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Abstract
As the scholarly border between China and Southeast Asia has dissipated, so the vast region from the Yangtze River to Malaysia has been integrated into a whole. There was an inexorable expansion of copper-base expertise southward, reaching Lingnan and Yunnan by 1400-1200 bc, and Southeast Asia one or two centuries later, with ultimate origins in the Asian steppes via the Chinese Central Plains and Sichuan. As prospectors identified and exploited the Southeast Asian copper mines, a limited range of copper-base artefacts moved along established exchange routes, including socketed axes, bangles and spears. At first rare and used to advertise status in communities advantaged by a strategic location, with increased production and in situ casting within consumer settlements, bronzes were no longer associated with social elites. Only with different regional stimuli during the Iron Age, were bronzes again employed by societies characterized by social inequality.
Abstract
The Bronze Age was a time of pivotal economic change when new long-distance trading networks became associated with a macro-regional division of labour and decentralised political complexity. These developments occurred against the background of a shifting mosaic of subsistence patterns, which included the east-west exchange of crops across Eurasia and (in some areas) greater use of secondary products. As Bronze Age economies became more specialised and diverse, it might be assumed that there was also an increased emphasis on the procurement and trade of fish and other marine resources. However, archaeological analyses of such resources are limited in contrast to land-based subsistence patterns and many questions remain. This essay aims to build a broad interpretive framework for analysing the role of marine resources in the Bronze Age. Our provisional results find that an increased emphasis on specialist systems of agropastoralism reduced the use of marine resources in many parts of Eurasia during this period. However, evidence from Japan and the eastern Mediterranean suggests that, at least in some regions, marine resources became commodities traded over long-distances by the late Bronze Age, though this requires further quantification. Island Southeast Asia displays a different pattern from other regions considered here in a greater continuity of marine resource use from the Neolithic into the historic era, perhaps due to a lower reliance on agropastoralism.
Abstract
This paper considers the extent to which ancient Nubian cultures might be considered ‘Bronze Age’ during the Second Millennium bce and questions the application of the term ‘Bronze Age’ to Middle Nubian cultures in some scholarly discourse. Using evidence from Nubian cemeteries and settlements in the Nile Valley, it is argued that while the Kerma culture and ancient Kush might be seen to participate in Bronze Age networks, other contemporaneous Nubian cultures did not directly participate. The author stresses the important of defining terminologies and a deeper consideration of Eurocentric perspectives when studying ancient northeast African cultures.
Abstract
This article aims to revisit the terms ‘Jade Age’ and ‘Bronze Age’ in respect to Chinese archaeology and history. It argues that the active exchanges of techniques, ideas, and tools between the bronze and stone producers have blurred the definitions of these periods and proposes that we focus more on the concrete agents in history. This article adopts evidence from the cold mechanical treatments of precious stones and bronzes. It presents and analyzes traces of polishing and chiseling on bronze surfaces and argues that some of the traces may have been left by abrasives as practiced in the lithic industry. This demonstrates that lapidary skills and the post-casting treatments of bronze objects were interrelated.
Abstract
At the critical junction of the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, marked by the fall of the Ur iii polity, the city of Susa in today’s southwest Iran left Mesopotamian control and became the lowland seat of the Shimashki and then Sukkalmah dynasts of the Zagros mountains, who elevated Elam as a significant power on the dynamic early Middle Bronze Age Near Eastern geopolitical stage. This transition ushered in new political, economic, and social conditions, which this paper argues can be detected in Susa’s mortuary record, particularly in the consumption of copper-base materials. A comparison of burial assemblages and evidence for the copper-base metallurgy industry before and after the transition demonstrates that while copper-base objects had already played a critical social role under Mesopotamian rule, their deployment in the structuring of Susian society expanded with the transition to eastern rule and more widespread changes in economic production and trade.
Abstract
Situated at the crossroads between Northeast Africa, the Mediterranean, the Near East and the Indian Ocean, ancient Egypt was a strategic pathway that facilitated contacts and the circulation of peoples, products and ideas across these vast regions. Sometimes the monarchy took the initiative in these contacts, whereas in other cases, mobile populations, local leaders, itinerant merchants and independent individuals fulfilled such a role. Egyptian regions participated in these exchanges in distinctive ways. Hence, control over wealth flows, access to coveted goods, contacts with privileged trading partners and attracting royal support represented significant moves in their strategies. A constant tension between different political models (centralized, confederacies of cities and territories, regional kingdoms) reemerged through the millennia. This often led to the collapse of the central authority (as it happened around 2160 bc) and was inspired, at least in part, by the political impact of trading activities.
Abstract
Andreas Gryphius is known as a poet and scholar, but less as a chiromancer. His biographers, however, identify him as such. This article wants to show, on the basis of wide-ranging textual evidence, that Gryphius has a differentiated relationship to chiromancy and knows how to combine appreciation and criticism in the ironic play of his epigrams, in accordance with the early modern scholarly dispute about chiromancy.
Abstract
In Pamphilus Gengenbach’s famous carnival play Der Nollhart (1517), ten characters discuss their future with four prophets: Nollhart, Methodius, Birgitta, and Sibylla. The play, its protagonists, and especially its prognostic and apocalyptic motifs have been the subject of scholarly interest for decades, but the Jew who enters the stage at the end of the play has been largely absent from research. This article focuses on this gap and argues that Gengenbach not only used the Jew to reproduce anti-Jewish sentiments and stereotypes, but also introduced him as a fifth prophet in the play. If Christians failed to recognize the signs of the end of days and act accordingly, the Jewish past and present – as depicted by Gengenbach’s Jew – would become a Christian future filled with captivity, death, loss, and abandonment. Accordingly, Der Nollhart is a remarkable example of how Gengenbach established the present and future through a Jewish past.
Abstract
This article deals with the different versions of the Losbuch der Beginen und Begarden. A comparative analysis of various selected parameters shows the ‘flexibility’ of the text and its illustrations. It is possible that its unique success – as confirmed by its broad tradition – is precisely due to its open structure. The exemplary observations in this article are imbedded in rather general thoughts on the genre ‘Losbuch’ (sortes).