Ancient finds from the Maltese islands are rare, and those held in the British Museum form an important collection. Represented is a wide cultural range, spanning the Early and Late Neolithic, the Bronze Age, Roman and more recent historic periods.

In the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum are more than six hundred ancient lamps that span the sixth century BCE to the seventh century CE, most from the Roman Imperial period and largely created in Asia Minor or North Africa. These lamps have much to reveal about life, religion, pottery, and trade in the ancient Graeco-Roman world. Most of the Museum’s lamps have never before been published, and this extensive typological catalogue will thus be an invaluable scholarly resource for art historians, archaeologists, and those interested in the ancient world. Reflecting the Getty's commitment to open content, Ancient Lamps in the J. Paul Getty Museum is available online at http://www.getty.edu/publications/ancientlamps and may be downloaded free of charge in multiple formats, including PDF, MOBI/Kindle, and EPUB, and features zoomable images and multiple views of every lamp, an interactive map drawn from the Ancient World Mapping Center, and bibliographic references. For readers who wish to have a bound reference copy, a paperback edition has been made available for sale.

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What should a catalogue of archaeological material contain? This book is a comprehensive index of 210 lamps from the Roman fort of Gerulata (present-day Bratislava-Rusovce, Slovakia) and its adjoining civilian settlement. The lamps were excavated during the last 50 years from the houses, cemeteries, barracks and fortifications of this Roman outpost on the Limes Romanus and span almost three centuries from AD 80 to AD 350. For the first time, they are published in full and in color with detailed analysis of lamp types, workshop marks and discus scenes. Roman lamps were a distinctive form of interior lighting that burned liquid fuel seeped through a wick to create a controlled flame. Relief decorations have made them appealing objects of minor art in modern collections, but lamps were far more than that – with a distribution network spanning three continents, made by a multitude of producers and brands, with their religious imagery depicting forms of worship, and as symbols of study and learning, Roman lamps are an effective tool that can be used by the modern scholar to discover the ancient economy, culture, craft organization and Roman provincial life.

This study focuses on the recording, study and publication of the corpus of the Late Antique lamps dating from the 3rd to the 7th centuries as found in rescue excavations in the town of Rhodes. The aim here is to present the diachronic changes in the artistic sensibility and preferences of this particular market.

This volume provides an extensive look at the technological development of lighting and lighting devices during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages in Western Europe and Byzantium. 29 papers are gathered from two International Lychnological Association (ILA) Round Tables held in Olten, Switzerland (2007) and Thessaloniki, Greece (2011).

Sepphoris was an important Galilean site from Hellenistic to early Islamic times. This multicultural city is described by Flavius Josephus as the “ornament of all Galilee,” and Rabbi Judah the Prince (ha-Nasi) codified the Mishnah there around 200 CE. The Duke University excavations of the 1980s and 1990s uncovered a large corpus of clay oil lamps in the domestic area of the western summit, and this volume presents these vessels. Richly illustrated with photos and drawings, it describes the various shape-types and includes a detailed catalog of 219 lamps. The volume also explores the origins of the Sepphoris lamps and establishes patterns of their trade, transport, and sale in the lower city’s marketplace. A unique contribution is the use of a combined petrographic and direct current plasma-optical emission spectrometric (dcp-oes) analysis of selected lamp fabrics from sites in Israel and Jordan. This process provided valuable information, indicating that lamps found in Sepphoris came from Judea, the Decapolis, and even Greece, suggesting an urban community fully engaged with other regional centers. Lamp decorations also provide information about the cosmopolitan culture of Sepphoris in antiquity. Discus lamps with erotic scenes and mythological characters suggest Greco-Roman influences, and menorahs portrayed on lamps indicate a vibrant Jewish identity.