Didyma

Hundreds of travel guide and travel accounts are flooding the market. Printed or in electronic form, in part, very extensive and detailed. But what if you are planning a short vacation, or simply a round trip to and not nearly have the time to work through hundreds of facts and details? All who wish to enjoy the beauty of the region and the wonderful artwork this series of books is dedicated to. The first book deals with the Aegean Coast and here in particular with the places Priene, Miletus and Didyma.

Sixty years after the end of World War II Stylianos (Stelios) Perrakis, Greek-born finance professor who has lived most of his life in Canada, went back to Greece to investigate a traumatic event in his family's history that colored his childhood years. The circumstances surrounding the kidnapping and murder of his maternal uncle by a Communist death squad in May 1944, in the Argolida region of the Greek Peloponnese, were cloaked in mystery, never discussed openly by family members. Using trial transcripts, interviews with survivors and with people involved in his uncle's kidnapping, and such primary materials as unpublished diaries and family correspondence, Perrakis managed to document the full sequence of events that led up to this family tragedy. He then widened his focus to draw out the implications of this particular event, painting an intimate picture of a prosperous middle-class provincial world faced with extraordinary challenges that it was unable to overcome.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Ancient Prophecy: Near Eastern, Biblical, and Greek Perspectives is the first monograph-length comparative study on prophetic divination in ancient Near Eastern, biblical, and Greek sources. Prophecy is one of the ways humans have believed to become conversant with what is believed to be superhuman knowledge. The prophetic process of communication involves the prophet, her/his audience, and the deity from whom the message allegedly comes from. Martti Nissinen introduces a wealth of ancient sources documenting the prophetic phenomenon around the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, whether cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia, the Hebrew Bible, Greek inscriptions, or ancient historians. Nissinen provides an up-to-date presentation of textual sources, the number of which has increased substantially in recent times. In addition, the study includes four analytical comparative chapters. The first demonstrates the altered state of consciousness to be one of the central characteristics of the prophets' public behavior. The second discusses the prophets' affiliation with temples, which are the typical venues of the prophetic performance. The third delves into the relationship between prophets and kings, which can be both critical and supportive. The fourth shows gender-inclusiveness to be one of the peculiar features of the prophetic agency, which could be executed by women, men, and genderless persons as well. The ways prophetic divination manifests itself in ancient sources depend not only on the socio-religious position of the prophets in a given society, but also on the genre and purpose of the sources. Nissinen contends that, even though the view of the ancient prophetic landscape is restricted by the fragmentary and secondary nature of the sources, it is possible to reconstruct essential features of prophetic divination at the socio-religious roots of the Western civilization.

A fresh examination of early Christianity by an international team of New Testament and classical scholars Volume 5 of The First Urban Churches investigates the urban context of Christian churches in first-century Roman Colossae, Hierapolis, and Laodicea. Building on the methodologies introduced in the first volume and supplementing the in-depth studies of Corinth, Ephesus, and Philippi (vols. 2-4), essays in this volume challenge readers to reexamine preconceived understandings of the early church and to grapple with the meaning and context of Christianity in its first-century Roman colonial context. Features: Analysis of urban evidence found in inscriptions, papyri, archaeological remains, coins, and iconography Proposed reconstructions of the past and its social, religious, and political significance A nuanced, informed portrait of ancient urban life in the cities of the Lycus Valley

These are the Proceedings of one of the colloquia organized by the International Research Group "Society and Administration in the Hellenistic and Roman World", patronized by the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research in Brussels and composed of ancient historians of the Universities of Leuven, Brussels, Antwerp, Bologna, Leiden, Trier, Koln, Gottingen, Thessaloniki, Cambridge and London (see also Studia Hellenistica 34, 1998, and 37, 2002). The contributions cover a wide range of topics and a vast geographical area: new papyrological evidence on the taxes imposed by Vespasian on the Jews in the Empire and the collection of arrears by Domitian; new papyrological evidence on the foundation and organization of poleis in Ptolemaic Egypt; problems of taxation and other administrative questions in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt; the upper strata of officialdom in the Seleucid kingdom and the entourage of the Antigonids; the Epirote Confederacy; the collapse of the monarchy in Syracuse; royal visits and regal displays in Ptolemaic Egypt; Egyptian temples and the Ptolemaic army; the settlements in the northern Sinai; the relationships between Greek subjects and Roman authorities in Asia Minor and elsewhere; people of Greek origin in Italy and the western provinces; the payment of Augustan troops in Germania Inferior. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Professors Edmond Van 't Dack (1923-1997) and Hubert Devijver (1936-1997).