Category: Ancient World

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Why talk about the Silkroad in China?

Birgitta Hoffmann

This autumn our Silkroad course is going to visit a slightly unusual element within the Silkroad studies – the transport within China.
Why would this be so interesting? We all know, that the land route enters China at the Gansu Corridor by passing through a gate in the Great Wall. From there it moved on to Xi’an/Changan, the ancient capital of China. We also know that Guangzhou on the Pearl River is the oldest of the China Sea harbours that carried the Maritime trade on the Silk Route to and from the Harbours. Guangzhou is even far enough in the South that it acts as China’s Monsoon Trade harbour.

So far this is very easy and hardly surprising. The question is what happens then?
Xi’an/Chang’an ceases to be the capital of China in the late Tang period, when the capital moves East beyond the passes first to Luoyang, then to Kaifeng. Very soon afterwards you hear of other capitals, with Beijing, Nanjing and Hangzhou being probably the most famous sites.
If we assume that the high luxury items of the Silkroad trade were destined particularly for the court, these changes of capitals and the creation of multiple capitals, when China disintegrates over centuries means that a trade route ending in Xi’an is of little use to anybody.

Other problems are the imperial monopolies: Silk, salt and tea are legally only available through the imperial government. But the place where tea is grown and the place where the harbours are, are in the Tang period at the opposite ends of the Pearl River and a long way from Chang’an.

We also have to consider the massive distances involved: From Guangzhou to Kaifeng is 1500km with another 700km to reach Beijing. Shanghai is 900 km away, Dunhuang another 2000 km. None of these routes is easy, often crossing mountains, sometimes deserts and several huge rivers. Creating a viable road network was a century-long project which started with the Qin emperors and was added and adjusted as time and money permitted or demanded. Heavy, bulky or fragile goods were always at risk on the roads, whether transported by horses or by carts and thus not really useful to the Silkroad trader of fragile luxury items.

In response the Chinese developed a very efficient use of waterways. With long rivers like the Wei, the Pearl River and the Yangtse East-West transport was possible, if the various hazards to navigations could be mastered, but what if you needed to travel North-South or needed to cross between river systems, for example, to take the pottery from Jingdezhen or Changsha to Guangzhou?

In this course we will take a look on how these transport problems were mastered during the different dynasties and what this meant for long-distance traders who wanted to obtain goods from the interior of China but weren’t necessarily interested in travelling there themselves or even not permitted to do so.

The Silkroad course on China starts on Thursday 3 October.
Places for the course or for individual lectures can be booked from this webpage here or via Eventbrite here.

 

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Roman villas in Gaul and Germany: the homes of the invaders and fashion victims?

Birgitta Hoffmann

After spending a year looking at the amazing estate centres in the Mediterranean, 10 weeks talking about the villas in Gaul and Germany might seem somewhat of a letdown. So why do it? For starters,  they are by far the most common Roman site type in the area and the closest parallels to the villas we find in Roman Britain. The rural farm with its yard and little bath house is for much of Gaul the definition of what it means to be living in the Roman NW provinces.
And like the farms in the American Midwest, there is at times a certain repetitiveness in their design and aspirations. But they also document, how Rome transformed and frankly reconstructed the Iron Age landscapes after the wars of Julius Caesar and later the Civil War of the 69/70 CE. The result are thriving landscapes in the hinterland of Gall0-Roman Towns and later Roman forts.

The joy of these is, however, the diversity and the variety of research that has been conducted on them. Every region has their own idea of what a villa estate should look like, which might reflect the type of agriculture that was practised and perhaps even more interesting is the question how fast you see the development of different levels of wealth. The picture is the reconstruction of the Roman villa of Borg in Germany. It is without a doubt the villa of a member of the financial elite, but it comes from the area of the Treveri, where you see these large villas quite early, so where does the money come from? And who are the owners? In the territory of the Helvetii (in modern Switzerland), you have a landscape that was evacuated in the late Iron Age and then resettled leading to some villas that are best described as palaces or the centre of a small town, rather than a rural site, but there are plenty of pointers that suggest that in many cases these large villas were in the hands of the local elite and increasingly we find that these sites continue  Iron Age settlements.

But we also find areas like Cologne where many of the villas may have been in the hands of retired Roman soldiers (who at this point are likely to have been born in Northern Italy and the South of France). How does this differ from the ‘Romanised villas’ in Switzerland? And are there local people who refuse to live with underfloor heating and mosaics and why?

It is not surprising that these 200-year-long traditions of rural living come in many areas to an abrupt halt during the third century. The surviving sites change, but how do you continue to farm in the face of an unpredictable military and political situation and if you are one of the lucky rich ones, who may be working closely with the court at Trier, how do you adapt your villa to document this in the face of your neighbours?

As you can see, a lot of material and questions to cover and as to mosaics and the art – let’s just say, it is amazing what can survive a long way from Rome.

If you are interested, you can find further details about the course here.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

What has a German writer to do with the Grand Tour

Birgitta Hoffmann

On Saturday, 18th of July, I will be offering a dayschool on Goethe and the Grand Tour.
Isn’t that a contradiction? The Grand Tour is in origin a deeply English and later British Institution. Established in the mid 17th century as a way for nobility to extricate itself from political problems in England, it became in the 18th century a finishing school for the young men/late teenagers of the British nobility who were sent with their ‘bear-keepers’/teachers to familiarise themselves with the cultural highlights and high society in Europe, especially in Italy and return laden with statues,  architectural plans and paintings 3 years later.

So how does a successful German writer and court official in his early forties fit into this? The answer lies in his age and in the time of the publication of his memoirs. When he travelled in 1786-1788 the grand tour was at the height of fashion. The idea had spread to all over Europe, The King of Sweden was travelling, so was the Tsar of Russia and everybody who could afford it. There were travel guides, there were picture books, there were diary, it was the ‘in’ thing to do.  Hardly, surprising to find Goethe joining in.

However, Goethe decided to give this tour his very own flair. He set out alone with a backpack on the post chaises –  the first backpacker in Europe and stayed not in fashionable hotels but with artist friends and wayside inns, always accompanied by his book box. Well read he reflects on what it means to look at art (ancient and otherwise) and thus joining the discussion started by Winkelmann, what it means to travel and what it does to you. In between, visits and discussions he falls out with his girlfriend and tries to get back into her good graces. A forty year old in the grips of a midlife crisis, a very literate man in a mid-life crisis and the first one to describe it in all its glory.

But I am not a literature critic or a philosopher/psychologist, so why is this so interesting for an archaeologist and historian? The answer lies in the publication date. Goethe returned from Italy in June 1788, France was already in turmoil, a year later the French Revolution would start and until June 1815 Europe was increasingly a theatre of war, making travel more and more hazardous until Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in the summer of 1815.

25 years is a long time, time enough for a fashion of the nobility to die.  But this is, where Goethe comes in. He published his memoirs of his time in Italy in 1815, twenty five years after the event. He was now an arbiter of taste in Europe, a polymath, a writer, a thinker. And his memoirs restarted the Grand Tour as a European phenomenon, not just for the nobility but also for the middle classes. Not just as an educational chore/opportunity, but very much as an emotional experience in the age of the Romantics. Thanks to him, travelling to Italy became the romantic dream of half a continent: off to the country where the oranges and lemons blossom to become more human, to experience the Italian way of life as well as the cultures of the past.

Without him, Thomas Cook and his tourists would have felt more than a little bit lost.

If you want to know more, there are still places on the course, you can find all the details here.  

I look forward to seeing you on Saturday.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Roman Britain on screen

Tony Keen

The world of ancient Rome continues to be a source of fascination for cinema and television. As I write, Gladiator 2 is slated for a November 2024 release, whilst the second season of Domina, telling the story of Livia, wife of the first Roman emperor, has just premiered on UK television. These productions garner much attention. A little less discussed are movies and television series set in the Roman province of Britannia. But such productions have been made for nearly a century now, beginning with Boadicea in 1927, and that is what my new course for MANCENT is all about.

The story of Roman Britain is one told through a few key moments. A particularly popular one is Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain, often (wrongly) seen as the point at which Britain became a Roman province. Curiously, almost all treatments of Caesar’s invasion are comedies, of which Carry On Cleo (1964) is surely the best known. There are quite a few productions set in the reign of the British King Cunobelinus, who reigned in the wake of Caesar’s invasion; these are all adaptations of William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.

Compared with Caesar’s raids, the invasion in 43 CE of the emperor Claudius, which actually imposed direct Roman rule, gets little coverage, though it is mentioned in I Claudius (1977), and is the basis for weird fantasy Britannia (2018—2021). Much more popular is the revolt of Queen Boudica (better known until recently as Boadicea). This is almost always treated seriously, and in quite a grem fashion, though the two treatments by Horrible Histories, once on television (2015) and once in cinema (2018) are exceptions.

The fate of the Ninth Legion and Hadrian’s Wall have often been linked, and so they are on screen, with such productions as Centurion (2010) and The Eagle (2011). Both can also be linked to a final ‘historical’ moment, the time of King Arthur. Though many Arthurian movies, such as Excalibur (1981), retain Malory’s setting of a quasi-medieval Anglocentric patriarchy, some seek to place him in the context of the end of Roman Britain; Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword (2017) is an example.

Certain motifs recur again and again across these productions: the weather is awful, with almost constant rain; Britain is a backwater in the Roman empire; its people are primitive compared to the sophisticated Romans; and there are Druids everywhere. What is interesting is that, where most movies and television shows give an American view of the Romans, productions about Roman Britain generally emerge from British writers, directors, and producers (or, in the case of two Asterix movies, French), and so we see Rome from a different perspective.

This course runs from 18 September to 27 November, with a break for 23 October. All sessions are two hours, and are recorded. You don’t have to be able to make the live sessions to get the recordings and can be booked here.

The picture is from Britannia (2018–2021) David Morrissey as Aulus Plautius, in search of some scenery to chew.

 

Britannia (2018–2021) David Morrissey as Aulus Plautius, in search of some scenery to chew.

 

Britannia (2018–2021) David Morrissey as Aulus Plautius, in search of some scenery to chew.

 

Britannia (2018–2021) David Morrissey as Aulus Plautius, in search of some scenery to chew.

 

Britannia (2018–2021) David Morrissey as Aulus Plautius, in search of some scenery to chew.

 

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Why talk about Silkroad in the Indian Ocean?

Birgitta Hoffmann

Everybody knows the Silkroad. Originally, we thought it went overland from Xi’an to the Mediterranean. But this is only one of many, many routes that were used since about 6000 BC to facilitate long-distance exchange between Africa, Asia (including the Western Pacific) and Europe. Today we know these routes were a huge network, forever changing and adapting to political and climate change, but always driven by the need to carry goods and ideas from one end of the world to the other.

One of the biggest parts of this network is the Maritime Routes and the Indian Ocean and in the middle of it, the Indian Subcontinent is a crucial turntable for this trade.

According to the ancient sources the biggest harbour in the South of India, in the area now known as Kerala was Muziris or Muchiri in the Tamil texts. During the Roman Period goods were brought here from the West and fortunes could be made by bringing Indian produce from spices to Cotton to Gemstone back. in 2009 the Archaeologists found this site at a place known as Pattanam, which means the harbour/port. The picture shows some of the amphora found at the site, but I also could have shown you pictures of gemstones and the remains of a wharf and store buildings.


Pattanam is probably the best-known of the sites that were discovered in the last 20 years of research into the Maritime Silkroad in India and I really look forward to talking about these new discoveries in my Course on the Silkroad trade in the Indian Ocean on Thursdays for MANCENT 
The course is online and recorded and open to international enrolment via Eventbrite and thanks to the recordings available at a time convenient for you.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

MANCENT 2023 Programme now out

Just in time for the bank holiday weekend, MANCENT is publishing its Autumn programme.

Courses will start in September and there is a wide range of humanities courses from Music to literature to History and Archaeology.

We are also reviving our Cultural day trips to various museums and sites and hope that will once again prove popular.

The full programme is on the website and can be booked either by contacting the lecturers or with many of them the online courses via Eventbrite links, which are very popular with our overseas students.

All the best and we look forward to seeing you soon at one of our events.

Birgitta Hoffmann
MANCENT Course Director and her team.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Thinking about Religion in Roman Britain

Birgitta Hoffmann

Time to look towards the Autumn lecture courses and I am beginning to review material for a course on the Religious World of Roman Britain. Sound like a clumsy title, but I am trying to introduce the students to the complexity that were the competing or coexisting belief systems in Roman Britain. And yes I will compare it occasionally with the very complex religious universe of the Indian subcontinent.

One of the issues that interest me is the different levels at which some cult followers made decisions on how to be seen by the wider population.
This is the Aesculapius stone from Maryport. It isn’t the only stone to Aesculapius in Britain and it isn’t the only Greek inscription from Britain either. But this one was found in Maryport, not exactly a Roman place that you would associate with words like ‘multiethnic’ beyond the Roman/Iron Age divide (?) and certainly not a place you would expect to see a lot of Greek speakers….and still Aulos Egnatios Pastor chose to use Greek on his dedication to Aesculapios. Did a Greek god give premium service to Greek speakers? Was this part of a small Greek-speaking group? Does that mean the language of the services was Greek?
And would everybody else feel excluded or welcomed to a mysterious cult that used special magic words and must therefore be powerful?

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Why study Greek and Roman Myths by Tony Keen

Whenever I visit the National Gallery in London, I always stop in front of Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1520-1523). It is one of my favourite paintings ever because mythologically it’s so rich.

Most mythological paintings of the sixteenth century and later draw upon the work of the Roman poet Ovid and his fifteen-book epic the Metamorphoses. Titian (full name Tiziano Vecelli) certainly drew upon Ovid’s work for paintings that came late in his career such as Diana and Callisto, Diana and Actaeon, and the Death of Actaeon. But the source for Bacchus and Ariadne, painted when Titian was in his thirties, was not the Metamorphoses. Ovid does mention the story, but not in detail. The best-known version of the tale is in an earlier poet, Gaius Valerius Catullus. Catullus’ poems were mostly short, but a small collection of longer poems survive. Of these, the longest is Poem 64. A ‘mini-epic’ of 408 lines, it covers a number of mythological accounts, including that of Bacchus and Ariadne.

Ariadne was a daughter of King Minos of Crete. She aided the Athenian hero Theseus when he came to Crete to kill her half-brother, the half-man, half-bull Minotaur. Understandably, afterwards, she had to flee Crete with Theseus. But then, for reasons no account really explains properly, Theseus abandons Ariadne on the island of Naxos. This is the moment Titian dramatises.

Ariadne is caught waving towards the ship of Theseus, which can be seen on the horizon, sail billowing in the wind. But Ariadne is suddenly distracted by the coming of the god Bacchus (the Greek Dionysus), the god of wine and revelry. We see her having turned her head towards the new arrival.