing history as a biblical scholar. A growing number of scholars are questioning the theoretical underpinnings of the main 'schools' of research and are calling for an approach that makes a more critical evaluation of both textual and artifactual material before using it in historical reconstruction. These essays were first presented at the annual SBL/ASOR meeting in 1989 in a symposium entitled 'The Role of History and Archaeology in Biblical Studies'.