A collection of essays by the art historian Aby Warburg, these essays look beyond iconography to more psychological aspects of artistic creation: the conditions under which art was practised; its social and cultural contexts; and its conceivable historical meaning.

Daniel Orrells examines the ways in which the ancient world was visualized for Enlightenment readers, and reveals how antiquarian scholarship emerged as the principal technology for envisioning ancient Greek culture, at a time when very few people could travel to Greece which was still part of the Ottoman Empire. Offering a fresh account of the rise of antiquarianism in the 18th century, Orrells shows how this period of cultural progression was important for the invention of classical studies. In particular, the main focus of this book is on the visionary experimentalism of antiquarian book production, especially in relation to the contentious nature of ancient texts. With the explosion of the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, eighteenth-century intellectuals, antiquarians and artists such as Giambattista Vico, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the Comte de Caylus, James Stuart, Julien-David Leroy, Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Pierre-François Hugues d'Hancarville all became interested in how printed engravings of ancient art and archaeology could visualize a historical narrative. These figures theorized the relationship between ancient text and ancient material and visual culture - theorizations which would pave the way to foundational questions at the heart of the discipline of classical studies and neoclassical aesthetics.

This volume deals with similarities and correspondences between Late Antiquity (c. 300-600 AD) and the Renaissance (roughly after c. 1350). In both periods, the presence of two competing forces, the ancient classical and the Christian traditions, led to a constant dynamic of thought and creativity. The ten essays in this volume present new views on these issues in the fields of political philosophy, theology, law, literature, art, and architecture.

The history of the struggles for control over Egypt's antiquities, and their repercussions, during a period of intense national ferment The sensational discovery in 1922 of Tutankhamun’s tomb, close on the heels of Britain’s declaration of Egyptian independence, accelerated the growth in Egypt of both Egyptology as a formal discipline and of ‘pharaonism'—popular interest in ancient Egypt—as an inspiration in the struggle for full independence. Emphasizing the three decades from 1922 until Nasser’s revolution in 1952, this compelling follow-up to Whose Pharaohs? looks at the ways in which Egypt developed its own archaeologies—Islamic, Coptic, and Greco-Roman, as well as the more dominant ancient Egyptian. Each of these four archaeologies had given birth to, and grown up around, a major antiquities museum in Egypt. Later, Cairo, Alexandria, and Ain Shams universities joined in shaping these fields. Contesting Antiquity in Egypt brings all four disciplines, as well as the closely related history of tourism, together in a single engaging framework. Throughout this semi-colonial era, the British fought a prolonged rearguard action to retain control of the country while the French continued to dominate the Antiquities Service, as they had since 1858. Traditional accounts highlight the role of European and American archaeologists in discovering and interpreting Egypt’s long past. Donald Reid redresses the balance by also paying close attention to the lives and careers of often-neglected Egyptian specialists. He draws attention not only to the contests between westerners and Egyptians over the control of antiquities, but also to passionate debates among Egyptians themselves over pharaonism in relation to Islam and Arabism during a critical period of nascent nationalism. Drawing on rich archival and published sources, extensive interviews, and material objects ranging from statues and murals to photographs and postage stamps, this comprehensive study by one of the leading scholars in the field will make fascinating reading for scholars and students of Middle East history, archaeology, politics, and museum and heritage studies, as well as for the interested lay reader.

We are a weird species. Like other species, we have a culture. But by comparison with other species, we are strangely unstable: human cultures self-transform, diverge, and multiply with bewildering speed. They vary, radically and rapidly, from time to time and place to place. And the way we live — our manners, morals, habits, experiences, relationships, technology, values — seems to be changing at an ever accelerating pace. The effects can be dislocating, baffling, sometimes terrifying. Why is this? In A Foot in the River, best-selling historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto sifts through the evidence and offers some radical answers to these very big questions about the human species and its history — and speculates on what these answers might mean for our future. Combining insights from a huge range of disciplines, including history, biology, anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, sociology, ethology, zoology, primatology, psychology, linguistics, the cognitive sciences, and even business studies, he argues that culture is exempt from evolution. Ultimately, no environmental conditions, no genetic legacy, no predictable patterns, no scientific laws determine our behaviour. We can consequently make and remake our world in the freedom of unconstrained imaginations. A revolutionary book which challenges scientistic assumptions about culture and how and why cultural change happens, A Foot in the River comes to conclusions which readers may well find by turns both daunting and also potentially hugely liberating.

The transformation of the Roman world from polytheistic to Christian is one of the most sweeping ideological changes of premodern history. At the center was sex. Kyle Harper examines how Christianity changed the ethics of sexual behavior from shame to sin, and shows how the roots of modern sexuality are grounded in an ancient religious revolution.