In 2015 the Office of Art and Archives focused on adding more art and archival content to the History, Art & Archives website (http://history.house.gov/). The website is a collaborative effort: curators and archivists in the Office of Art and Archives and Office of the Historian staff work on and contribute content. The Office of Art and Archives…[Read more]

In the history of old Romanian painting, the icon of Saint John the Baptist with scenes from his life from Budești‑Josani occupies a very important place due to its exceptional artistic quality, as well as the Slavonic inscription with the master’s signature and date. The inscription, in a very poor state of preservation, has already been part…[Read more]

This study identified the icon of Virgin Moscovita and the icon of the Holy Mandylion, described in Konstantinos Dapontes’ writings, with the icon of the Virgin and the icon of the Holy Mandylion preserved in his family monastery Evangelistria in Skopelos island. We can now retrace the “biography”of these two artefacts, the history of their creat…[Read more]

La découverte d’une inscription slavonne dans le narthex de l’église du monastère de Râmeț (comté d’Alba) en 1966, sa relecture avec des moyens techniques spéciaux en 1978 et sa publication officielle en 1985 ont porté à l’attention des historiens le nom du peintre (Mihul du Criș-Blanc), le nom de l’évêque fondateur (archevêque Gélase),…[Read more]

The Tribe of Dan has always appeared to biblical scholars and archaeologists as something of an enigma. For decades, certain scholars, beginning with Yigael Yadin, have proposed a connection between the Denyen/Danaoi Sea People and the Danites of Ancient Israel, arguing that the former became the latter and were adopted into Israel at a later date…[Read more]

A summary and review of a creative and neutral approach to teaching the Documentary Hypothesis to undergraduate students.

This paper surveys potential counterparts of the ancient Egyptian concept of mAat (maat) from other cultures and summarises such cross-cultural studies as have already been completed. Its scope ranges from antiquity to the present day and across Europe, Africa, the Near East, India, China, Australia and the Americas. Paradigms that appear to…[Read more]

The article is published in the official Journal of The Institute of Science and Technology (ISSN 2040-1868)

The act of classification has the widest implications for scholarship. Whatever the format, it involves the totality of our being. The use of our eyes indicates that decisions about whatever it is that we observe have already been made. Yet the interaction between the mechanical act of seeing and the mind or memory has rarely been registered. An…[Read more]

Some thoughts on Boris Eldagsen’s Image, well ‘photograph’, an AI generated image.

Review of the literature on pictograph sites in the Canadian Shield with specific reference to those found in the Lake of the Woods, in north-western Ontario, Canada.

This booklet serves as documentation and manual for the app Creative Museum, the new participatory platform of the Badisches Landesmuseum. The goal of the app is to create a digital space for debate. Museum employees, experts and citizens are invited to get into conversation with each other and share their contributions on equal terms. The topics…[Read more]

This publication is part of the project “Ricontrans – Visual Culture, Piety and Propaganda. Transfer and Reception of Russian Religious Art in the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean (16th to Early 20th Century)”, funded from the European Research Council (erc) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant…[Read more]

Does “authorship” still have a place in the study of the Hebrew Bible? Historical criticism has long sought to uncover the human authors behind the biblical texts. But how might the “death of the author,” so forcefully declared by Roland Barthes over fifty years ago, change the contours of this search? This volume brings together leading experts…[Read more]

This work provides new insights into the relationship between the Holiness legislation in Leviticus 17–26 and processes of cultic centralization in the Persian period. The author departs from the classical theory that Leviticus 17–26 merely presume, with minor modifications, a concept of centralization articulated in Deuteronomy. She shows how Lev…[Read more]

Early Jewish writings are replete with narratives of warfare and collective violence. Yet relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to how these accounts of violence affected the way Jews structured their festal calendar. This essay examines the festivals described in 1 and 2 Maccabees that serve to commemorate the most impressive m…[Read more]

This Open Access volume reveals how violent pasts were constructed by ancient Mediterranean societies, the ideologies they served, and the socio-political processes and institutions they facilitated. Combining case studies from Anatolia, Egypt, Greece, Israel/Judah, and Rome, it moves beyond essentialist dichotomies such as “victors” and “va…[Read more]

Research into emotions is a developing field within Assyriology, and NLP tools for Akkadian texts offers new perspectives on the data. We use PMI-based word embeddings to explore the relationship between parts of the body and emotions. Using data downloaded from Oracc, we ask which parts of the body were semantically linked to emotions. We do this…[Read more]

Beards were part of a visual matrix of expressing masculinity during the NeoAssyrian period (ca. 934–612 BCE). But masculinity does not exist in isolation and interacts with other aspects of identity. I will examine the beard as an indicator of masculine status during the Neo-Assyrian period. This will be done through investigating the visual a…[Read more]