Lorenzo Verderame

Agnès Garcia Ventura

Claudia Tavolieri

This collection of eleven essays provides the reader with some valuable insights into the richness of sources dealing with music and musical performance scattered over 3000 years and covering a wide range of geographies, from Syria to Iberia, through Greece and Rome. The volume, then, offers a series of examinations of literary data and materials from different areas of the Classical World and the Near East in ancient times and in late Antiquity, examined both synchronically and diachronically, in some cases in dialogue with one another. This broad treatment makes this collection of interest to historians, archaeologists, philologists and musicians, providing them with a multi-faceted volume which guides them towards a fuller understanding of ancient societies and which heightens the awareness of the importance of music as a transversal phenomenon.

Archaeology and Written Sources

The Study of Musical Performance in Antiquity

Agnès Garcia-Ventura

The present volume collects eighteen essays exploring the history of ancient Near Eastern studies. Combining diverse approaches—synthetic and analytic, diachronic and transnational—this collection offers critical reflections on the who, why, and how of this cluster of fields. How have political contexts determined the conduct of research? How do academic agendas reflect larger social, economic, and cultural interests? How have schools of thought and intellectual traditions configured, and sometimes predetermined, the study of the ancient Near East? Contributions treating research during the Nazi and fascist periods examine the interpenetration of academic work with politics, while contributions dealing with specific national contexts disclose fresh perspectives on individual scholars as well as the conditions and institutions in which they worked. Particular attention is given to scholarship in countries such as Turkey, Portugal, Iran, China, and Spain, which have hitherto been marginal to historiographic accounts of ancient Near Eastern studies.

Perspectives on the History of Ancient Near Eastern Studies

M. Erica Couto-Ferreira

This volume addresses a set of historical questions that explore the multiple aspects associated with the uterus through the dissection of both learned and popular sources, material evidence, daily practices, iconography, and representation. It transcends Eurocentric models of understanding and representing the female body by bringing into the discussion a number of case studies taken from a larger number of cultural and social historical realities, including the Mediterranean, the Ancient Near East, Pre-Columbian America, East Asia, and Medieval Europe, that are explored from the methodological perspectives offered by a wide range of disciplines and epistemologies. Because of its intimate, indissoluble relation to the experience of being a woman, and because of its hiddenness within the body and darkness; its communication with the outside world and its accessibility through the vagina; its capacity to contain and give shelter; to engender and procreate; to expulse and give birth to both fully formed and truncated, deformed beings; and its potential to go in and out, the womb offers a wealth of possibilities to conceptualise the world.

Lorenzo Verderame

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