By focusing on religion, this monograph represents the first extended attempt to explore how the socio-cultural infrastructure of Cyprus was affected by the transition from segmented administration by many Cypriot kings to the island-wide government by a foreign Ptolemaic correspondent.

By focusing on religion, this monograph represents the first extended attempt to explore how the socio-cultural infrastructure of Cyprus was affected by the transition from segmented administration by many Cypriot kings to the island-wide government by a foreign Ptolemaic correspondent.

Change and Resilience offers a view of the main Mediterranean islands from West to East in Late Antiquity because Mediterranean islands can contribute in fundamental ways to our understanding not only of earlier colonizations but also later periods. The volume explores specifically the time frame from the fall of the Roman empire to the Medieval period. A first group of papers covers islands and island groups in the Central and Western Mediterranean, including the Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and the Adriatic islands. Together, these five papers highlight several common themes across the region: local or indigenous sites were often reoccupied in Late Antiquity, the rural countryside typically played a significant role in the contributions of islands to wider Mediterranean economic networks, and islands – big and small – often played significant roles in shifting political and religious power. The second group focuses on the Eastern Mediterranean. Three papers cover a range of islands, including Crete, the Cyclades, and Cyprus. Together they emphasize the impacts external shifts in political power and economic ties in the Eastern Mediterranean had on island landscapes, as well as the connected relationship between sacred space and territorial occupation across many of these islands. The final group of papers pivots on changing perceptions of island landscapes in Late Antiquity—or “island mindscapes.” Three papers focus on how communities adapted as they underwent Christianization in island contexts, emphasizing the diverse and varied ways that island landscapes became “Christianized,” as well as how other political and economic factors shaped the dynamics of change.

Some hundred early Christian churches are attested on Cyprus, dating from the fourth to seventh centuries.Their architectural remains have shaped the Cypriot landscape.The peculiar evolution of the features of the Cypriot church gave rise to a scientific discussion on how to evaluate these specific local developments. In the last decade, individual research as well as conferences and workshops dedicated to late antiquity and the early Byzantine period have contributed towards a new approach and a new impulse for the study of this period in Cyprus.The volume reinforces and furthers this trend taking into consideration relevant parameters reflected on the architectural planning, such as structural knowledge and innovations, cultic behaviours, liturgical traditions, economic capacities, social and political aspirations. Based on current developments in research, new findings in Cyprus and the focus on intercultural contacts, the volume is organised into four different sections: 1) Building the Christian cityscape and landscape; 2) Christian communities and church building, fourth to seventh centuries; 3) Interior arrangement and theological concepts; 4) 'International Byzantine Style'? Local traditions and adaptations in- and outside Cyprus.

The ninth to the fifth centuries BCE saw a series of significant historical transformations across Cyprus, especially in the growth of towns and in developments in the countryside. In this book, Catherine Kearns argues that changing patterns of urban and rural sedentism drove social changes as diverse communities cultivated new landscape practices. Climatic changes fostered uneven relationships between people, resources like land, copper, and wood, and increasingly important places like rural sanctuaries and cemeteries. Bringing together a range of archaeological, textual, and scientific evidence, the book examines landscapes, environmental history, and rural practices to argue for their collective instrumentality in the processes driving Iron Age political formations. It suggests how rural households managed the countryside, interacted with the remains of earlier generations, and created gathering spaces alongside the development of urban authorities. Offering new insights into landscape archaeologies, Dr Kearns contributes to current debates about society's relationships with changing environments.

Cyprus was a thriving and densely populated late antique province. Contrary to what used to be thought, the Arab raids of the mid-seventh century did not abruptly bring the island’s prosperity to an end. Recent research instead highlights long-lasting continuity in both urban and rural contexts. This volume brings together historians and archaeologists working on diverse aspects of Cyprus between the sixth and eighth centuries. They discuss topics as varied as rural prosperity, urban endurance, artisanal production, civic and private religion and maritime connectivity. The role of the imperial administration and of the Church is touched upon in several contributions. Other articles place Cyprus back into its wider Mediterranean context. Together, they produce a comprehensive impression of the quality of life on the island in the long late antiquity.

From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behavior while it is often felt that deities responsible for both natural benefits and natural calamities (such as droughts, famines, floods and landslides) need to be appeased. We presume that, in many societies, lakes, rivers, rocks, mountains, caves and groves were considered sacred. Individual sites and entire landscapes are often associated with divine actions, mythical heroes and etiological myths. Throughout human history, people have also felt the need to monumentalize their sacred landscape. But this is where the similarities end as different societies had very different understandings, believes and practices. The aim of this new thematic appraisal is to scrutinize carefully our evidence and rethink our methodologies in a multi-disciplinary approach. More than 30 papers investigate diverse sacred landscapes from the Iberian peninsula and Britain in the west to China in the east. They discuss how to interpret the intricate web of ciphers and symbols in the landscape and how people might have experienced it. We see the role of performance, ritual, orality, textuality and memory in people’s sacred landscapes. A diachronic view allows us to study how landscapes were ‘rewritten’, adapted and redefined in the course of time to suit new cultural, political and religious understandings, not to mention the impact of urbanism on people’s understandings. A key question is how was the landscape manipulated, transformed and monumentalized – especially the colossal investments in monumental architecture we see in certain socio-historic contexts or the creation of an alternative humanmade, seemingly ‘non-natural’ landscape, with perfectly astronomically aligned buildings that define a cosmological order? Sacred Landscapes therefore aims to analyze the complex links between landscape, ‘religiosity’ and society, developing a dialectic framework that explores sacred landscapes across the ancient world in a dynamic, holistic, contextual and historical perspective.

The Getty Research Journal features the work of art historians, museum curators, and conservators from around the world as part of the Getty’s mission to promote critical thinking in the presentation, conservation, and interpretation of the world’s artistic legacy. Articles present original research related to the Getty’s collections, initiatives, and research projects. This issue features essays on the cross-cultural features of a small alabaster vessel in the “international style” of the ancient Mediterranean, French and Flemish influences in the Montebourg Psalter, a new identification for the so-called bust of Saint Cyricus, the effects of the Reformation on the art market in northern Europe, sketchbooks kept by the Portuguese painter João Glama Stroeberle containing comments from his teachers, the origins of the architectural history survey, Japanese ink aesthetics in non-ink media, the impact of the invention of adhesive tape in the 1930s on the artistic process of abstract painters, and the importance of ephemeral artifacts for the documentation of Carolee Schneemann’s performance works. Shorter texts include notices on an Egyptian ushabti from the tomb of Neferibresaneith, a bronze statuette newly identified as representing the Alexandrian god Hermanubis, and an etching by Félix Bracquemond commissioned by the Parisian gallery Arnold & Tripp.

This is the first monograph devoted solely to the ceramics of Cyprus in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods. The island was by then no longer divided into kingdoms but unified politically, first under Ptolemaic Egypt and later as a province in the Roman Empire. Submission to foreign rule was previously thought to have diluted - if not obliterated - the time-honoured distinctive Cypriot character. The ceramic evidence suggests otherwise. The distribution of local and imported pottery in Cyprus points to the existence of several regional exchange networks, a division that also seems reflected by other evidence. The similarities in material culture, exchange patterns and preferential practices are suggestive of a certain level of regional collective self-awareness. From the 1st century BC onwards, Cyprus became increasingly engulfed by mass produced and standardized ceramic fine wares, which seem ultimately to have put many of the indigenous makers of similar products out of business - or forced them to modify their output. Also, the ceramic record gradually became less diverse during the Roman Period than before - developments which we today might be inclined to view as symptoms of an early form of globalisation.

Edited by G. Papantoniou, D. Michaelides and M. Dikomitou-Eliadou, Hellenistic and Roman Terracottas is a collection of 29 chapters with an introduction presenting diverse and innovative approaches (archaeological, stylistic, iconographic, functional, contextual, digital, and physicochemical) in the study of ancient terracottas across the Mediterranean and the Near East, from the Hellenistic period to Late Antiquity. The 34 authors advocate collectively the significance of a holistic approach to the study of coroplastic art, which considers terracottas not simply as works of art but, most importantly, as integral components of ancient material culture. The volume will prove to be an invaluable companion to all those interested in ancient terracottas and their associated iconography and technology, as well as in ancient artefacts and classical archaeology in general.