This even is open to the public; in-person and on Zoom Please fill out this form if you plan to attend the conference remotely. Upon registration you will receive the Zoom link, which will be also circulated on the morning of the event: https://forms.gle/tfvQqK3TNnjvZaPP7 The phrase “the Roman world” has long served as a useful shorthand to describe Rome’s vast sphere of influence. Yet it homogenizes: the peoples who inhabited the Roman Empire were tremendously diverse; until 212 CE most were not, legally speaking, Roman citizens. Moreover, they exerted great agency in their responses to and relationships with Roman power and, in so doing, profoundly shaped the empire’s social, political, cultural, and economic expressions. “A Roman World?: Imperial Power and Provincial Communities” shares new research that explores these dynamics from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Emphasizing a diversity of actors, regions, and media, this workshop-conference addresses topics that include the creation of new Italian identities in the Republican province of Africa; the relationships between industrial activity in Carthago Nova and the natural environment; and the use of portrait sculpture by religious communities in imperial Thessaloniki as a means by which locals redefined themselves in relation to Rome. “A Roman World?” rejects the traditional dichotomy of colonizer and colonized and instead interrogates the politics of writing and rewriting the Roman past. Ultimately, it presents a new history of a world that was, in important ways, not Roman at all. You can find a detailed program of the event on our website here: https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://ancient-mediterranean.columbia.edu/events/a-roman-world-imperial-power-and-provincial-communities/__;!!IBzWLUs!TK0FjPMGD7fLDnMSJwwaBaMPBcRhRvP2feb_DNcXqBTPgoQiC4a6ST_TIlyXpnpvUOTajbYPsexQ6eIWpkYBbok$ For any questions feel free to get in touch with me at gl2623@columbia.edu.

This talk will take place in person and online. To attend in person please RSVP by Tuesday, April 25th to Eileen Robinson, eileenrobinson@princeton.edu Click here for the Zoom registration link: https://princeton.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJModOqrqTgsGdwpjP9dQz0ag_9-BcvTQ7wj

At-Home Anthro LIVE, Virtual Event Dating back over 5000 years, senet, a popular ancient Egyptian game. is one of the oldest board games in the world. Students will learn about its history and significance to ancient Egyptian people. They will then make their own senet boards and learn how to play. Free to registered guests. Register here: https://cilc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN__y_DON7ES4endbORD3Y8CQ

Classics Colloquium Zoom Link: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/92411245763?pwd=TWljcmFUVklPNC9kbWRsdWh3dldEZz09

The Twelfth Annual M.I. Rostovtzeff Lecture Series, Lecture III How did ancient Greek and Roman authors conceive of their own knowledge of the natural world? Did they see it as progressing and increasing, or as degenerating in some way? What did they see as the strengths or dangers posed by their own and others’ epistemic practices, and what are the strengths and dangers that we in turn face in interpreting and understanding those practices today? By framing these questions in terms of a larger category of ‘epistemic corruption,’ I hope to show that ancient ideas about knowledge practices are tightly correlated with claims about moral and bodily virtues and vices. Ancient scientific and philosophical thinkers not infrequently developed theories about how different groups of people are differently constituted. When classifying people who are different from themselves in some way (different by class, by gender, by national origin), we find that an author’s social biases often bleed over into what they try to justify as natural categories. This slippage is easy enough to spot from our own vantage point, but its relative invisibility to our historical actors poses some interesting problems for the philosophy of history. This event is free and open to the public, but an RSVP is required. RSVP HERE: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/rostovtzeff-series-epistemic-corruption-progress-in-ancient-science-3-registration-600837008667

Great Lecture Series Howard C. and Elizabeth Watts Petersen Annual Lecture The earliest cities in the world arose in a dynamic wetland environment at the intersection of the Tigris-Euphrates delta and the shore of the Persian Gulf during the 4th- and 3rd-millennia BCE. Recent work at the site of Lagash, led by the Penn Museum, in collaboration with the University of Pisa and Cambridge University, focuses on reconstructing the ancient environment of southern Iraq through remote sensing, geological coring, and excavation. This illustrated lecture will bring this formative chapter of human history to life through an overview of this work to date, including geological, ethnographic, and archaeological evidence. This lecture will take place in person and online. Buy tickets here: https://446.blackbaudhosting.com/446/May-Great-Heritage-Series--Marshland-of-Cities-The-Environmental-Context-of-Lagash-and-its-Neighbor?_ga=2.214718162.491975322.1682658302-1584585937.1632426536

Since the sixteenth century, the transmission of knowledge from antiquity to modernity was pieced together as follows: the sciences were born in the ancient Near East and Egypt. They were received in the ancient Greek world and were furnished with a theoretical background in philosophy. Philosophy and science were cherished in the Roman world but died out by the seventh century. They were soon received by the Arabs through the Greek-to-Arabic translation movement of the ninth and tenth centuries. They were repatriated to Europe through an Arabic-to-Latin translation movement in the twelfth century. Their definitive and qualitatively superior repatriation occurred in the fifteenth century, when Byzantine scholars fleeing the Ottoman empire brought to Europe their knowledge of the Greek language and manuscripts of the ancient Greek authors. This narrative was further elaborated in the colonial conditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Post-colonial critics attacked many of its components but have not proposed any new and comprehensive narrative. The lecture will use the example of grammar to explain how this master narrative can be replaced and what the political implications of doing so are. This lecture will take place in person and on zoom. Register for zoom here: https://princeton.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0oceyopjkoHtI1lFuT7pDAqpWxqxJHmz6r

The Twelfth Annual M.I. Rostovtzeff Lecture Series, Lecture IV How did ancient Greek and Roman authors conceive of their own knowledge of the natural world? Did they see it as progressing and increasing, or as degenerating in some way? What did they see as the strengths or dangers posed by their own and others’ epistemic practices, and what are the strengths and dangers that we in turn face in interpreting and understanding those practices today? By framing these questions in terms of a larger category of ‘epistemic corruption,’ I hope to show that ancient ideas about knowledge practices are tightly correlated with claims about moral and bodily virtues and vices. Once we have seen the different ways in which knowledge practices can be compromised by corruption, both in ancient sources themselves and in our understanding of those sources, we can begin to appreciate some of the difficulties that can arise in articulating a clear and transhistorical notion of scientific progress. Ancient authors, for their part, were often ambivalent about progress, sometimes cleaving to a narrative about a lost golden age, and sometimes celebrating the triumphs of their own times or developments that they anticipated in the future. What might this mean for our own understandings of science, then and now? This event is free and open to the public, but an RSVP is required. RSVP HERE: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/rostovtzeff-series-epistemic-corruption-progress-in-ancient-science-4-registration-600842464987

Organized by John Hopkins (NYU) and Francesco de Angelis (Columbia) This year’s New York Workshop of Etruscan and Italic Art will center on the extraordinary discovery in 2022 of votive offerings from a healing sanctuary at the site of San Casciano dei Bagni, Italy. On Thursday, May 4, Jacopo Tabolli, director of excavations, will give a keynote lecture open to the public. On Friday, specialists will gather in the morning for a roundtable discussion on healing, the body and votive offerings; in the afternoon, we will have talks on Etruscan mirrors, gems, and sarcophagi. On Saturday morning, we will hold a celebration of the life and work of Larissa Bonfante, an inspiration and model for Etruscologists in the United States and in New York especially, where she received her PhD from Columbia and became an esteemed faculty member in the Department of Classics at NYU. This event will take place in person and online. View the full schedule and register to attend here: https://as.nyu.edu/departments/ancientstudies/events/spring-2023/2023-new-york-workshop-of-etruscan-and-italic-art.html

The Deep Dig: Adult Classes Delve into the colorful lives of kings, courtiers, and diplomats in the ancient Near East. From fantastic feasts to opulent marriages, explore the palaces and luxury arts of the royal courts of ancient Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the Levant. Each week, we will examine case studies—from the golden hoards of the royal tombs of Ur to the monumental palaces of the Assyrians—that reveal the myriad ways these cosmopolitan societies interacted with one another. Explore how international arts and architecture transcended cultural differences and allowed the flourishing of diplomacy at a crossroads of cultures. Join us for Member Preview of this class on May 2. Dates Thursday, May 4 Thursday, May 11 Thursday, May 18 Thursday, May 25 Buy tickets here: https://446.blackbaudhosting.com/446/The-Deep-Dig-International-Art-and-Politics-in-the-Ancient-Near-East?_ga=2.21979134.457077749.1682030160-681779679.1678307665 Scholarships are available. Please send an inquiry to events@pennmuseum.org.

This talk will take place in person and on zoom. To attend in person please RSVP by Tuesday, May 2nd to Eileen Robinson, eileenrobinson@princeton.edu Click here for the Zoom registration link: https://princeton.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIpf-qgqTsiGNd5NMtqzvCXvTBDgYndMqNc

At-Home Anthro LIVE Lamps were found across the Roman world throughout its history. Like their modern counterparts, these lamps allowed people to lengthen their day or conduct business in dark places. Archaeologists find these artifacts in a variety of contexts, such as houses, shops, temples, and other buildings. See close views of oil lamps in our collection before designing your own ancient Roman lamp! This virtual event is free. Register here: https://cilc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_rOWPwKlLSiaP_LSg7EFaZA

Early China Seminar Lecture Series For thousands of years, deer were one of the main sources of food, antler, and skins for people in North China, but the ecological significance of this remains unexplored. People in Neolithic and Early Bronze Age China modified landscapes in significant ways through earthworks, irrigation, and other agricultural practices. Particularly, people often used controlled fires to clear agricultural fields, abandoning fields after a few years and moving on to new land. Frequent shifting of farmed lands created a mosaic of vegetation types that is the ideal habitat for deer, and the faunal remains excavated at archaeological sites in China make clear that people hunted and ate a lot of deer. This paper examines zooarchaeological, textual, and paleoenvironmental evidence to explore the relationship between humans, deer, and the landscape. Ancient people were probably aware of what types of vegetation attracted deer and intentionally managed their landscapes to make them better deer habitat. However, after domesticated cattle, sheep, and goats arrived from Western Asia, people had less need for deer. As farming intensified, human impact on the landscape grew and deer were eliminated from people’s diets and from the landscape. Request the pre-circulated paper here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSezOc2DuQq_V86JB992fFTJZ3kcPP_O0vw1O66BP7OqMpI-dQ/viewform

Lovejoy Lecture In 1588, Cesare Baronio published the first volume of his Annales: a massive history of Christianity, intended to prove that the Church had not changed in any essential way since the Incarnation. Baronio used an eclectic method. He followed the tradition of church history when he excerpted primary sources and cited them in their entirety. But he was also an antiquarian, who would become renowned for restoring Roman churches to their original, late antique appearance. As a historian as well, he used material evidence of many kinds, from coins to buildings, to support his arguments. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is offered and refuses what the Vulgate called "murratum vinum" (15:23). To identify what the cup contained, Baronio did extensive research and consulted a local naturalist. He printed his solution in Annales I, only to discover that the subject was already a matter of lively debate among everyone from biblical commentators to natural philosophers. Baronio was besieged by scholars across Europe, determined to show that he had ignored Jewish sources or misidentified ancient objects. He refuted these attacks when he reprinted his first volume. His arguments found some support. Over time, moreover, the quarrels he had started paradoxically helped him make connections across the Republic of Letters. Eventually, though, another expert naturalist-Nicolas Guibert-used his mastery of both his own field and the study of antiquity to produce a devastating rebuttal. Baronio admitted defeat, but even he could do nothing to put an end to the debate, which rolled on and on. Intending only to solve a technical problem, Baronio had helped to create the interdisciplinary method characteristic of biblical and ecclesiastical scholarship in the seventeenth century.

ARCE-PA Lecture In Person Lecture Information: Registration is the day of the lecture only, at the entrance to the lecture room. Unless stated, we do not pre-register for in-person lectures. Free for and ARCE members For all others pricing is as follows: General public: $10 Penn Museum members and UPenn Staff & Faculty: $7 Students with ID (unless otherwise stated): $5

This talk will take place in person and on zoom. To attend in person Please RSVP by Friday, May 5th to: eileenrobinson@princeton.edu To attend virtually click here for the Zoom registration link: https://princeton.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUqc-qprjoqGdLmAMBW0Z7KkRy9mkTu6_8v

Expanding the Ancient World Workshop Expanding the Ancient World is a series of professional development workshops and online resources for teachers. Keyed to the NYC Department of Education Social Studies Scope and Sequence, this program is designed to offer K-12 educators opportunities to develop their knowledge of the ancient world and to provide classroom-ready strategies for teaching the past with reliable sources. Featuring inquiry-based workshops, flexible lesson plans, and up-to-date research, Expanding the Ancient World aims to equip teachers with information and skills that they can share with their students. CTLE credits will be offered to New York State teachers. The ancient Mediterranean was a racially diverse place—this is reflected in its art if we look beyond the famous white sculptures associated with antiquity. This workshop provides examples of non-white people depicted in ancient Mediterranean art that teachers can use to introduce students to the diversity of the ancient world. It also offers guidance on how to discuss these representations, and their contexts, in a sensitive and nuanced way fit for the diverse classrooms of New York City and beyond. This workshop will take place online; a Zoom link will be provided via email to registered participants. Registration is required at THIS LINK: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/etaw-workshop-space-for-race-black-and-brown-faces-in-ancient-art-registration-566559102527