Lamp as a Symbol in Theology and Iconology of Light in the Mediterranean / Light and fire have been a part of the religious experience since the dawn of civilization, its cultic use can be traced back to as early as the Paleolithic. Seen as divine emanations, light and fire were experienced as a symbol of the divine presence. This symbolism can be…[Read more]

This paper studies transmutation theory as found in the texts attributed to Zosimus of Panopolis,“the philosopher Synesius,” and “the philosopher Olym-piodorus of Alexandria.” It shows that transmutation theory (i.e. a theory explain-ing the complete transformation of substances) is mostly absent from the work attributed to these three authors…[Read more]

Many scholars of ancient Greek religion would probably agree that the use of curse tablets in the ancient Mediterranean world ‘cut across all social categories’. From a comparative perspective, it would be surprising if high levels of Greek literacy had been achieved by all social classes in classical and Hellenistic times. Greek literature,…[Read more]

We present a fully automated workflow for phylogenetic reconstruction on large datasets, consisting of two novel methods, one for fast detection of cognates and one for fast Bayesian phylogenetic inference. Our results show that the methods take less than a few minutes to process language families that have so far required large amounts of time…[Read more]

This paper is intended to be an approach to the festivities that take place mainly in Thrace and Macedonia, but also in other Greek geographical locations, during the dodecaimero and the three weeks of Carnival prior to Lent and during other important Christian days. Since ancient times, these festivals have maintained their origins in initiation…[Read more]

This short essay considers rabbinic ideas of reproduction, likeness, and species variation in conversation with the work of Joann Sfar and Sunaura Taylor. Part of Ancient Jew Review’s Forum on Animals.

Neis traces an expression of bodily language (kavvanat halev, literally “directing the heart”) from biblical to early rabbinic sources and demonstrates how it oriented people to the affective, physical, and spatial dimensions of prayer. Rejecting a binary that would treat such language as either mental/subjective (and thus metaphorically) or sol…[Read more]

Preview of Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature (SBL Press, 2019) https://secure.aidcvt.com/sbl/ProdDetails.asp?ID=064211C&PG=1&Type=BL&PCS=SBL

From SBL Press:
In her book, Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature, Meredith J. C. Warren identifies and defines a new genre in ancient texts that she terms…[Read more]

The early Church regarded dreams as potential messages from God, private revelations that appear as visions while the soul is undistracted by bodily sensations. Sleep, with its accompanying dreams, was also believed to be the temporary state of the disembodied soul as it awaits the resurrection of its body at the Last Judgment. Not only did…[Read more]

Early medieval literate culture, dominated by Christian monks and clerics, was focused on interpreting biblical texts and correlating them with a theological system devised in patristic times and late antiquity. Central to biblical exegesis was the fourfold method that distinguished the literal (or historical) sense of Old Testament narratives…[Read more]

Tracing an early rabbinic approach to the human, this article analyzes how the Tannaim (early Palestinian Jewish sages) of the Mishnah and Tosefta (redacted ca. early 3rd century CE) set the human side by side with other species, and embedded their account within broader considerations of reproduction, zoology and species crossings. The human here…[Read more]

This article makes several claims. It argues that the genre of “pilgrim’s literature” is present in rabbinic sources, and identifies rabbinic pilgrimage itineraries. Secondly, it shows that aside from the expected melancholic post-Temple itinerary, there exist itineraries for Babylon and for biblical conquest that do a very dif…[Read more]

Horace is sometimes said to profess in the Odes a “poetics of presence”, a philosophical or aesthetic orientation that privileges the here and now. This paper examines how such an orientation toward the present might interact with the poet’s use of the future tense and especially with those future verbs that seem to postpone focal events. It is co…[Read more]

In Books 1-3 of the Odes, Horace makes clear a hierarchy of divinity through the structures of lyric address and distinguishes the gods and goddesses of his poetic preference from the preeminent deities of Augustan state cult. Specifically, he equivocates masterfully as he approaches Apollo and Jupiter while elevating Mercury, a minor figure in…[Read more]

This article introduces a new perspective, the history of vision, into the study of rabbinic literature. Specifically it examines how rabbinic visual regimes dealt with those objects and images that it designated as idols. It argues that rabbis took seeing seriously and that they developed a set of strategies to shape the viewing of problematic…[Read more]

Blog post, published with the blog “History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences”. Here shared in form of a paper draft. Please cite as:

List, Johann-Mattis. 2018. Towards a history of concept list compilation in historical linguistics. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. http://hiphilangsci.net/2018/10/31/concept-list-compilation/

The Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications (CLICS), has established a computer-assisted framework for the interactive representation of cross-linguistic colexification patterns. In its current form, it has proven to be a useful tool for various kinds of investigation into cross-linguistic semantic associations, ranging from studies on…[Read more]

Current efforts in computational historical linguistics are predominantly concerned
with phylogenetic inference. Methods for ancestral state reconstruction have only
been applied sporadically. In contrast to phylogenetic algorithms, automatic reconstruction methods presuppose phylogenetic information in order to explain what has
evolved when…[Read more]

With increasing amounts of digitally available data from all over the world, manual annotation of cognates in multi-lingual word lists becomes more and more time-consuming in historical linguistics. Using available software packages to pre-process the data prior to manual analysis can drastically speed-up the process of cognate detection.…[Read more]

This is an Accepted Manuscript, for an article forthcoming in Antiquity (2019), and remains subject to pre-publication type-editing and proofing. Please cite as James M. Harland, ‘Memories of Migration? So-called “Anglo-Saxon” Burial Costume of the 5th Century AD,’ Antiquity 93 (2019). A link to the final publication at Cambridge University Press…[Read more]