Alte Geschichte (Huebner)Head of Research Unit Prof. Dr.Sabine HuebnerOverviewMembersPublicationsProjects & CollaborationsProjects & Collaborations OverviewMembersPublicationsProjects & Collaborations Projects & Collaborations 30 foundShow per page10 10 20 50 In nomine patris, filii et ... avi? Grandparenthood in early Christian families Research Project | 2 Project MembersPI Dr. Lisa Brunet: This study aims for a more cohesive understanding of the social and cultural environment of early Christian families, by complementing historical (i.e. epigraphical, papyrological, literary and legal) documents from the third to the sixth century CE with fragments from the New Testament and apocryphal gospels. More specifically, by leveraging diverse source datasets regarding grandparenthood in Late Antiquity, this project builds on the interdisciplinary approach to the study of ancient daily life introduced by prof. Sabine Huebner at the University of Basel. Surprisingly, despite the increasing amount of scholarship on the notions and culture of grandparenthood, ancient grandparents have hitherto remained under-examined. We ask what can be ascribed to socio-cultural patterns and expectations towards grandparents as well as individual realities and attitudes. What were the daily concerns and difficulties experienced by grandparents in the Christian Mediterranean? How did Christianity influence the bond between grandparent and grandchild? And, what about the grandparents of Jesus himself? Examining multiple ancient perspectives, this study will substantially advance our knowledge regarding the flexibility and inclusivity in early Christian familial mentality. As such, this project aspires to contribute to present-day debates concerning inclusion and elderly care strategies. EGRAPSA: Retracing the evolutions of handwritings in Greco-Roman Egypt thanks to digital palaeography Research Project | 4 Project MembersPapyri preserved by the dry climate of Egypt are an unparalleled source of information on the Ancient World. Around 80,000 papyri written in ancient Greek have already been published, covering a millennium between the time of Alexander the Great and the Arab conquest of Egypt (end of 4th c. BCE to early 8th c. CE). However, their large number, their diversity and their current dispersion have impeded a comprehensive grasp of their nature and content. In particular, palaeography, as the study of handwritings that has the potential to unveil who, where and when a text has been written, still relies on experts' assertions which rarely reach consensus. New technological advances in Computer Science allow now building the big picture of the writing culture of Greco-Roman Egypt and developing scientific analyses of scripts. The goal of EGRAPSA project (literally "I have written" in Ancient Greek) is to provide a new theoretical framework to the palaeography of Greek papyri. Starting from sound evidence, it aims at retracing the evolutions of handwritings, generating a model that, in turn, can contribute at organizing the papyrological documentation in a coherent panorama, improving the solidity of dates and writer identifications made on palaeographical grounds. The ground-breaking dimension of the project is not only in its scope that encompasses the entire papyrological documentation in its complexity, and in its conceptual approach to make sense of the plurality of scripts by discerning evolution phenomena but also in its methodological choice to measure similarities and explain evolutions by focusing on the reconstruction of the dynamics of writing, thus to literally re-trace handwritings. Living in a man's world: Reading the lives of women in the private correspondence from a Roman fort in Egypt's Eastern Desert Research Project | 2 Project MembersAs surprising as it may seem, the Roman forts (praesidia) in the Eastern Desert of Egypt were not only occupied by men. Of course, the main population was made up of soldiers and male civilians, but the documents found there tell us about the presence of women alongside them. The Krokodilô fort, excavated between 1996 and 1997, provides us a particularly rich documentation on the subject. Indeed, many ostraca (inscribed sherd ; it is the preferred writing medium in the desert, as it is cheaper than papyrus and easy to obtain) are letters written in Greek and addressed or related to women. The research project consists in deciphering and editing for the first time a set of 129 unedited documents from Krokodilô, dated at the beginning of the 2nd century A.D., and in analyzing the data that will come from it in order to have a better understanding of the existence that these women could lead, as wives, mothers, sisters or daughters of the men in the camp, or sometimes as prostitutes, but also as proper individuals. These documents will provide new evidences of the roles and positions they could hold, of their occupations, of the relations they had with the men of the fort and with those of the other praesidia, but also with each other, in short of the daily life of the women of the Roman camps of the Egyptian Eastern Desert at the beginning of the 2nd century. Urban Biographies of the Roman and Late Antique Worlds: Antinoopolis and Heracleopolis in Egypt, c. 100 - c. 650 CE Research Project | 5 Project Members«Urban Biographies of the Roman and Late Antique Worlds» examines the development of cities in Middle Egypt in the Roman and late antique periods, focusing on the two case-studies of Antinoopolis and Heracleopolis . The project aims to illustrate the contribution of ancient papyri and other materials found in Egypt to the urban history of the Roman and late antique worlds, and more specifically to uncover continuities and changes in the lives of these two individual cities. The project team will combine archaeological approaches and digital methods with the analysis of papyri and other textual materials to build an on-line platform which integrates relevant data for both sites. Historical research on these data will confront the individual evolution for each of these two cities with broader assumptions about economic, social, cultural, and political change, in particular the transition from the Roman to the late antique period. SNF-Scientific Exchange: Fiscal Institutions in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt Research Project | 1 Project MembersThe social and economic history of Greco-Roman Egypt is a major strength of the Institute of Ancient History at the University of Basel. The invited scholar and his host have both worked extensively on documentary texts on papyrus, while both also adopt comparative methods of historical sociology in their research. The overall objective of this scientific exchange is to advance our understanding of fiscal institutions in Egypt by sharing different perspectives and expertise on the Ptolemaic (323-30 BC) and Roman imperial period. Monson's aims are to incorporate the papyrological evidence into a broader comparative study of fiscal regimes in the ancient Mediterranean as well as to solve specific problems in the interpretation of the sources. For myself and researchers at the University of Basel, the goal is to use Monson's visit for a series of workshops and presentations centered on the fiscal regime in Egypt under the Ptolemaic dynasty and the Roman empire. The results will be seen in high-quality research outputs, namely, a book and articles that benefit from substantial collaborative input. Their impact will be as much in the creation of new knowledg about Greco-Roman Egypt as in the refinement of methodologies for comparative history, which will have multiplying effects through the students and scholars in this field from Basel and nearby universities who will profit from the exchange. The Roman Egypt Laboratory: Climate Change, Societal Transformations, and the Transition to Late Antiquity Research Project | 6 Project MembersThe interaction between climate change, environmental stress, and societal transformations is increasingly attracting the interest of the scientific community and the general public alike, as contemporary concerns about global warming grow. This research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and directed by Prof. Dr. Sabine R. Huebner will apply groundbreaking and innovative multidisciplinary approaches to the complex relationships between climate variability and environmental change on the one hand and the ability and capacity of human society to adapt to these challenges on the other. The third century CE was a period of grand-scale transformations and existential threats to the Roman Empire, the ancient superpower that ruled a geographically vast and ethnically diverse area comprising nearly a fourth of the world population at that time. During the third century, the Roman Empire experienced military anarchy, civil wars, rampant inflation, severe famines, dramatic changes in the religious landscape, bloody persecutions of minority groups, and raids and invasions from beyond the frontier. What were the reasons and causal relationships underlying this concurrence of adverse events? Recent research has suggested that climate variations triggered these cascading shocks, but this theory has yet to be put to scrutiny through a comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis of all available evidence. Due to its unparalleled evidence, the Roman province of Egypt can serve as a laboratory to test such hypotheses and study social vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation strategies in the face of environmental and climatic changes. This pioneering and innovative project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between climate scientists, archaeologists, and ancient historians that bridges the traditional divide between the humanities and the natural sciences. The project aims to evaluate and interpret the effects of environmental stressors, and climate change on society, economy, and politics using third-century Roman Egypt as a case study for a multi-disciplinary approach to a fervently debated transition period in Western civilization. This holistic approach to climate change and societal transformations will be the first of its kind for the Roman world and promises a major breakthrough in an increasingly intense scholarly discussion, which this project will shape and lead. Climate Change in the Breadbasket of the Roman Empire: Reconstructing Nile Floods for the Roman Period Research Project | 1 Project MembersThe importance of the Nile on Egypt's agriculture, society, culture and political history can hardly be overrated. Since rainfall is almost non-existent in Middle and Upper Egypt, any changes in the annual Nile flood must have triggered an immediate response in Egyptian society, economy and politics. Moreover, the Nile river and its fertile flood plains did not only play a crucial role in the development of Egyptian civilization, but they also constituted one of the main pillars for the economic stability of the Roman Empire and helped to sustain its imperial expansion. The grain supply of the city of Rome and the Roman army was closely tied to the annual cycle of the Egyptian river. Reconstructing annual changes in the quality of the flood of the Nile is thus important not only for studying the immediately adjacent Egyptian society, but it also has implications of a larger scale, for a series of below-average Nile floods must have had serious political and socio-economic consequences for the entire Roman Empire. Climate Change in the Breadbasket of the Roman Empire: Reconstructing Nile Floods for the Roman Period An interdisciplinary conference held at the Swiss Institute in Rome Villa Maraini, Via Ludovisi 48, Rome (Italy) January 23/24, 2020 Until now ancient historians studying the society and economy of Roman Egypt have hardly paid any attention to the flood quality in any given year. Moreover, our literary, epigraphic and papyrological sources offer only sparse evidence for exceptional years: the earliest consecutive records of Nile flood levels start in the 7th century CE recorded by the Islamic Nilometer in Cairo. With new advances in the field of paleoclimatology, which offers an entirely new array of sources to ancient historians, there is hope that we will be able to reconstruct Nile flood data for the Graeco-Roman period, and develop collaborative methods of assessing the impact of climatic variability or change on ancient societies without oversimplifying their causal connections. At this conference we aim to discuss both human and natural proxy data in order to reconstruct summer Nile flooding during the Roman period from 30 BCE to roughly 700 CE. Dissertation project Audric Wannaz: Eine Korpusstudie zum Inhalt und zur Struktur der familiären Privatbriefe der griechisch-römischen Zeit Research Project | 1 Project MembersDas Projekt hat zum Ziel, durch die Korpusstudie einer bestimmten Art von Briefen einen sowohl inhaltlichen als auch methodischen Mehrwert für das Studium der antiken Sozialgeschichte zu erzeugen. Bis heute fehlt es an einer quantitativ gestützten Typologie des Briefes als Genre unter den dokumentarischen Quellen der Antike, obwohl dem bereits zahlreiche qualitative Untersuchungen gewidmet sind. Ich möchte mit meiner Arbeit am Beispiel einer bestimmten Briefart dem Entstehen einer solchen Typologie einen Anfang setzen. Einige Privatbriefe sind einzigartige Quellen, indem sie wie keine andere Textart von Beziehungen zwischen Familienmitgliedern und Freunden zeugen, die außerhalb ihrer Mikrokosmen irrelevant waren. Diese persönlichen, familiären Briefe verschaffen einen Einblick in die wohl intimste Sphäre der Leben antiker Menschen und verdienen es daher meines Erachtens, als Korpus untersucht zu werden. Auf der methodischen Ebene kann diese Arbeit als Versuch betrachtet werden, das qualitative close reading der bisherigen Forschung zu den persönlichen Privatbriefen mit dem durch das Aufkommen der digital humanities möglich werdenden distant reading zu ergänzen (ohne sie zu ersetzen!). Auf die Korpusstudie bezogen heisst es, dass sie in einem ersten Teil zunächst corpus based funktionieren wird, da die bisherigen Fragestellungen der Forschung die Erschaffung des Korpus maßgeblich prägen werden. Umgekehrt wird die Analyse des Korpus zu einer corpus driven Vorgehensweise führen, sobald durch die neuen Visualisierungsmethoden neue Fragestellungen aus den Texten ersichtlich werden. Connecting - Editing - Programming - Learning (CEPL): sowing the seeds for joint teaching and research in digital papyrology, philology and ancient history in the European Campus Research Project | 1 Project MembersThe project in the field of Classical Antiquity is under the direction of the University of Freiburg and is being implemented in collaboration with the Universities of Basel and Strasbourg. Students are introduced to reading, editing and publishing of Greek papyri online, a considerable number of which can be found in the manuscript collections of the three universities. The aim is joint teaching development in the fields of papyrology (focus in Strasbourg), ancient history (focus in Freiburg), and digitization of historical manuscripts (focus in Basel), eventually contributing to the existing trinational master's programme in the field of ancient studies. The project is supported by Eucor - The European Campus in the "Teaching" category of the Seed Money scheme. Nomisma: Measuring Monetary Integration in the Late Roman Empire Research Project | 5 Project MembersThe purpose of this Forschungsfond application is to develop a database of coinages of the Later Roman Empire in order to study and statistically measure the actual monetary integration of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East during its first unified currency system in the late third, fourth, and fifth centuries CE. This has important implications for understanding the global economy of the Mediterranean and beyond, as we can trace economic links and study trade and commercial relations based on the movement of coins and the economic profile of each province. Assessing the monetary integration can also open up question of economic interdependence between differing regions around the Mediterranean, and thus help us understand the way in which the various level of economic units- local, regional and global, functioned during this important period of human history. Furthermore, studying monetary integration can help to assess the adequacy of employing an open currency system in the European continent, something that is very relevant to present-day economic systems. The construction of the database of third to fifth century coin hoards is the first step of a larger project aimed at studying the link of coins and commercial economy, and is meant to be seed money in preparation for an Ambizione project application, which will center around understanding economic interdependence on various levels within the Roman Empire in order to understand the success and shortcomings of an open currency systems by looking at different periods throughout monetary history. 123 123 OverviewMembersPublicationsProjects & Collaborations
Projects & Collaborations 30 foundShow per page10 10 20 50 In nomine patris, filii et ... avi? Grandparenthood in early Christian families Research Project | 2 Project MembersPI Dr. Lisa Brunet: This study aims for a more cohesive understanding of the social and cultural environment of early Christian families, by complementing historical (i.e. epigraphical, papyrological, literary and legal) documents from the third to the sixth century CE with fragments from the New Testament and apocryphal gospels. More specifically, by leveraging diverse source datasets regarding grandparenthood in Late Antiquity, this project builds on the interdisciplinary approach to the study of ancient daily life introduced by prof. Sabine Huebner at the University of Basel. Surprisingly, despite the increasing amount of scholarship on the notions and culture of grandparenthood, ancient grandparents have hitherto remained under-examined. We ask what can be ascribed to socio-cultural patterns and expectations towards grandparents as well as individual realities and attitudes. What were the daily concerns and difficulties experienced by grandparents in the Christian Mediterranean? How did Christianity influence the bond between grandparent and grandchild? And, what about the grandparents of Jesus himself? Examining multiple ancient perspectives, this study will substantially advance our knowledge regarding the flexibility and inclusivity in early Christian familial mentality. As such, this project aspires to contribute to present-day debates concerning inclusion and elderly care strategies. EGRAPSA: Retracing the evolutions of handwritings in Greco-Roman Egypt thanks to digital palaeography Research Project | 4 Project MembersPapyri preserved by the dry climate of Egypt are an unparalleled source of information on the Ancient World. Around 80,000 papyri written in ancient Greek have already been published, covering a millennium between the time of Alexander the Great and the Arab conquest of Egypt (end of 4th c. BCE to early 8th c. CE). However, their large number, their diversity and their current dispersion have impeded a comprehensive grasp of their nature and content. In particular, palaeography, as the study of handwritings that has the potential to unveil who, where and when a text has been written, still relies on experts' assertions which rarely reach consensus. New technological advances in Computer Science allow now building the big picture of the writing culture of Greco-Roman Egypt and developing scientific analyses of scripts. The goal of EGRAPSA project (literally "I have written" in Ancient Greek) is to provide a new theoretical framework to the palaeography of Greek papyri. Starting from sound evidence, it aims at retracing the evolutions of handwritings, generating a model that, in turn, can contribute at organizing the papyrological documentation in a coherent panorama, improving the solidity of dates and writer identifications made on palaeographical grounds. The ground-breaking dimension of the project is not only in its scope that encompasses the entire papyrological documentation in its complexity, and in its conceptual approach to make sense of the plurality of scripts by discerning evolution phenomena but also in its methodological choice to measure similarities and explain evolutions by focusing on the reconstruction of the dynamics of writing, thus to literally re-trace handwritings. Living in a man's world: Reading the lives of women in the private correspondence from a Roman fort in Egypt's Eastern Desert Research Project | 2 Project MembersAs surprising as it may seem, the Roman forts (praesidia) in the Eastern Desert of Egypt were not only occupied by men. Of course, the main population was made up of soldiers and male civilians, but the documents found there tell us about the presence of women alongside them. The Krokodilô fort, excavated between 1996 and 1997, provides us a particularly rich documentation on the subject. Indeed, many ostraca (inscribed sherd ; it is the preferred writing medium in the desert, as it is cheaper than papyrus and easy to obtain) are letters written in Greek and addressed or related to women. The research project consists in deciphering and editing for the first time a set of 129 unedited documents from Krokodilô, dated at the beginning of the 2nd century A.D., and in analyzing the data that will come from it in order to have a better understanding of the existence that these women could lead, as wives, mothers, sisters or daughters of the men in the camp, or sometimes as prostitutes, but also as proper individuals. These documents will provide new evidences of the roles and positions they could hold, of their occupations, of the relations they had with the men of the fort and with those of the other praesidia, but also with each other, in short of the daily life of the women of the Roman camps of the Egyptian Eastern Desert at the beginning of the 2nd century. Urban Biographies of the Roman and Late Antique Worlds: Antinoopolis and Heracleopolis in Egypt, c. 100 - c. 650 CE Research Project | 5 Project Members«Urban Biographies of the Roman and Late Antique Worlds» examines the development of cities in Middle Egypt in the Roman and late antique periods, focusing on the two case-studies of Antinoopolis and Heracleopolis . The project aims to illustrate the contribution of ancient papyri and other materials found in Egypt to the urban history of the Roman and late antique worlds, and more specifically to uncover continuities and changes in the lives of these two individual cities. The project team will combine archaeological approaches and digital methods with the analysis of papyri and other textual materials to build an on-line platform which integrates relevant data for both sites. Historical research on these data will confront the individual evolution for each of these two cities with broader assumptions about economic, social, cultural, and political change, in particular the transition from the Roman to the late antique period. SNF-Scientific Exchange: Fiscal Institutions in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt Research Project | 1 Project MembersThe social and economic history of Greco-Roman Egypt is a major strength of the Institute of Ancient History at the University of Basel. The invited scholar and his host have both worked extensively on documentary texts on papyrus, while both also adopt comparative methods of historical sociology in their research. The overall objective of this scientific exchange is to advance our understanding of fiscal institutions in Egypt by sharing different perspectives and expertise on the Ptolemaic (323-30 BC) and Roman imperial period. Monson's aims are to incorporate the papyrological evidence into a broader comparative study of fiscal regimes in the ancient Mediterranean as well as to solve specific problems in the interpretation of the sources. For myself and researchers at the University of Basel, the goal is to use Monson's visit for a series of workshops and presentations centered on the fiscal regime in Egypt under the Ptolemaic dynasty and the Roman empire. The results will be seen in high-quality research outputs, namely, a book and articles that benefit from substantial collaborative input. Their impact will be as much in the creation of new knowledg about Greco-Roman Egypt as in the refinement of methodologies for comparative history, which will have multiplying effects through the students and scholars in this field from Basel and nearby universities who will profit from the exchange. The Roman Egypt Laboratory: Climate Change, Societal Transformations, and the Transition to Late Antiquity Research Project | 6 Project MembersThe interaction between climate change, environmental stress, and societal transformations is increasingly attracting the interest of the scientific community and the general public alike, as contemporary concerns about global warming grow. This research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and directed by Prof. Dr. Sabine R. Huebner will apply groundbreaking and innovative multidisciplinary approaches to the complex relationships between climate variability and environmental change on the one hand and the ability and capacity of human society to adapt to these challenges on the other. The third century CE was a period of grand-scale transformations and existential threats to the Roman Empire, the ancient superpower that ruled a geographically vast and ethnically diverse area comprising nearly a fourth of the world population at that time. During the third century, the Roman Empire experienced military anarchy, civil wars, rampant inflation, severe famines, dramatic changes in the religious landscape, bloody persecutions of minority groups, and raids and invasions from beyond the frontier. What were the reasons and causal relationships underlying this concurrence of adverse events? Recent research has suggested that climate variations triggered these cascading shocks, but this theory has yet to be put to scrutiny through a comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis of all available evidence. Due to its unparalleled evidence, the Roman province of Egypt can serve as a laboratory to test such hypotheses and study social vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation strategies in the face of environmental and climatic changes. This pioneering and innovative project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between climate scientists, archaeologists, and ancient historians that bridges the traditional divide between the humanities and the natural sciences. The project aims to evaluate and interpret the effects of environmental stressors, and climate change on society, economy, and politics using third-century Roman Egypt as a case study for a multi-disciplinary approach to a fervently debated transition period in Western civilization. This holistic approach to climate change and societal transformations will be the first of its kind for the Roman world and promises a major breakthrough in an increasingly intense scholarly discussion, which this project will shape and lead. Climate Change in the Breadbasket of the Roman Empire: Reconstructing Nile Floods for the Roman Period Research Project | 1 Project MembersThe importance of the Nile on Egypt's agriculture, society, culture and political history can hardly be overrated. Since rainfall is almost non-existent in Middle and Upper Egypt, any changes in the annual Nile flood must have triggered an immediate response in Egyptian society, economy and politics. Moreover, the Nile river and its fertile flood plains did not only play a crucial role in the development of Egyptian civilization, but they also constituted one of the main pillars for the economic stability of the Roman Empire and helped to sustain its imperial expansion. The grain supply of the city of Rome and the Roman army was closely tied to the annual cycle of the Egyptian river. Reconstructing annual changes in the quality of the flood of the Nile is thus important not only for studying the immediately adjacent Egyptian society, but it also has implications of a larger scale, for a series of below-average Nile floods must have had serious political and socio-economic consequences for the entire Roman Empire. Climate Change in the Breadbasket of the Roman Empire: Reconstructing Nile Floods for the Roman Period An interdisciplinary conference held at the Swiss Institute in Rome Villa Maraini, Via Ludovisi 48, Rome (Italy) January 23/24, 2020 Until now ancient historians studying the society and economy of Roman Egypt have hardly paid any attention to the flood quality in any given year. Moreover, our literary, epigraphic and papyrological sources offer only sparse evidence for exceptional years: the earliest consecutive records of Nile flood levels start in the 7th century CE recorded by the Islamic Nilometer in Cairo. With new advances in the field of paleoclimatology, which offers an entirely new array of sources to ancient historians, there is hope that we will be able to reconstruct Nile flood data for the Graeco-Roman period, and develop collaborative methods of assessing the impact of climatic variability or change on ancient societies without oversimplifying their causal connections. At this conference we aim to discuss both human and natural proxy data in order to reconstruct summer Nile flooding during the Roman period from 30 BCE to roughly 700 CE. Dissertation project Audric Wannaz: Eine Korpusstudie zum Inhalt und zur Struktur der familiären Privatbriefe der griechisch-römischen Zeit Research Project | 1 Project MembersDas Projekt hat zum Ziel, durch die Korpusstudie einer bestimmten Art von Briefen einen sowohl inhaltlichen als auch methodischen Mehrwert für das Studium der antiken Sozialgeschichte zu erzeugen. Bis heute fehlt es an einer quantitativ gestützten Typologie des Briefes als Genre unter den dokumentarischen Quellen der Antike, obwohl dem bereits zahlreiche qualitative Untersuchungen gewidmet sind. Ich möchte mit meiner Arbeit am Beispiel einer bestimmten Briefart dem Entstehen einer solchen Typologie einen Anfang setzen. Einige Privatbriefe sind einzigartige Quellen, indem sie wie keine andere Textart von Beziehungen zwischen Familienmitgliedern und Freunden zeugen, die außerhalb ihrer Mikrokosmen irrelevant waren. Diese persönlichen, familiären Briefe verschaffen einen Einblick in die wohl intimste Sphäre der Leben antiker Menschen und verdienen es daher meines Erachtens, als Korpus untersucht zu werden. Auf der methodischen Ebene kann diese Arbeit als Versuch betrachtet werden, das qualitative close reading der bisherigen Forschung zu den persönlichen Privatbriefen mit dem durch das Aufkommen der digital humanities möglich werdenden distant reading zu ergänzen (ohne sie zu ersetzen!). Auf die Korpusstudie bezogen heisst es, dass sie in einem ersten Teil zunächst corpus based funktionieren wird, da die bisherigen Fragestellungen der Forschung die Erschaffung des Korpus maßgeblich prägen werden. Umgekehrt wird die Analyse des Korpus zu einer corpus driven Vorgehensweise führen, sobald durch die neuen Visualisierungsmethoden neue Fragestellungen aus den Texten ersichtlich werden. Connecting - Editing - Programming - Learning (CEPL): sowing the seeds for joint teaching and research in digital papyrology, philology and ancient history in the European Campus Research Project | 1 Project MembersThe project in the field of Classical Antiquity is under the direction of the University of Freiburg and is being implemented in collaboration with the Universities of Basel and Strasbourg. Students are introduced to reading, editing and publishing of Greek papyri online, a considerable number of which can be found in the manuscript collections of the three universities. The aim is joint teaching development in the fields of papyrology (focus in Strasbourg), ancient history (focus in Freiburg), and digitization of historical manuscripts (focus in Basel), eventually contributing to the existing trinational master's programme in the field of ancient studies. The project is supported by Eucor - The European Campus in the "Teaching" category of the Seed Money scheme. Nomisma: Measuring Monetary Integration in the Late Roman Empire Research Project | 5 Project MembersThe purpose of this Forschungsfond application is to develop a database of coinages of the Later Roman Empire in order to study and statistically measure the actual monetary integration of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East during its first unified currency system in the late third, fourth, and fifth centuries CE. This has important implications for understanding the global economy of the Mediterranean and beyond, as we can trace economic links and study trade and commercial relations based on the movement of coins and the economic profile of each province. Assessing the monetary integration can also open up question of economic interdependence between differing regions around the Mediterranean, and thus help us understand the way in which the various level of economic units- local, regional and global, functioned during this important period of human history. Furthermore, studying monetary integration can help to assess the adequacy of employing an open currency system in the European continent, something that is very relevant to present-day economic systems. The construction of the database of third to fifth century coin hoards is the first step of a larger project aimed at studying the link of coins and commercial economy, and is meant to be seed money in preparation for an Ambizione project application, which will center around understanding economic interdependence on various levels within the Roman Empire in order to understand the success and shortcomings of an open currency systems by looking at different periods throughout monetary history. 123 123
In nomine patris, filii et ... avi? Grandparenthood in early Christian families Research Project | 2 Project MembersPI Dr. Lisa Brunet: This study aims for a more cohesive understanding of the social and cultural environment of early Christian families, by complementing historical (i.e. epigraphical, papyrological, literary and legal) documents from the third to the sixth century CE with fragments from the New Testament and apocryphal gospels. More specifically, by leveraging diverse source datasets regarding grandparenthood in Late Antiquity, this project builds on the interdisciplinary approach to the study of ancient daily life introduced by prof. Sabine Huebner at the University of Basel. Surprisingly, despite the increasing amount of scholarship on the notions and culture of grandparenthood, ancient grandparents have hitherto remained under-examined. We ask what can be ascribed to socio-cultural patterns and expectations towards grandparents as well as individual realities and attitudes. What were the daily concerns and difficulties experienced by grandparents in the Christian Mediterranean? How did Christianity influence the bond between grandparent and grandchild? And, what about the grandparents of Jesus himself? Examining multiple ancient perspectives, this study will substantially advance our knowledge regarding the flexibility and inclusivity in early Christian familial mentality. As such, this project aspires to contribute to present-day debates concerning inclusion and elderly care strategies.
EGRAPSA: Retracing the evolutions of handwritings in Greco-Roman Egypt thanks to digital palaeography Research Project | 4 Project MembersPapyri preserved by the dry climate of Egypt are an unparalleled source of information on the Ancient World. Around 80,000 papyri written in ancient Greek have already been published, covering a millennium between the time of Alexander the Great and the Arab conquest of Egypt (end of 4th c. BCE to early 8th c. CE). However, their large number, their diversity and their current dispersion have impeded a comprehensive grasp of their nature and content. In particular, palaeography, as the study of handwritings that has the potential to unveil who, where and when a text has been written, still relies on experts' assertions which rarely reach consensus. New technological advances in Computer Science allow now building the big picture of the writing culture of Greco-Roman Egypt and developing scientific analyses of scripts. The goal of EGRAPSA project (literally "I have written" in Ancient Greek) is to provide a new theoretical framework to the palaeography of Greek papyri. Starting from sound evidence, it aims at retracing the evolutions of handwritings, generating a model that, in turn, can contribute at organizing the papyrological documentation in a coherent panorama, improving the solidity of dates and writer identifications made on palaeographical grounds. The ground-breaking dimension of the project is not only in its scope that encompasses the entire papyrological documentation in its complexity, and in its conceptual approach to make sense of the plurality of scripts by discerning evolution phenomena but also in its methodological choice to measure similarities and explain evolutions by focusing on the reconstruction of the dynamics of writing, thus to literally re-trace handwritings.
Living in a man's world: Reading the lives of women in the private correspondence from a Roman fort in Egypt's Eastern Desert Research Project | 2 Project MembersAs surprising as it may seem, the Roman forts (praesidia) in the Eastern Desert of Egypt were not only occupied by men. Of course, the main population was made up of soldiers and male civilians, but the documents found there tell us about the presence of women alongside them. The Krokodilô fort, excavated between 1996 and 1997, provides us a particularly rich documentation on the subject. Indeed, many ostraca (inscribed sherd ; it is the preferred writing medium in the desert, as it is cheaper than papyrus and easy to obtain) are letters written in Greek and addressed or related to women. The research project consists in deciphering and editing for the first time a set of 129 unedited documents from Krokodilô, dated at the beginning of the 2nd century A.D., and in analyzing the data that will come from it in order to have a better understanding of the existence that these women could lead, as wives, mothers, sisters or daughters of the men in the camp, or sometimes as prostitutes, but also as proper individuals. These documents will provide new evidences of the roles and positions they could hold, of their occupations, of the relations they had with the men of the fort and with those of the other praesidia, but also with each other, in short of the daily life of the women of the Roman camps of the Egyptian Eastern Desert at the beginning of the 2nd century.
Urban Biographies of the Roman and Late Antique Worlds: Antinoopolis and Heracleopolis in Egypt, c. 100 - c. 650 CE Research Project | 5 Project Members«Urban Biographies of the Roman and Late Antique Worlds» examines the development of cities in Middle Egypt in the Roman and late antique periods, focusing on the two case-studies of Antinoopolis and Heracleopolis . The project aims to illustrate the contribution of ancient papyri and other materials found in Egypt to the urban history of the Roman and late antique worlds, and more specifically to uncover continuities and changes in the lives of these two individual cities. The project team will combine archaeological approaches and digital methods with the analysis of papyri and other textual materials to build an on-line platform which integrates relevant data for both sites. Historical research on these data will confront the individual evolution for each of these two cities with broader assumptions about economic, social, cultural, and political change, in particular the transition from the Roman to the late antique period.
SNF-Scientific Exchange: Fiscal Institutions in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt Research Project | 1 Project MembersThe social and economic history of Greco-Roman Egypt is a major strength of the Institute of Ancient History at the University of Basel. The invited scholar and his host have both worked extensively on documentary texts on papyrus, while both also adopt comparative methods of historical sociology in their research. The overall objective of this scientific exchange is to advance our understanding of fiscal institutions in Egypt by sharing different perspectives and expertise on the Ptolemaic (323-30 BC) and Roman imperial period. Monson's aims are to incorporate the papyrological evidence into a broader comparative study of fiscal regimes in the ancient Mediterranean as well as to solve specific problems in the interpretation of the sources. For myself and researchers at the University of Basel, the goal is to use Monson's visit for a series of workshops and presentations centered on the fiscal regime in Egypt under the Ptolemaic dynasty and the Roman empire. The results will be seen in high-quality research outputs, namely, a book and articles that benefit from substantial collaborative input. Their impact will be as much in the creation of new knowledg about Greco-Roman Egypt as in the refinement of methodologies for comparative history, which will have multiplying effects through the students and scholars in this field from Basel and nearby universities who will profit from the exchange.
The Roman Egypt Laboratory: Climate Change, Societal Transformations, and the Transition to Late Antiquity Research Project | 6 Project MembersThe interaction between climate change, environmental stress, and societal transformations is increasingly attracting the interest of the scientific community and the general public alike, as contemporary concerns about global warming grow. This research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and directed by Prof. Dr. Sabine R. Huebner will apply groundbreaking and innovative multidisciplinary approaches to the complex relationships between climate variability and environmental change on the one hand and the ability and capacity of human society to adapt to these challenges on the other. The third century CE was a period of grand-scale transformations and existential threats to the Roman Empire, the ancient superpower that ruled a geographically vast and ethnically diverse area comprising nearly a fourth of the world population at that time. During the third century, the Roman Empire experienced military anarchy, civil wars, rampant inflation, severe famines, dramatic changes in the religious landscape, bloody persecutions of minority groups, and raids and invasions from beyond the frontier. What were the reasons and causal relationships underlying this concurrence of adverse events? Recent research has suggested that climate variations triggered these cascading shocks, but this theory has yet to be put to scrutiny through a comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis of all available evidence. Due to its unparalleled evidence, the Roman province of Egypt can serve as a laboratory to test such hypotheses and study social vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation strategies in the face of environmental and climatic changes. This pioneering and innovative project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between climate scientists, archaeologists, and ancient historians that bridges the traditional divide between the humanities and the natural sciences. The project aims to evaluate and interpret the effects of environmental stressors, and climate change on society, economy, and politics using third-century Roman Egypt as a case study for a multi-disciplinary approach to a fervently debated transition period in Western civilization. This holistic approach to climate change and societal transformations will be the first of its kind for the Roman world and promises a major breakthrough in an increasingly intense scholarly discussion, which this project will shape and lead.
Climate Change in the Breadbasket of the Roman Empire: Reconstructing Nile Floods for the Roman Period Research Project | 1 Project MembersThe importance of the Nile on Egypt's agriculture, society, culture and political history can hardly be overrated. Since rainfall is almost non-existent in Middle and Upper Egypt, any changes in the annual Nile flood must have triggered an immediate response in Egyptian society, economy and politics. Moreover, the Nile river and its fertile flood plains did not only play a crucial role in the development of Egyptian civilization, but they also constituted one of the main pillars for the economic stability of the Roman Empire and helped to sustain its imperial expansion. The grain supply of the city of Rome and the Roman army was closely tied to the annual cycle of the Egyptian river. Reconstructing annual changes in the quality of the flood of the Nile is thus important not only for studying the immediately adjacent Egyptian society, but it also has implications of a larger scale, for a series of below-average Nile floods must have had serious political and socio-economic consequences for the entire Roman Empire. Climate Change in the Breadbasket of the Roman Empire: Reconstructing Nile Floods for the Roman Period An interdisciplinary conference held at the Swiss Institute in Rome Villa Maraini, Via Ludovisi 48, Rome (Italy) January 23/24, 2020 Until now ancient historians studying the society and economy of Roman Egypt have hardly paid any attention to the flood quality in any given year. Moreover, our literary, epigraphic and papyrological sources offer only sparse evidence for exceptional years: the earliest consecutive records of Nile flood levels start in the 7th century CE recorded by the Islamic Nilometer in Cairo. With new advances in the field of paleoclimatology, which offers an entirely new array of sources to ancient historians, there is hope that we will be able to reconstruct Nile flood data for the Graeco-Roman period, and develop collaborative methods of assessing the impact of climatic variability or change on ancient societies without oversimplifying their causal connections. At this conference we aim to discuss both human and natural proxy data in order to reconstruct summer Nile flooding during the Roman period from 30 BCE to roughly 700 CE.
Dissertation project Audric Wannaz: Eine Korpusstudie zum Inhalt und zur Struktur der familiären Privatbriefe der griechisch-römischen Zeit Research Project | 1 Project MembersDas Projekt hat zum Ziel, durch die Korpusstudie einer bestimmten Art von Briefen einen sowohl inhaltlichen als auch methodischen Mehrwert für das Studium der antiken Sozialgeschichte zu erzeugen. Bis heute fehlt es an einer quantitativ gestützten Typologie des Briefes als Genre unter den dokumentarischen Quellen der Antike, obwohl dem bereits zahlreiche qualitative Untersuchungen gewidmet sind. Ich möchte mit meiner Arbeit am Beispiel einer bestimmten Briefart dem Entstehen einer solchen Typologie einen Anfang setzen. Einige Privatbriefe sind einzigartige Quellen, indem sie wie keine andere Textart von Beziehungen zwischen Familienmitgliedern und Freunden zeugen, die außerhalb ihrer Mikrokosmen irrelevant waren. Diese persönlichen, familiären Briefe verschaffen einen Einblick in die wohl intimste Sphäre der Leben antiker Menschen und verdienen es daher meines Erachtens, als Korpus untersucht zu werden. Auf der methodischen Ebene kann diese Arbeit als Versuch betrachtet werden, das qualitative close reading der bisherigen Forschung zu den persönlichen Privatbriefen mit dem durch das Aufkommen der digital humanities möglich werdenden distant reading zu ergänzen (ohne sie zu ersetzen!). Auf die Korpusstudie bezogen heisst es, dass sie in einem ersten Teil zunächst corpus based funktionieren wird, da die bisherigen Fragestellungen der Forschung die Erschaffung des Korpus maßgeblich prägen werden. Umgekehrt wird die Analyse des Korpus zu einer corpus driven Vorgehensweise führen, sobald durch die neuen Visualisierungsmethoden neue Fragestellungen aus den Texten ersichtlich werden.
Connecting - Editing - Programming - Learning (CEPL): sowing the seeds for joint teaching and research in digital papyrology, philology and ancient history in the European Campus Research Project | 1 Project MembersThe project in the field of Classical Antiquity is under the direction of the University of Freiburg and is being implemented in collaboration with the Universities of Basel and Strasbourg. Students are introduced to reading, editing and publishing of Greek papyri online, a considerable number of which can be found in the manuscript collections of the three universities. The aim is joint teaching development in the fields of papyrology (focus in Strasbourg), ancient history (focus in Freiburg), and digitization of historical manuscripts (focus in Basel), eventually contributing to the existing trinational master's programme in the field of ancient studies. The project is supported by Eucor - The European Campus in the "Teaching" category of the Seed Money scheme.
Nomisma: Measuring Monetary Integration in the Late Roman Empire Research Project | 5 Project MembersThe purpose of this Forschungsfond application is to develop a database of coinages of the Later Roman Empire in order to study and statistically measure the actual monetary integration of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East during its first unified currency system in the late third, fourth, and fifth centuries CE. This has important implications for understanding the global economy of the Mediterranean and beyond, as we can trace economic links and study trade and commercial relations based on the movement of coins and the economic profile of each province. Assessing the monetary integration can also open up question of economic interdependence between differing regions around the Mediterranean, and thus help us understand the way in which the various level of economic units- local, regional and global, functioned during this important period of human history. Furthermore, studying monetary integration can help to assess the adequacy of employing an open currency system in the European continent, something that is very relevant to present-day economic systems. The construction of the database of third to fifth century coin hoards is the first step of a larger project aimed at studying the link of coins and commercial economy, and is meant to be seed money in preparation for an Ambizione project application, which will center around understanding economic interdependence on various levels within the Roman Empire in order to understand the success and shortcomings of an open currency systems by looking at different periods throughout monetary history.
