BRILL

A journey to Palmyra; collected essays to remember Delbert R. Hillers.

The 13 essays are not a tribute to Hillers, who devoted his final 15 years studying the people and culture in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, but a research tool such as he would have wanted to produce himself. They explore various aspects of archaeological research, history and social history, art, and philology to illustrate the complex and multi-faceted culture of the city and its surround. Among the topics are Greek and Latin words in Palmyrene inscriptions, the role of women, the city of the dead, lexicographical and grammatical notes on the Aramaic texts, burial practices as revealed by funerary goods, questions about the iconography and epigraphy of a new tessera, and Palmyra in the third century on the eve of its destruction by the Romans. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Legitimizing the order; the Ottoman rhetoric of state power.

In this collection of conference papers delivered at Bogazici University in July 2001, contributors describe how the elite of the Ottoman state sought the rhetoric to justify state power and achieve order and legitimacy at various times with various intentions. Topics include the definitions of legitimacy and world order, representations of Murad III in the late sixteenth century, foreign legitimacy, religiosity, apostasy and Ottoman Islamic identity, orthodoxy in the Ottoman-Safavid conflict, and three papers on the crisis of Ottoman legitimacy in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Material virtue; ethics and the body in early China.

Csikszentmihalyi (East Asian languages and literature, U. of Wisconsin at Madison) considers recent archeological discoveries of texts in his examination of an early Confucian concept that material virtue has a physical correlate in the body. He describes the ru virtue discourse, the moral psychology of the wuxing, the moral psychology and human physiology of the mengzi, the transcendent body of the sage, the overall qi of the virtues, and how these concepts came to be applied in the early empire. Appendices include the reconstructed Zisi and the Goodian and Mawangdui versions of the Waxing. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Muqarnas; an annual on the visual culture of the Islamic world; v.21: Essays in honor of J.M. Rogers.

Rogers, who was curator of Islamic art at the British Museum, taught at the U. of London, and curates the Nasser D Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, is honored in this volume of 31 essays on Islamic art and architecture. Among the topics are the iconography of a camel fight, European arts and crafts at the Mamluk court, folios from the Nuzhat-nama, a second Herat bucket, Arabic signatures in Norman Sicily, paintings of the pre-Islamic Ka'ba, and the classical revival of Nur al-Din's Qastal al-Shu'aybiyya. Other chapters consider Mamluk bookbinding, Chaghatai architecture, Ottoman ceramics in Europe, and the bibliophile aghas at Topkapi Saray. The contributors are art historians and curators in the Turkey, Kuwait, Russia, Egypt, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, the UK, and the US. The volume is heavily illustrated with good quality color plates. It is not indexed. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Officina magica; essays on the practice of magic in antiquity.

There are 13 essays, of course, most of which were first delivered at a 1999 conference organized at the Warburg Institute by the Institute of Jewish Studies of University College London. Among the topics they discuss are ancient Mesopotamian magical practices; the possible survival and continuity of Mesopotamian culture in later periods, especially regarding the magic of the Talmud and of the magic bowls; Jewish magic in various periods such as the Aramaic incantation bowls, the Jewish tradition in medieval manuscripts that partly reflect early themes, and the fragments of the Geniza that testify to the role played by magic in the life of the period; Zoroastrian omen texts; magical artifacts from Late Antiquity; and underlying questions of the theory and method of studying the magical tradition. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Ornamental wall painting in the art of the Assyrian empire.

In this short text, Albenda (no affiliation is noted) surveys the ornamental wall painting of various Assyrian buildings, describing the use of color, placement, and decorative motifs. The paintings discussed are known from drawings of them made by early excavators, whose research is described briefly. In addition to painstaking descriptions of the decorative motifs found in the paintings, Albenda provides a summarizing analysis of decorative traditions in these courtly and occasionally, religious buildings. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Princes and princely culture, 1450-1650; v.2.

Historians, art historians, and scholars of literature and language look at selected courts of England and southern Europe to examine the self-image of rulers; culture and art at princely courts, the relations between culture, politics, and power; court festivals, ceremonies, and spectacles; and the construction of official history at court. Among their topics are Pope Pius II and the ideas of the appropriate thematization of the self, princes and culture in the 15th-century Italian Po Valley courts, politics and the occult at the court of Edward IV, the 1476 marriage of Matthias Corninus to Beatrice of Aragón in urban and court historiography, and official history at the court of Philip II of Spain. The first volume covers the northern continent and Scotland, and contains the introduction to the set. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Sogdian traders; a history.

In order to give some substance to the almost legendary, certainly crucial, but ephemeral historical fact of The Silk Road, La Vaissiére focuses on a particular class of a particular people who engaged at a particular historical time in the long-distance trade between the Near East and India and China that The Silk Road epitomizes: he identifies and defines the long-term commercial activity of the Sogdian merchants, who originated in the region in Central Asian region of Samarkand, for some 15 centuries from the sixth BC to the culture's decline in the 10th CE. The study covers the ancient network up to 350 CE, the commercial empire 350-750, commerce and diplomacy 550-750, and the breakup of the networks 700-1000. Histoire des marchands Sogdiens was first published in 2002 by Collége de France. James Ward's translation is presumably from the 2004 second edition. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Spirit-mediums, sacred mountains and related bon textual traditions in Upper Tibet; calling down the Gods.

Bellezza (U. of Virginia) examines the spirit-mediums from the upper regions of northwest Tibet, men and women who serve as the incarnate form of the region's chief mountain gods as well as a range of other divinities. He finds that the spirit-mediums are locally important religious and medical practitioners with a long legacy of tradition behind them that opens windows into the remaining non-Buddhist culture of the region, which has indelibly imprinted Tibet's Buddhism over the centuries. Because the study focuses on the culture and traditions of the spirit-mediums, he draws primarily from Tibetan textual and oral sources, wherein are enshrined the legendary and contemporary components of the tradition that he compares for his diachronic perspective. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Studies on astral magic in medieval Jewish thought.

Schwartz (humanities, Bar-Ilan U.) explores a type of magic aimed at "drawing down" spiritual forces to affect natural forces for healing or to predict the future, that assumed a controversial role in 12th-15th century philosophical discourse in Jewish communities in Spain, Provence, and Byzantium. Not only did astral magic conflict with the prevailing Aristotelian world view, the esoteric practice was also criticized on theological grounds as akin to idolatry for the images it employed. Based on readings of the diverse positions of such thinkers as Judah Halevi and E. b. Moses Kalkish, the author argues that medieval Jewish intellectuals integrated the rationalists' paradigm of occult experience with Aristotle's science. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Transfigurations of Hellenism; aspects of late antique art in Egypt, A.D. 250-700.

Inspired by recent discoveries and exhibitions, Török examines Egyptian Coptic culture in terms of its artistic production. In doing so he seeks to correct misperceptions about anti-Hellenism and the pharonic revival, the myth of Volkskunst and the contribution of forgery to Coptic art history. He begins by examining society and at in late Roman and early Byzantine Egypt, including its images of social identity and the role of conquest, and traces the reasons for the survival of Alexandrian Hellenistic architecture and new patterns of monumentality. He seeks evidence in mortuary display and in images of the good life, as well as in the turn to Christianity in late antique Egypt. He provides resources such as lists of monuments and museums, as well as hundreds of illustrations of artifacts from across the time period. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Under the influence; questioning the comparative in medieval Castile.

Scholars interested in the complex cultural and artistic creations of medieval Spain will find food for thought in the 12 essays of this collection. The topics include Las cantigas de Santa Maria, references to Mongols in Iberian literature, Christian administrative practices in conquered Muslim cities, two versions of the Kalilah was-Dimnah, and why Castilian Christians favored fine Muslim textiles. A central theme of all the essays, referred to in the title, is the nature of the artistic and other influences of the region's different cultural groups on one another. The contributors are curators and academics at universities in the US, Qatar, and Spain. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Who were the Babylonians?

Arnold draws on current Assyriological data to trace the geopolitical realities behind literary references to Babylonians by ancient classical historians such as Herodotus and Berossus and by authors of the Bible. Much is known about the material culture of Mesopotamia, he says, but most of the literature has been written by specialists for each other. He has combed through that literature, focusing on Babylonia, to provide a general survey for students of history, archaeology, philology, and the Bible. He begins with Babylonia before the Babylonians came — the Old Accadian and neo-Sumerian periods — and proceeds through Hammurabi's empire, the fall of Babylon, and the neo-Babylonian period. Society for Biblical Literature publishes the paperbound edition; Brill publishes the hardbound. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)