Open Access Chapters on the Ancient Near East and Egypt from Brill
Abstract
This paper is about the history of a question in ancient Greek philosophy and medicine: what holds the parts of a whole together? The idea that there is a single cause responsible for cohesion is usually associated with the Stoics. They refer to it as the synectic cause (αἴτιον συνεκτικόν), a term variously translated as ‘cohesive cause,’ ‘containing cause’ or ‘sustaining cause.’ The St See More
Abstract
The aim of this essay is to identify three different pre-Platonic forms of holism: the ‘therapeutic’, the ‘environmental’, and the ‘cosmic.’ With the help of passages from the Hippocratic On the Nature of Man, On Regimen, and On Sevens, on the one hand, and from Plato, the earliest independent authority on the holistic nature of Hippocratic medicine, on the other, I make the case that See More
Abstract
‘Holism’, strangely enough, given the absolute quality it indicates, is a concept that can only be grasped through negative examples: what it is contrary to, the paradigms to which it constitutes an alternative. Definitions of ‘holism’ thus usually involve the interdependence among the parts composing an individual object; their relationship with that object as their container and sum; it See More
Abstract
The chapter attempts to analyse what can sensibly be understood by the term ‘holism’, which is very frequently used in relation to ancient medicine. It identifies three fundamental senses of the term – (1) unity of mind and body, (2) a unitary conception of the body itself, (3) unity of the body with its larger environment or cosmos – and considers ways in which both ancient medical theory See More
Abstract
This paper reconstructs the chain of demand for cash from Asia to the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It shows that the Javanese’s currency preferences were visible in the exports from Europe. The growing Dutch involvement in Javanese society from the 1680s increased and transformed the composition of the currencies requested from the Dutch Republic, towa See More
Abstract
This article discusses the commercial, socio-economic and legal dynamics of slave trading in Egypt on the basis of papyri from the AH third-fourth/ninth-tenth centuries CE. Particular focus is given to the activities of slavers, the networks of professional slave traders, the socio-economics of slave acquisition, and commercial dynamics at slave markets. Much of the discussion draws See More
Abstract
This paper questions the conventional scholarly view that early Chinese economic thought simply conceived of farming and commerce as mutually opposing forces. It argues that during Western Han times there existed a significant distance between court rhetoric and economic reality and suggests that, in reading official discourse, one should be cautious not to emphasize the economic over See More