Benjamin Isaac

There was racism in the ancient world, after all. This groundbreaking book refutes the common belief that the ancient Greeks and Romans harbored "ethnic and cultural," but not racial, prejudice. It does so by comprehensively tracing the intellectual origins of racism back to classical antiquity. Benjamin Isaac's systematic analysis of ancient social prejudices and stereotypes reveals that some of those represent prototypes of racism--or proto-racism--which in turn inspired the early modern authors who developed the more familiar racist ideas. He considers the literature from classical Greece to late antiquity in a quest for the various forms of the discriminatory stereotypes and social hatred that have played such an important role in recent history and continue to do so in modern society. Magisterial in scope and scholarship, and engagingly written, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity further suggests that an understanding of ancient attitudes toward other peoples sheds light not only on Greco-Roman imperialism and the ideology of enslavement (and the concomitant integration or non-integration) of foreigners in those societies, but also on the disintegration of the Roman Empire and on more recent imperialism as well. The first part considers general themes in the history of discrimination; the second provides a detailed analysis of proto-racism and prejudices toward particular groups of foreigners in the Greco-Roman world. The last chapter concerns Jews in the ancient world, thus placing anti-Semitism in a broader context.

The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity

Jonathan Price

Walter Ameling

Hannah M. Cotton

Werner Eck

Alla Kushnir-Stein

Haggai Misgav

Ada Yardeni

This third volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae includes inscriptions from the South Coast from the time of Alexander through the end of Byzantine rule in the 7th century. It includes all the languages used in the inscriptions of this period – Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, Samaritan, Christian Palestinian Aramaic, and Nabataean. The 488 texts are classified according to city, from Tel Aviv in the north to Raphia in the South.

A multi-lingual corpus of the inscriptions from Alexander to Muhammad

South Coast: 2161-2648

Peter Weiß

Avner Ecker

Volume IV/1 of the CIIP includes all inscriptions from the regions known as Judea and Idumea in ancient times. It does not include Jerusalem, whose inscriptions were previously presented in Volume 1. The inscriptions are epigraphic texts in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, Georgian, and Armenian.

Iudaea / Idumaea, Part 1: 2649-3324

Jonathan J. Price

Leah Di Segni

Der erste Band des Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae umfasst die Inschriften Jerusalems von der Zeit Alexanders bis zur Eroberung durch die Araber in allen Sprachen, die damals für Inschriften verwendet wurden: Hebräisch, Aramäisch, Griechisch, Latein, Syrisch, Armenisch. Die rund 1.100 Texte werden nach drei Zeitepochen gegliedert: bis zur Zerstörung Jerusalems im Jahr 70, bis zum Beginn des 4. Jahrhunderts, bis zum Ende der byzantinischen Herrschaft im 7. Jahrhundert.

Jerusalem, Part 2: 705-1120

Miriam Eliav-Feldon

Joseph Ziegler

Is it possible to speak of western racism before the eighteenth century? The term 'racism' is normally only associated with theories, which first appeared in the eighteenth century, about inherent biological differences that made one group superior to another. Here, however, leading historians argue that racism can be traced back to the attitudes of the ancient Greeks to their Persian enemies and that it was adopted, adjusted and re-formulated by Europeans right through until the dawn of the Enlightenment. From Greek teachings on environmental determinism and heredity, through medieval concepts of physiognomy, down to the crystallization of attitudes to Indians, Blacks, Jews and Gypsies in the early modern era, they analyse the various routes by which racist ideas travelled before maturing into murderous ideologies in the modern western world. In so doing this book offers a major reassessment of the place of racism in pre-modern European thought.

The Origins of Racism in the West

The second volume of the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae covers the inscriptions of Caesarea Maritima and the coastal region of the Middle Coast from Tel Aviv in the south to Haifa in the north from the time of Alexander to the Muslim conquest. The approx. 1,050 texts comprise all the languages used for inscriptions during this period (Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, Samaritan, Syrian, and Persian) and are arranged according to the principal settlements and their territory. The great majority of the texts belongs to Caesarea, the capital of the province of Judaea/Syria Palaestina. No other place in Judaea has produced more Latin inscriptions than this area, reflecting the strong Roman influence on the city.

Caesarea and the Middle Coast: 1121-2160

This book explores how the Graeco-Roman world suffered from major power conflicts, imperial ambition, and ethnic, religious and racist strife.

Benjamin Isaac

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