Bet Rhomaye: Being and Belonging in Syriac in the Late Roman Empire

Bet Rhomaye: Being and Belonging in Syriac in the Late Roman Empire  

Wolfe, James

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Greek and Latin

My dissertation investigates how Syriac-speakers conceptualized their communal subjectivities within a Roman imperial context. I argue that Syriac literature from the Roman empire, and especially Syriac historiography and Syriac liturgical texts, provided Syriac-speakers with the discursive tools with which they could interpret recent history and formulate conceptions of the self within a Roman context. I argue that Syriac identity prior to the formation of the Syriac Orthodox Church was articulated through a dialectic with contemporary Roman imaginaries of ethnicity and citizenship. In doing so, I problematize scholarship that supposes `Syriacness' and `Romanness' were antithetical in the late Roman period. Instead, I contend that Syriac-speaking communities adopted, manipulated, and redefined discourses of Romanness in order to create their own Syriac-speaking Roman subjectivities.

Committee: Anthony Kaldellis (Advisor); David Brakke (Committee Member); Fritz Graf (Committee Member) 

 

Newly Open Access Journal: Journal of Ancient History

Journal of Ancient History

 

About this journal

The current volume of <journal name> is open access via Subscribe to Open (S2O). All accepted articles will be published under a Creative Commons license at no cost to authors. Learn more about De Gruyter Brill’s Subscribe to Open program.

Objective
The Journal of Ancient History aims to provide a forum for scholarship covering all aspects of ancient history and culture from the Archaic Period to Late Antiquity (roughly the ninth century BCE through the eighth century CE). The journal publishes peer-reviewed articles concerning the history and historiography (ancient and modern) of the ancient Mediterranean world and of neighboring civilizations in their relations with it. The journal is open to submissions in discipline s closely related to ancient history, including epigraphy, numismatics, religion and law. The journal does not currently publish book reviews.

Vol. 14 (2026):  

Issue 1

 

• Frontmatter
• Publicly Available

  Frontmatter

  August 18, 2026

  Page range: I-IV
• Requires Authentication

  Inventing Draco’s Politeia: Political Narrative in Late Fourth Century BCE Athens

  July 31, 2026

  Eleni Krikona

  Page range: 1-46
• Open Access

  The Four-Year War, Boiotia, and the Exile of Demochares of Leukonoe

  April 20, 2026

  Antonio Iacoviello

  Page range: 47-71
• Requires Authentication

  By the Numbers: Contextualizing the Inscribed Numerals on the Haspnaś Helmets from Vetulonia

  July 21, 2026

  Hilary Becker

  Page range: 72-111
• Open Access

  What was “Roman” about Roman Grand Strategy?

  June 16, 2026

  Kevin Blachford

  Page range: 112-132

   

See AWOL's full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies

 

 

The Porphyry Ceiling. Ethnicity and Power in the Late Roman Empire

The Porphyry Ceiling. Ethnicity and Power in the Late Roman Empire

Storti, Gemma

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Greek and Latin

My dissertation investigates how questions of ethnicity affected social mobility in the military and political context of the late Roman empire. In particular, I focus on individuals of the fourth and fifth centuries whose ethnic profiles can be defined as non-Roman, and I illustrate how their ethnic `otherness' could be considered as a liability for advancement in the Roman state. Through the analysis of selected case studies, I show that invisible barriers to recognition and promotion were in place in the late Roman world for individuals with a non-Roman pedigree. The careers of Alaric, Gainas, Stilicho, Aspar, Arbogast, Ricimer, Magnentius, and Zeno testify to the existence of these barriers, which I call the `Porphyry Ceiling' after the modern notion of the Glass Ceiling.

Committee: Anthony Kaldellis (Advisor) 

 

Bishops and Books: Literary Authenticity and Authority in Early Christianity

Bishops and Books: Literary Authenticity and Authority in Early Christianity

Koperski, Andrew

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, History

This dissertation examines early Christian literary hierarchies and categories, beginning in the pre-Christian context of the Hellenistic world and ending in the early Middle Ages. While scholars have long studied the formation of the biblical canon and the development of ancillary classes of text, such as the so-called “apocrypha,” many accounts of this history struggle to evince how these intellectual and institutional categories changed over time, which tends to obscure early Christian intellectual nuance and circumspection. This project improves our understanding by rooting early Christian evaluation of sacred (or potentially sacred) literature in the literary criticism of the classical world. It finds that, over the course of centuries, early Christianity generally moved away from the question of textual authenticity to the question of theological authority. In many cases, this movement corresponded to the maturation of the institutional episcopacy, particularly in the post-Constantinian era. Consequently, while Hellenistic literary criticism had once provided the chief template for Christians to evaluate books, hierarchies of text became increasingly institutionalized and supposed to have been settled by earlier authorities. By the sixth century, some Christian commentators forgot the meaning of the older categories altogether.

Committee: Kristina Sessa (Advisor) 

 

 

Coastal Archaeology in Small Islands: Prehistoric Lifeways, Research Perceptions, Biases, Methods and Approaches

Coastal Archaeology in Small Islands: Prehistoric Lifeways, Research Perceptions, Biases, Methods and Approaches

Edited by Maaike S. de Waal

The potential of investigating archaeology on small islands has long been underestimated. Non-local archaeologists often regard such islands as offering (too) few opportunities for prehistoric use and habitation due to limited resources and isolation, whereas prehistoric communities saw them as resource-rich and well-connected. Accessibility and logistical challenges further affect research on small or remote islands, reflecting modern biases shaped by reliance on cars and (digital) infrastructure.

This volume brings together research projects on prehistoric coastal archaeology in islands now perceived as ‘small’ or ‘remote’. Divided into five sections, it includes 14 chapters by 23 contributors, covering case studies from the Cyclades (Greece), Adriatic (Croatia), Mediterranean, Galician Atlantic (Spain), Kalmarsund (Sweden), Scotland, Fiji, Japan, and the Caribbean.

The contributions address themes such as insularity, interaction, and connectivity, as well as biases linked to ideas of remoteness and isolation. By examining what islands offered to prehistoric communities and tracing the continuous use of coastal locations, the volume shows that these were not marginal areas but activity hotspots. It also considers coastal erosion, threatened heritage, island ecology, and prehistoric resource use and adaptation.

It is hoped that this volume will inspire local and non-local archaeologists and archaeology enthusiasts to collaborate in documenting, investigating, and protecting coastal heritage in small islands.

Paperback ISBN: 9789464264630 | Hardback ISBN: 9789464264647 | Imprint: Sidestone Press | Format: 182x257mm | 282 pp. | Language: English | 5 illus. (bw) | 71 illus. (fc) | Keywords: small islands; coastal archaeology; prehistory; coastal processes; remoteness; site survival | download cover | DOI: 10.59641/s3v9p0q1r2 | CC-license: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

 

List of Figures and Tables

SECTION ONE. INTRODUCTION

Foreword
Helen Dawson

1. Introduction: Coastal Archaeology in Small Islands
Maaike S. de Waal

2. Island Archaeology: An Integrative Review from a Maritime Perspective
Veronica Walker Vadillo, & Kristin Ilves

SECTION TWO. MOBILITY, CONNECTEDNESS, AND INSULARITY

3. Connecting the Coastline. Visibility and Coastal Navigation in the Southern Coastline of Menorca during the Late Bronze Age
Alejandra Galmés-Alba, & Manuel Calvo Trias

4. Transporting Parian and Naxian Marble in the Cyclades
Judith Muñoz-Sogas

5. The Relevance of ‘Far-Flung’ Island Landscapes in Prehistoric Scotland: Loch Roag and the Complex of Calanais
Gail Higginbottom, Vincent Mom, & Mike Efstathiou

6. Challenging Concepts of Remoteness in the Outer Hebrides
Emily Gal, & Rebecca Rennell

7. Beachware as a Cultural Resource in Prehistoric Small Island Societies: Examples from the Western Isles, Scotland, and the Ryukyu Islands, Japan
Matt Law

SECTION THREE. METHODS

8. Project SENTINELA. Monitoring and Documenting the Erosive Processes on the Cultural Heritage of the Galician Atlantic Islands
Patricia Valle Abad, Alba Antía Rodríguez Novoa, Marta Lago Cerviño, & Adolfo Fernández Fernández

9. Three Eroding Shetland Sites: Community Monitoring and Targeted Investigation
Ellie Graham

10. Pre-colonial Indigenous Settlement in Eroding Coastal Landscapes. The Sites of Little Bay, Boscobelle Bay, and Skeetes Bay Plateau, Barbados
Maaike S. de Waal

SECTION FOUR. LANDSCAPE NARRATIVES

11. From Defense to Display: Bronze Age Hillforts on the Small Adriatic Island of Ist
Pio Domines Peter

12. What a Clam Can Reveal: Understanding Settlement Realignment c. 2500 cal yr BP in Southwestern Viti Levu, Fiji
Roselyn Kumar, Frank R. Thomas, and Amy Prendergast

13. Within the Stories of a Landscape – Archaeology and Folklore on The Blue Maiden, a Pristine Island in the Kalmar Strait
Kenneth Alexandersson & Anna-Karin Karlsson

SECTION FIVE. CONCLUSIONS

14. Epilogue: Looking Back and Looking Forwards
Maaike S. de Waal

Acknowledgements
Author Biographies

 

 

 

 

 

Unforeseeable Futures: Confronting Crises in the Archaeology of Highland Societies

Unforeseeable Futures: Confronting Crises in the Archaeology of Highland Societies

Edited by Susan Pollock, Reinhard Bernbeck, Gisela Eberhardt, and Martin Kehl 

Despite their apparent ubiquity today, archaeologists have seldom focused explicitly on crises. The authors in this book take up the challenge of doing so, drawing on archaeological cases from a wide temporal and spatial range. In addition to identifying crises, the contributions search for the factors that underlie them. These range from climate to disease, environmental destruction, sudden natural events such as volcanic eruptions, and intra- or intersocietal conflicts.

Factors are often intertwined in complex ways that lead to emergent properties and that can neither be attributable solely to anthropogenic nor to natural causes. Coping with crises include rearrangements of ways of life, such as increasing or decreasing mobility, the use of alternative (‘second-choice’) food sources, recourse to intensified or newly developed rituals, demise of old institutions and/or the building of new ones, and small-scale acts of subversion.

This book is the fifth volume of a series published by the German-Iranian research cooperation “The Iranian Highlands: Resiliences and Integration in Premodern Societies”. The goal of the research project is to shine a new light on communities and societies that populated the Iranian highlands and their more or less successful strategies to cope with the many vagaries, the constant changes and risks of their natural and humanly shaped environments.

 Paperback ISBN: 9789464271713 | Hardback ISBN: 9789464271720 | Imprint: Sidestone Press Academics | Format: 210x280mm | 228 pp. | The Iranian Highlands. Early Societies between Resilience and Integration 5 | Language: English | 19 illus. (bw) | 63 illus. (fc) | Keywords: crisis in archaeology; crisis factors; coping with crisis; highland societies; resilience; climate change; migration | download cover | DOI: 10.59641/y3b9v0w1x2 | CC-license: CC BY 4.0

 

Crises – An Introduction
Reinhard Bernbeck, Susan Pollock, and Martin Kehl

Characterising crises

Crises of Our Own Making: Finding a Way Out of the Resilience Myth for Archaeology
Matthew C. Reilly

Are Archaeologists Crisis-philic? Exploring the Nexus of Climate Change and Migration
Sepideh Maziar

Politics, religion, and crises

How did the Elamites Cope with Crises? Looking at the Gap between the Middle and the Neo-Elamite Period
Rafiei-Alavi

Is This Burning an Eternal Flame? Political Crises and Dynastic Cults in Southwest Asia during Antiquity
Michael Brown

Death at the beginning of life. Medieval and early modern infant burial as response to multiple crises and what we can learn from it today
Barbara Hausmair

Environment and Crises

Climate and Crises: Towards an Eventful and Punctuated Prehistory
Felix Riede

Dehqaed’s Natural Crises and the Challenge of Flooding
Zohreh Zehbari

Fending off Crises with Porosity: Sand, Water and Wind in the Helmand Basin
Moslem Mishmastnehi and Reinhard Bernbeck

Resources, technology, and crisis

Probing Criticality: Sliding Scales of Crisis in Two Highland Societies
Reinhard Bernbeck, Susan Pollock, and Jana Eger

On the Edge of Crisis – A View from Archaeometry
Kristina A Franke

Metal and Crisis: Crisis Phenomena in the Production, Distribution and Utilisation of Copper and Other Metals Between the 4th and the Late 2nd Millennium BCE in West Asia
Thomas Stöllner

No Risk, No Neolithisation
Judith Thomalsky and Akbar Abedi

 

 

›Se necare‹: Il suicidio in Seneca filosofo

›Se necare‹: Il suicidio in Seneca filosofo

Ivan Spurio Venarucci 

 

This book is in the series

Volume 14 | CICERO

 This study examines the theme of suicide in Seneca, analyzing all relevant passages from his prose works. Adopting a rhetorical and pragmatic approach, it treats the texts as communicative acts within a multifaceted debate—both philosophical and historical-political—set against the backdrop of the Julio-Claudian era, when the choice between life and mors voluntaria was a pressing and controversial issue.

eBook published on:

October 5, 2026

eBook ISBN:

9783112241974

Hardcover published on:

October 5, 2026

Hardcover ISBN:

9783112241967

Front matter:

10

Main content:

582

Tables:

1