Hallowed Stewards

Sheds new light on the complex and long overlooked financial aspect of Athenian society

A nuanced narrative about the intersections of religious and economic life in early Christianity The divine was an active participant in the economic spheres of the ancient Mediterranean world. Evidence demonstrates that gods and goddesses were represented as owning goods, holding accounts, and producing wealth through the mediation of religious and civic officials. This book argues that early Christ-followers also used financial language to articulate and imagine their relationship to the divine. Theo-economics—intertwined theological and economic logics in which divine and human beings regularly transact with one another—permeate the letters of Paul and other texts connected with Pauline communities. Unlike other studies, which treat the ancient economy and religion separately, Divine Accounting takes seriously the overlapping of themes such as poverty, labor, social status, suffering, cosmology, and eschatology in material evidence from the ancient Mediterranean and early Christian texts.

Landscape has been a key theme in world archaeology and trans-cultural art history over the last half century, particularly in the study of painting in art history and in all questions of human intervention and the placement of monuments in the natural world within archaeology. However, the representation of landscape has been rather less addressed in the scholarship of the archaeologically-accessed visual cultures of the ancient world. The kinds of reliefs, objects, and paintings discussed here have a significant purchase on matters concerned with landscape and space in the visual sphere, but were discovered within archaeological contexts and by means of excavation. Through case studies focused on the invention of wilderness imagery in ancient China, the relation of monuments to landscape in ancient Greece, the place of landscape painting in Mesoamerican Maya art, and the construction of sacred landscape across Eurasia between Stonehenge and the Silk Road via Pompeii, this book emphasises the importance of thinking about models of landscape in ancient art, as well as the value of comparative approaches in underlining core aspects of the topic. Notably, it explores questions of space, both actual and conceptual, including how space is configured through form and representation.

An interdisciplinary discussion engaging classics, archaeology, religious studies, and the social sciences The Struggle over Class brings together scholars from the fields of New Testament and early Christianity to examine Christian texts in light of the category of class. Historically rigorous and theoretically sophisticated, this collection presents a range of approaches to, and applications of, class in the study of the epistles, the gospels, Acts, apocalyptic texts, and patristic literature. Contributors Alicia J. Batten, Alan H. Cadwallader, Cavan W. Concannon, Zeba Crook, James Crossley, Lorenzo DiTommaso, Philip F. Esler, Michael Flexsenhar III, Steven J. Friesen, Caroline Johnson Hodge, G. Anthony Keddie, Jaclyn Maxwell, Christina Petterson, Jennifer Quigley, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Daniëlle Slootjes, and Emma Wasserman challenge both scholars and students to articulate their own positions in the ongoing scholarly struggle over class as an analytical category.

A selection of essays on symbola, as the tokens of Classical Athens were called, bringing together scholars of various disciplines and professional categories (numismatists, historians, museum curators) that intends to reshape our knowledge on the roles these objects played in the Athenian Democracy. This is a series of case studies which aspires to test old theories and probe new assumptions. The first section explores the extent to which our knowledge has evolved since symbola were first distinguished from coins. Four essays demonstrate how tokens, as material manifestations of particular institutions, contributed to the formation of civic and political identity in the city-state of Athens and the roles they played in ensuring legal and political equality. The second section of the volume on new finds aims to develop expertise in studying tokens and increase relevant knowledge. Finally, a third section contains comparative studies from Sicily, Jerusalem and Ephesos, aiming to adopt a comparative methodology for a better understanding of the characteristics and roles of tokens from across the ancient Mediterranean. Contributors: Vera Geelmuyden Bulgurlu, Tumay Hazinedar Coscun, Antonino Crisà, Yoav Farhi, P. J. Finglass, Mairi Gkikaki, Irini Karra, James Kierstead, John H. Kroll, Stamatoula Makrypodi, Christian Mondello, Daria Russo, Martin Schäfer. An Open Access edition will be available on publication.

In 508/7 B.C.E., after years of chaos and uncertainty, the city of Athens was rocked by a momentous occurrence: the passage of a series of reforms that resulted in what has come to be known as the world's first democracy. Exactly how the Athenians did this is still a fundamental question 2,500 years later. The results of the reforms transformed the very nature of what it meant to be Athenian and their far-reaching effects would come to leave their mark on nearly every aspect of society, including the structures at which they prayed and in which they debated legislation. By attending to the built environment broadly, and monumental architecture specifically, this book investigates the built environment of ancient Athens precisely during this time, the late Archaic period (ca. 514/13 - 480/79 B.C.E.). It was these decades, filled with transition and disorder, when the Athenians transformed their political system from a tyranny to a democracy. Concurrent with the socio-political changes, they altered the physical landscape and undertook the monumental articulation of the city and countryside. Interpreting the nature of the fledgling democracy from a material standpoint, this book approaches the questions and problems of the early political system through the lens of buildings. The focus on monumental structures erected during this particular time period demonstrates how the built environment worked to facilitate the functioning of the nascent political regime. While Athenian democracy--its institutions, ideology, and capabilities--has been intensively studied, little attention has been paid to the intersection between built structures and the political system during its earliest phases. This book draws attention to a pivotal period of Athenian political history through the built environment, thereby exposing the richness of the material record and illustrating how it participated in the creation of a new democratic Athenian identity.

Covering a broad chronological and geographic range and a great variety of source types, this volume examines the presence and activities of ancient women in the public domain, for example as rulers, patrons, priestesses, wives, athletes and pilgrims.