Pasts Imperfect (6.8.23)

Buddhist-Platonist Dialogue, Ancient Perfume, Gender in Ancient Greek Poetry & More

(L) “Visit of Elapatra” panel (2nd-3rdC CE), Gandhara (Pakistan), schist, now at the British Museum, London, UK (1899,0609.42; image courtesy of the British Museum); (R) Bust of Plato (Tiberian era copy of a 4thC BCE original), Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek, Munich, Germany (inv. 548; image via Wikimedia).

This week, ancient philosophy expert Amber Carpenter discusses how and why those who study Buddhism and Platonism are coming together in conversation. Then, archaeologists claim that the Roman Empire smelled like patchouli; Arum Park publishes a new, open access book on gender and ancient Greek poetry; the AAR relaunches their online digital humanities hub; new ancient world journal volumes, upcoming online lectures and conferences; and more.

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Buddhists and Platonists in Conversation by Amber Carpenter

Platonism if most famous for its theory of unchanging Forms. This might at first seem to be diametrically opposed to Buddhist thought, which takes impermanence as a mark of existence. To make the opposition acuter still, both sides think it a matter of great significance that reality is as they describe, and that it be known to be so. It is this very point of agreement, however, which complicates this easy opposition, and makes matters interesting. For in thinking it terribly important that we see that reality is as they say, both Indian Buddhist philosophers and Platonists share the conviction that we are, most of us, most of the time, in all our everyday life, thoroughly deluded, and miserable because of it.

Because of this, Buddhists and Platonists have something to say to each other—and so do scholars studying these philosophers and their traditions. The Buddhist-Platonist Dialogues website and research group brings a together thirteen such scholars with the intent of overcoming the philological and historical barriers that create challenges for fruitful conversation. We met for twenty monthly seminars over two years, sharing the texts and techniques of our respective traditions. Our aim in proceeding this way was not just to create a series of studies in Buddhist-Platonist philosophical inquiry, but also to extend the community of scholars prepared to participate in such inquiry in general. Even if we have no textual record of philosophical exchange between Platonists and Buddhists, we can create such exchange, testing the claims and the arguments of each against robust interlocutors from the other side, and thus bring out for ourselves the contours of whole lines of thought more sharply. For it is after all that we today might understand something new, or better than we did before, that the exercise is worth engaging in at all—rather than leaving each tradition closed within its circle of historical interlocutors.

The project began in 2019, and a volume of papers originating from its 2021 workshop, Crossing the Stream, Leaving the Cave: Buddhist-Platonist Philosophical Inquiries (edited by Amber Carpenter and Pierre-Julien Harter) will be published next year by Oxford University Press. In it, contributors explore issues such as the epistemic status of perception, the relationship of wisdom to practice, and conceptions of causation in the context of both traditions. Upcoming activities include a panel on Indian Tibetan and Platonist Philosophy at the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies Conference. Plans are also underway for a more focused comparison of the 8thC CE philosophical poem, Guide to the Bodhistattva’s Way of Life by Śāntideva and Plato’s Republic.

Further Reading

Jan Westerhoff The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2018) provides a historical narrative of the development of Buddhist philosophy in the first millennium of the common era.

Amber Carpenter Indian Buddhist Philosophy (Routledge, 2014)
——“Ideals and Ethical Formation: Confessions of a Buddhist-Platonist’, in Christian Coseru, ed. Reasons and Empty Persons: Mind, Metaphysics, and Morality (Springer, 2023)
preprint; Philiminality Oxford PodCast

Damien Keown, The Nature of Buddhist Ethics (Palgrave MacMillan, 1992) uses an Aristotelian framework to understand Buddhist Ethics.

Gordon Davis, ed. Ethics Without Self, Dharma Without Atman: Western and Buddhist Philosophical Traditions in Dialogue. (Springer, 2018) see especially chapters 2, 3, and 8.

Buddha performing a miracle before ascetics while flanked by a Herculean depiction of Vajrapāṇi (2nd-3rdC CE), schist, Gandhara (Pakistan), now at the British Museum, London, UK (1961,0218.1, image courtesy of the British Museum).

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Public Scholarship and a Global Antiquity

In an article by the University of Córdoba, archaeologists claim they now have “Proof that part of the Roman Empire smelled of patchouli.” The evidence was originally published in a new article titled “Archaeometric Identification of a Perfume from Roman Times” authored by Daniel Cosano, Juan Manuel Román, and their contributors. In 2019, a small quartz ointment jar (called an unguentarium in Latin) was found in a Roman tomb in Carmona (Spain). As they note, “To [their] knowledge, this may be the first time a perfume from Roman times has been identified, which is a major advance in this field.” For more on the olfactory sense in antiquity, Mark Bradley’s edited volume on Smell and the Ancient Senses is a good place to start.

“Figure 2: (a) Unguentarium found in the mausoleum; (b) Precise location of the unguentarium inside the urn” (Cosano et al. 2023).

Ever wondered how gender and ancient Greek poetry intertwine? The University of Michigan Press blog has a new post from Arum Park, author of the freshly published and open access book Reciprocity, Truth, and Gender in Pindar and Aeschylus. In it, she discusses the muses and the “relevance of gender in ancient Greek poetry.” Park delves into the poetic world of Pindar and Aeschylus, uncovering that they have more in common than many scholars ever thought if we simply look through the lenses of reciprocity, truth, and gender.

In other open access news, congratulations to Rafael Rachel Neis for their new book out now, When a Human Gives Birth to a RavenRabbis and the Reproduction of Species, from the University of California Press. As they note:

This book investigates rabbinic treatises relating to animals, humans, and other life-forms. Through an original analysis of creaturely generation and species classification by late ancient Palestinian rabbis and other thinkers in the Roman Empire, Rafael Rachel Neis shows how rabbis blurred the lines between humans and other beings, even as they were intent on classifying creatures and tracing the contours of what it means to be human.

Read this book now, for free on Luminos.

The American Academy in Rome just launched a new Digital Humanities Center that brings together a trove of 60,000 images and documents from the AAR’s Archaeological Study Collection, and its Archaeological, Institutional, and Photographic Archives. The new platform is primed for reuse and comparison taking advantage of the the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) and available under a Creative Commons License

Research on ancient texts and languages taking advantage of machine learning has increased dramatically in the past decade. In “Machine Learning for Ancient Languages” just published #openaccess in Computational Linguistics, Thea Sommerschield and her collaborators survey this research, noting its challenges and successes, and finding that successful applications most often involve collaboration between scientists and historians.

BeInf – Beyond Influence: The Connected Histories of Ethiopic and Syriac Christianity is a new initiative under the direction of Aaron Butts at theUniversity of Hamburg Asien-Afrika-Institut . Through a series of multi-disciplinary case-studies, the project will explore the connections between Syriac and Ethiopic Christianity in a manner that moves beyond questions of one-way influence and crosses disciplinary boundaries.

In Hyperallergiic, Maya Pontone discusses how a large network of “Preclassic Maya multi-tiered cities, towns, and villages that date back to 1,000 BCE” has recently been uncovered. In and article for the journal Ancient Mesoamerica, the team report on their use of LiDAR technology to uncover 964 interconnected archaeological sites. This new research demonstrates the existence of elaborate, complex Preclassic Maya sites much earlier than previously known.

The field of ancient medicine is hopping at the moment. ISAW professor Claire Bubb has a new book on Dissection in Classical Antiquity: A Social and Medical History and a forthcoming edited volume with Michael Peachin, Medicine and the Law Under the Roman Empire, out in August 2023. Additionally, the online exhibition, Comparative Guts, is now live.

Comparative Guts is a comparative exhibition about the human body, and in particular about one body part, the ‘guts’. It brings together historians, anthropologists, artists from a wide range of fields and traditions. To our purposes, ‘guts’ refers to everything found inside the lower torso, the organs and parts traditionally linked to nutrition and digestion, but also endowed with emotional, ethical, and metaphysical significance, depending on the representation and narrative.

Perhaps one of the coolest things on the site is a 3D reconstruction of the digestive system according to Aristotle.

Screenshot of the Comparative Guts online exhibition.

A new article in the Journal of Archaeological Science, “Analyses of queen Hetepheres’ bracelets from her celebrated tomb in Giza reveals new information on silver, metallurgy and trade in Old Kingdom Egypt, c. 2600 BC,” by Karin Sowada, Richard Newman, and their contributors, sheds new light on early trade relations between ancient Egypt and Greek settlements. It also allows more insight into Egyptian metallurgy practices during the Old Kingdom. The silver in the bracelets was found to come likely from mines in the Cyclades (Aegean islands, Greece).

Over at the Medieval Manuscripts Blog from the British Library, curator Peter Toth discusses “The last day of Constantinople” in order to remember the 570th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople on May 29, 1453. As the Venetian soldiers remarked, “Shudder Sun and groan Earth, the city is taken.”

“Detail of a grant by Sultan Mehmed II to the Genoese inhabitants of Galata, with the sultan’s monogram and the beginning of the Greek text” (1 June 1453) Egerton MS 2817; image and caption via the British Library’s Medieval Manuscripts Blog.

Finally, the International Society for Nubian Studies (ISNS) has issued a statement regarding the attacks by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on the Sudan National Museum in Khartoum. You can read more about the attacks here, but the destruction of cultural heritage in the fighting—which broke out beginning April 15—is strongly condemned.

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New Antiquity Journal Issues (by @YaleClassicsLib)
Bulletin of the American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR) Vol. 389 (2023)
Journal of Ancient History Vol. 11, No. 1 (2023)
Archiv für Religionsgeschichte Vol. 24 No. 1 (2023)Dieux en séries? Approche comparée des listes divines dans les religions antiques
Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde Vol. 150, No. 1 (2023) NB Luigi Prada, “The Ancient Egyptian Origin of a Transcultural Trope, across Classical, Islamic, and Jewish Traditions: The First Attestation of the Crocodile Bird in Egyptian, or Why Herodotus Is Not a Liar (with the First Edition of P. Vienna D 6104)”
Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische Archäologie Vol. 113, No. 1 (2023)
Antikes Christentum = Journal of Ancient Christianity Vol. 27 , No. 1 (2023) Intertextuality as a Phenomenon in the History of Religion and Culture
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities Vol. 38, No. 2 (2023)
Klio Vol. 105, No. 1 (2023)
Journal of Early Christian Studies Vol. 31, No. 2 (2023)
Studia Iranica Vol. 50, No. 2 (2021)
Journal of Ancient Philosophy Vol. 17 No. 1 (2023) #openaccess NB Paul Woodruff, “Learning through Love: A Lover’s Initiation in the Symposium”
Near Eastern Archaeology Vol 86, No 2 (2023)
Circe de clásicos y modernos Vol. 27 No. 1 (2023) #openaccess
Philosophy East and West Vol. 73, No. 2 (2023)
Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome Vol. 67 (2022) #openaccess
After Constantine No. 3 (2023) #openaccess
Journal of Indian Philosophy Vol. 51, No. 3 (2023)
DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 1 (2023) #openaccess
Syria Vol. 99 (2022) #openaccess
The Medieval Globe Vol. 8, No. 2 (2022) Commentary at the Crossroads
Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage Vol. 29 (June 2023)
Iranica Antiqua Vol. 57 (2022)
Journal of Near Eastern Religions Vol. 22, No. 2 (2023) NB C. López-Ruiz & E. Rodríguez González, “A Perilous Sailing and a Lion: Comparative Evidence for a Phoenician Afterlife Motif.”
Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía Vol. 40 No. 2 (2023) #openaccess
History of Humanities Vol. 8, No. 1 (2023) Unfolding Disciplines in the History of the Humanities
Bonner Jahrbücher Vol. 220 (2020) #openaccess

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Ancient World Lectures, Conferences, and CFPs

On June 13, 2023 at 6:00 pm London Time, there will be a Zoom Webinar on “Open Sesame: Ancient Persia and the Greek Imagination” given by James Fraser & Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones. The webinar is meant to coincide with the British Museum’s current exhibition “Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece.” The British Institute of Persian Studies & the British Museum are sponsoring it and you can register here.

What has AI ever done for us? And what might it do in the future? On June 14-15, 2023, at the University of Bristol and online will be the “Alpha, Aleph, and AI: Languages of the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East” conference. Register here.

On Saturday, October 21, 2023, the Fifth Annual Missouri Egyptological Symposium (#MOEgypt5) will be held. “New Directions in Teaching Ancient Egypt and Nubia: Practical Matters, Innovation, and Collaboration,” brings together scholars, educators, students, museum professionals— anyone invested in teaching about ancient Egypt and Nubia— in order to address practical matters, recent innovations, and future collaborations. Applications are open to anyone with an educational or occupational interest in ancient Nile Valley Studies which includes Egypt and Nubia. Graduate students, early career scholars, adjunct/contingent professors, K-12 teachers, museum professionals, educational specialists, public historians, and independent scholars are encouraged to apply. The deadline to apply is Monday, August 21, 2023. A detailed CfP can be found on the symposium webpage here. If you have questions about the symposium or the application process, contact the symposium organizers at arcemissouri@gmail.com.

On June 14, 2023 from 6:45 to 8:15 p.m. ET, Smithsonian Associates is holding a seminar, “A Journey Through Ancient China: Eunuchs in Chinese History.” American University professor Justin M. Jacobs discusses the history of eunuchs in Ancient China for this seminar: “Long despised by the Confucian elite and grossly neglected by historians, eunuchs often appear as little more than a demeaning caricature in narratives of Chinese history. Jacobs details the everyday lives of imperial Chinese eunuchs and explains why they were so politically indispensable despite rhetorical denunciations of them. He also examines the traumatic life cycle of a eunuch from birth to employment to retirement.”

Mural of a group of eunuchs in the tomb of Prince Zhanghuai, Tang Dynasty, 706 CE, Qianling, Shaanxi Province, China (image via Wikimedia).