Bøker i Ancient Environments-serien

Focusing on the transitional period of the late Republic to the early Principate, Trees in Ancient Rome offers a sustained examination of the deployment of trees in the ancient city, exploring not only the practicalities of their cultivation, but also their symbolic value. The Ruminal fig tree sheltered the she-wolf as she nursed Romulus and Remus and year's later Rome was founded between two groves. As the city grew, neighbourhoods bore the names of groves and hills were known by the trees which grew atop them. From the 1st century BCE, triumphs included trees among their spoils and Rome's green cityscape grew, as did the challenges of finding room for trees within the congested city.This volume begins with an examination of the role of trees as repositories of human memory, lasting for several generations. It goes on to untangle the import of trees, and their role in the triumphal procession, before closing with a discussion of how trees could be grown in Rome's urban spaces. Drawing on a combination of literary, visual and archaeological sources, it reveals the rich variety of trees in evidence, and explores how they impacted, and were used to impact, life in the ancient city.

Presenting a new perspective on human-animal relations in the ancient Near East, this volume considers how we should understand equids (horses, donkeys, onagers and various hybrids) as animals that are social actors. Recht brings together a wealth of new data, including Bronze Age Near Eastern material culture from a range of archaeological contexts with equid remains as well as iconography and texts. She looks in particular at finds of equids themselves from burials, sacred space and settlements alongside associated artefacts such as chariots and harnesses.This is the first time the agency of animals is recognized. The study is essential reading for prehistorians, archaeologists and those studying early animal domestication, showcasing how humans encounter and interact with other animals, and how those animals in turn interact with humans. Recht outlines the broader implications for human involvement with their environment, both today and in the past, and points to further study in a number of focused appendices.

More than any other type of environment, with the possible exception of mountains, the sea has been understood since antiquity as being immovable to a proverbial degree. Yet it was the sea's capacity for movement - both literally and figuratively through such emotions as fear, hope and pity - that formed one of the primary means of conceptualizing its significance in Late Antique societies. This volume advances a new and interdisciplinary understanding of what the sea as an environment and the pursuit of seafaring meant in antiquity, drawing on a range of literary, legal and archaeological evidence to explore the social, economic and cultural factors at play. The contributions are structured into three thematic parts which move from broad conceptual categories to specific questions of networks and mobility. Part One takes a wide view of the Mediterranean as an environment with great metaphorical and symbolic potential. Part Two looks at networks of seaborne communication and the role of islands as the characteristic hubs of the Mediterranean. Finally, Part Three engages with the practicalities of tackling the sea as a challenging environment that needs to be challenged politically, legally and for the means of travel.

This book demonstrates how the Romans constructed garden boundaries specifically in order to open up or undermine the division between a number of oppositions, such as inside/outside, sacred/profane, art/nature, and real/imagined. Using case studies from across literature and material and visual culture, Victoria Austen explores the perception of individual garden sites in response to their limits, and showcases how the Romans delighted in playing with concepts of boundedness and separation. Transculturally, the garden is understood as a marked-off and cultivated space. Distinct from their surroundings, gardens are material and symbolic spaces that constitute both universal and culturally specific ways of accommodating the natural world and expressing human attitudes and values. Although we define these spaces explicitly through the notions of separation and division, in many cases we are unable to make sense of the most basic distinction between 'garden' and 'not-garden'. In response to this ambiguity, Austen interrogates the notion of the 'boundary' as an essential characteristic of the Roman garden.