Archives In The Ancient World

This interdisciplinary volume offers a systematic approach to archival documents and to the societies which created them, addressing questions of formal aspects of creating, writing, and storing ancient documents, and showing how widely archival systems were copied and adapted.

The research group Legal Documents in Ancient Societies aims to investigate the legal and administrative systems in a variety of societies of the ancient world through a document-based approach, crossing traditional disciplinary boundaries and providing a locus for scholars who work in different but contiguous fields to discuss and compare the results of their individual research. The fourth meeting of the group was held at the University of Trieste on 30 September-1 October 2011 and focused on the study of archives and archival records and the different ways they interlocked with, and were functional to, the workings of the ancient administrative, and political, systems.- This book, part of a series aiming to investigate the legal systems of ancient societies through a document-based, comparative approach, focuses on the study of archives and archival records and their interplay with the workings of administrative and political systems. The papers are arranged in four sections dealing with the Ancient Near East, Classical Greece, the Persian Tradition and the Hellenistic World, and the Roman Empire. The themes touched upon chronologically span from the early second millennium B.C. to the late Roman Empire and geographically range from Mesopotamia to the Western Mediterranean. The archives considered, public and private, are conspicuous for their variety and reflect diverse archival concepts and traditions but a number of common patterns also emerge in respect to their physical organization, to the classification of texts, the function of record-keeping and the role of seals. We are entitled to speak of a recurring ‘archival behaviour’. - Michele Faraguna is associate professor of Greek history at the University of Trieste. His work has focused on Greek political, administrative, economic, and legal history from the Archaic age to early Hellenism. He is the author of Atene nell’età di Alessandro. Problemi politici, economici, finanziari (1992) in addition to many articles. He edited Dynasthai didaskein. Studi in onore di Filippo Càssola (2006) and Nomos despotes. Law and Legal Procedures in Ancient Greek Society (2007). He is a member of the Editorial board of the Encyclopedia of Ancient History (2013). He is currently working, together with Laura Boffo, on a book on public archives in the Greek cities.

The Book of the Ancient World is an account of our common heritage from the dawn of civilization to the coming of the Greeks. It is the story of how human beings began their great adventure of learning how to live; of how they have sought to satisfy the practical needs of their bodies, the questioning of their minds, and the searching of their spirits. To this end it subordinates details of political events to the record of things that lie at the foundation or our modern civilization. Dorothy Mills had an uncanny and unique ability to write history that is interesting and at the same time based on sound scholarship. Her direct, engaging approach is valued increasingly by the many parents in our day who are looking for reliable materials for home study, as well as by many private school educators. The highly-prized six volumes of her historical works (see below) have become very scarce on the used book market, and so Dawn Chorus has undertaken to reprint them as part of its effort to offer texts ideally suited to the needs of a new generation of teachers and students. In a world where the quality of education has so deteriorated, may the reissue of this wonderful historical series shine as a beacon to a new generation of young (and not so young) scholars . Dawn Chorus publishes these five other books by Dorothy Mills: The Book of the Ancient Greeks; The Book of the Ancient Romans; The People of Ancient Israel; The Middle Ages; and Renaissance and Reformation Times. Dawn Chorus has also republished another outstanding, and long-out-of-print historical series perfectly suited for home or school use (and highly recommended in home-school curricula), entitled The Picturesque Tale of Progress, by Olive Beaupre Miller. It is available in large format (9 volumes), or smaller, double-bound format (5 volumes).

Archives are considered to be collections of administrative, legal, commercial and other records or the actual place where they are located. They have become ubiquitous in the modern world, but emerged not much later than the invention of writing. Following Foucault, who first used the word archive in a metaphorical sense as "the general system of the formation and transformation of statements" in his "Archaeology of Knowledge" (1969), postmodern theorists have tried to exploit the potential of this concept and initiated the "archival turn". In recent years, however, archives have attracted the attention of anthropologists and historians of different denominations regarding them as historical objects and "grounding" them again in real institutions. The papers in this volume explore the complex topic of the archive in a historical, systematic and comparative context and view it in the broader context of manuscript cultures by addressing questions like how, by whom and for which purpose were archival records produced, and if they differ from literary manuscripts regarding materials, formats, and producers (scribes).

The circulation of books was the motor of classical civilization. But books were both expensive and rare, and so libraries - private and public, royal and civic - played key roles in articulating intellectual life. This collection, written by an international team of scholars, presents a fundamental reassessment of how ancient libraries came into being, how they were organized and how they were used. Drawing on papyrology and archaeology, and on accounts written by those who read and wrote in them, it presents new research on reading cultures, on book collecting and on the origins of monumental library buildings. Many of the traditional stories told about ancient libraries are challenged. Few were really enormous, none were designed as research centres, and occasional conflagrations do not explain the loss of most ancient texts. But the central place of libraries in Greco-Roman culture emerges more clearly than ever.

Mythical animals, florals, rosettes, religious and secular symbols, more.