Fergus Millar’s The Roman Near East: 31 BC–AD 337 published in 1993 is one of the leading contrib... more Fergus Millar’s The Roman Near East: 31 BC–AD 337 published in 1993 is one of the leading contributions to the study of the Roman Near East. His analysis of Greek and Latin literary and narrative texts and especially inscriptions and papyri has been important in developing a better understanding of culture in the Roman Near East. It also illuminates the political history of Rome’s presence in the Near East during this period. The contributions of classicists to the study of the Roman Near East have come under increasing criticism in more recent times for being too 'Eurocentric'. In reaction to this, calls have been made by a number of scholars for a greater voice to be given to the 'Eastern' sources and also to the material evidence. There is perhaps some merit in these claims but there are difficulties with privileging Eastern sources and deficiencies in attempts to do so. The period of Shapur I’s wars with Rome is an appropriate and important period of the history of the Roman Near East by which to investigate the nature of the sources, the important contributions by classicists and the inherent problems in attempting to privilege an Eastern perspective. This paper considers the various categories of evidence available for this period and argues that classicists should continue to play a significant role in analysing the Roman Near East.25 page(s
It is generally agreed that during the first century BC the Euphrates River came to represent a n... more It is generally agreed that during the first century BC the Euphrates River came to represent a negotiated boundary of Roman and Parthian power in the Near East, and that this remained the case until the overthrow of the Parthians by the Sassanians in the third century AD. It was during the first century BC that the term imperium began to be used in the context of expressions of corporate Roman power; this eventually saw an additional important usage of the term evolve to that of an expression of physical territory, that is, empire, by the end of the reign of Augustus. This paper argues that it is possible to link the development of the Euphrates as a boundary of Roman and Parthian power in the first century BC with developments and changes in the usage of the term imperium. It traces the history of Roman and Parthian agreements and conflicts throughout the first century BC in the context of the development of the Euphrates as a boundary. The paper also argues that only the upper se...
Click here if your download doesn"t start automatically Arabs and Empires Before Islam Arabs and ... more Click here if your download doesn"t start automatically Arabs and Empires Before Islam Arabs and Empires Before Islam Arabs and Empires Before Islam illuminates the history of the Arabs before the emergence of Islam, collating nearly two hundred and fifty translated extracts from an extensive array of ancient sources. Drawn from a broad period between the eighth century BC and the Middle Ages, the sources include texts written in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Persian, and Arabic, inscriptions in a variety of languages and alphabets, and discussions of archaeological sites from across the Near East. More than twenty international experts from the fields of archaeology, classics and ancient history, linguistics and philology, epigraphy, and art history, provide detailed commentary and analysis on this diverse selection of material.
Localizing a cloud of points from noisy measurements of a subset of pairwise distances has applic... more Localizing a cloud of points from noisy measurements of a subset of pairwise distances has applications in various areas, such as sensor network localization and reconstruction of protein conformations from NMR measurements. In [1], Drineas et al. proposed a natural two-stage approach, named SVD-MDS, for this purpose. This approach consists of a low-rank matrix completion algorithm, named SVD-Reconstruct, to estimate random missing distances, and the classic multidimensional scaling (MDS) method to estimate the positions of nodes. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis for this method. More specifically, we first establish error bounds for Euclidean distance matrix (EDM) completion in both expectation and tail forms. Utilizing these results, we then derive the error bound for the recovered positions of nodes. In order to assess the performance of SVD-Reconstruct, we present the minimax lower bound of the zerodiagonal, symmetric, low-rank matrix completion problem by Fano's method. This result reveals that when the noise level is low, the SVD-Reconstruct approach for Euclidean distance matrix completion is suboptimal in the minimax sense; when the noise level is high, SVD-Reconstruct can achieve the optimal rate up to a constant factor.
(Surveying Roman Military Landscapes across Northern Britain (2009)) would have been welcome. Ch.... more (Surveying Roman Military Landscapes across Northern Britain (2009)) would have been welcome. Ch. 2 considers the literary and epigraphic evidence for roads in order to reconstruct the main Roman transportation network. Focusing on the literary documents rst, F. provides a synthesis of research done on the Antonine Itinerary and Tabula Peutingeriana down to 2012, in order to demonstrate the nature of these documents. He argues that the source for both came from an itinerary or map drafted by the Roman army building the road network in the years following the conquest. Next, the nine known milestones from Dacia are presented in detail in order to reconstruct the sequence of construction and repairs undertaken by the Roman administration. In ch. 3, the focus is on the rural settlements of Dacia: their topography and the physical remains of the routes connecting them. In order to show how the road network structured the province, the author details the physical remains of each settlement site in the province with an emphasis on features such as walls, buildings and aqueducts. The spotlight is on the well-known sites at Potaissa and Napoca, but he does not neglect proles of the smaller settlements. Once the evidence for the cities has been set out, attention shifts to the archaeological remains for the roads connecting them. F.’s presentation of fresh data from years of eld work is remarkable and greatly improves our understanding of the region. The chapter is rounded out by a short section on the villas of Dacia and an excursus on bridges. It must be admitted that while all the structures presented are treated with exemplary ability, the inclusion of analysis derived from available small nds and ecofacts, as well as from some of the non-Roman settlement sites, would have added an extra dimension to the discussion both here and in the next chapter. In the fourth and nal chapter, the literary and archaeological evidence is set out alongside evidence from maps of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and aerial photographs, to reconstruct the landscape of the Roman province. As part of the reconstruction, space is given to a very valuable overview of past projects. The presentation of these historic projects provides greater depth and control over the synthesis of past map data and archaeological evidence, as well as allowing scholars to see both the history and historiography behind modern interpretations. For most readers though, the core of the chapter will probably lie in several case studies built out of the synthesized data. These individual studies reconstruct key administrative and military points in the province as well as showing patterns of Roman interaction involving social venues such as hot springs. This volume is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the Roman presence in the Dacian landscape, their geographic perceptions of the region and the history of scholarship undertaken on the province. More importantly, this work is the best study of the road network of Roman Dacia available outside the author’s 2006 publication. Given the vast quantity of information to be found here, it is somewhat unfortunate that referencing topics in the text can be difcult since there is no index. However, as compensation there is a very detailed and well-organized table of contents.
Fergus Millar’s The Roman Near East: 31 BC–AD 337 published in 1993 is one of the leading contrib... more Fergus Millar’s The Roman Near East: 31 BC–AD 337 published in 1993 is one of the leading contributions to the study of the Roman Near East. His analysis of Greek and Latin literary and narrative texts and especially inscriptions and papyri has been important in developing a better understanding of culture in the Roman Near East. It also illuminates the political history of Rome’s presence in the Near East during this period. The contributions of classicists to the study of the Roman Near East have come under increasing criticism in more recent times for being too 'Eurocentric'. In reaction to this, calls have been made by a number of scholars for a greater voice to be given to the 'Eastern' sources and also to the material evidence. There is perhaps some merit in these claims but there are difficulties with privileging Eastern sources and deficiencies in attempts to do so. The period of Shapur I’s wars with Rome is an appropriate and important period of the history of the Roman Near East by which to investigate the nature of the sources, the important contributions by classicists and the inherent problems in attempting to privilege an Eastern perspective. This paper considers the various categories of evidence available for this period and argues that classicists should continue to play a significant role in analysing the Roman Near East.25 page(s
It is generally agreed that during the first century BC the Euphrates River came to represent a n... more It is generally agreed that during the first century BC the Euphrates River came to represent a negotiated boundary of Roman and Parthian power in the Near East, and that this remained the case until the overthrow of the Parthians by the Sassanians in the third century AD. It was during the first century BC that the term imperium began to be used in the context of expressions of corporate Roman power; this eventually saw an additional important usage of the term evolve to that of an expression of physical territory, that is, empire, by the end of the reign of Augustus. This paper argues that it is possible to link the development of the Euphrates as a boundary of Roman and Parthian power in the first century BC with developments and changes in the usage of the term imperium. It traces the history of Roman and Parthian agreements and conflicts throughout the first century BC in the context of the development of the Euphrates as a boundary. The paper also argues that only the upper se...
Click here if your download doesn"t start automatically Arabs and Empires Before Islam Arabs and ... more Click here if your download doesn"t start automatically Arabs and Empires Before Islam Arabs and Empires Before Islam Arabs and Empires Before Islam illuminates the history of the Arabs before the emergence of Islam, collating nearly two hundred and fifty translated extracts from an extensive array of ancient sources. Drawn from a broad period between the eighth century BC and the Middle Ages, the sources include texts written in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Persian, and Arabic, inscriptions in a variety of languages and alphabets, and discussions of archaeological sites from across the Near East. More than twenty international experts from the fields of archaeology, classics and ancient history, linguistics and philology, epigraphy, and art history, provide detailed commentary and analysis on this diverse selection of material.
Localizing a cloud of points from noisy measurements of a subset of pairwise distances has applic... more Localizing a cloud of points from noisy measurements of a subset of pairwise distances has applications in various areas, such as sensor network localization and reconstruction of protein conformations from NMR measurements. In [1], Drineas et al. proposed a natural two-stage approach, named SVD-MDS, for this purpose. This approach consists of a low-rank matrix completion algorithm, named SVD-Reconstruct, to estimate random missing distances, and the classic multidimensional scaling (MDS) method to estimate the positions of nodes. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis for this method. More specifically, we first establish error bounds for Euclidean distance matrix (EDM) completion in both expectation and tail forms. Utilizing these results, we then derive the error bound for the recovered positions of nodes. In order to assess the performance of SVD-Reconstruct, we present the minimax lower bound of the zerodiagonal, symmetric, low-rank matrix completion problem by Fano's method. This result reveals that when the noise level is low, the SVD-Reconstruct approach for Euclidean distance matrix completion is suboptimal in the minimax sense; when the noise level is high, SVD-Reconstruct can achieve the optimal rate up to a constant factor.
(Surveying Roman Military Landscapes across Northern Britain (2009)) would have been welcome. Ch.... more (Surveying Roman Military Landscapes across Northern Britain (2009)) would have been welcome. Ch. 2 considers the literary and epigraphic evidence for roads in order to reconstruct the main Roman transportation network. Focusing on the literary documents rst, F. provides a synthesis of research done on the Antonine Itinerary and Tabula Peutingeriana down to 2012, in order to demonstrate the nature of these documents. He argues that the source for both came from an itinerary or map drafted by the Roman army building the road network in the years following the conquest. Next, the nine known milestones from Dacia are presented in detail in order to reconstruct the sequence of construction and repairs undertaken by the Roman administration. In ch. 3, the focus is on the rural settlements of Dacia: their topography and the physical remains of the routes connecting them. In order to show how the road network structured the province, the author details the physical remains of each settlement site in the province with an emphasis on features such as walls, buildings and aqueducts. The spotlight is on the well-known sites at Potaissa and Napoca, but he does not neglect proles of the smaller settlements. Once the evidence for the cities has been set out, attention shifts to the archaeological remains for the roads connecting them. F.’s presentation of fresh data from years of eld work is remarkable and greatly improves our understanding of the region. The chapter is rounded out by a short section on the villas of Dacia and an excursus on bridges. It must be admitted that while all the structures presented are treated with exemplary ability, the inclusion of analysis derived from available small nds and ecofacts, as well as from some of the non-Roman settlement sites, would have added an extra dimension to the discussion both here and in the next chapter. In the fourth and nal chapter, the literary and archaeological evidence is set out alongside evidence from maps of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and aerial photographs, to reconstruct the landscape of the Roman province. As part of the reconstruction, space is given to a very valuable overview of past projects. The presentation of these historic projects provides greater depth and control over the synthesis of past map data and archaeological evidence, as well as allowing scholars to see both the history and historiography behind modern interpretations. For most readers though, the core of the chapter will probably lie in several case studies built out of the synthesized data. These individual studies reconstruct key administrative and military points in the province as well as showing patterns of Roman interaction involving social venues such as hot springs. This volume is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the Roman presence in the Dacian landscape, their geographic perceptions of the region and the history of scholarship undertaken on the province. More importantly, this work is the best study of the road network of Roman Dacia available outside the author’s 2006 publication. Given the vast quantity of information to be found here, it is somewhat unfortunate that referencing topics in the text can be difcult since there is no index. However, as compensation there is a very detailed and well-organized table of contents.
The award of the Archibald Prize in 1944 to William Dobell for his “modernist” portrait of Joshua... more The award of the Archibald Prize in 1944 to William Dobell for his “modernist” portrait of Joshua Smith provoked what one newspaper described at the time as “the biggest legal smash hit since Ned Kelly”. The controversy convulsed Sydney’s art world, knocked the Pacific War off the front pages of newspapers, attracted international attention and saw a crush of viewers pack the normally serene halls of the Art Gallery of NSW. Leading the uproar and subsequent bitter legal battle was Mary Edwards, the painter who with Garfield Barwick as counsel, prosecuted the case against Dobell and the gallery trustees all the way to the Supreme Court of NSW. Written by Peter Edwell, a relative of Mary Edwards, this book is the first dedicated study of the controversy and landmark court case, which reverberates in Australian art and legal circles to this day.
Rome and Persia at War: Imperial Competition and Contact, 193–363 CE, 2020
This book focuses on conflict, diplomacy and religion as factors in the relationship between Rome... more This book focuses on conflict, diplomacy and religion as factors in the relationship between Rome and Sasanian Persia in the third and fourth centuries AD. During this period, military conflict between Rome and Sasanian Persia was at a level and depth not seen mostly during the Parthian period. At the same time, contact between the two empires increased markedly and contributed in part to an increased level of conflict. Edwell examines both war and peace-diplomacy, trade and religious contact-as the means through which these two powers competed, and by which they sought to gain, maintain and develop control of territories and peoples who were the source of dispute between the two empires. The volume also analyses internal factors in both empires that influenced conflict and competition between them, while the roles of regional powers such as the Armenians, Palmyrenes and Arabs in conflict and contact between the two "super pow-ers" receive special attention. Using a broad array of sources, this book gives special attention to the numismatic evidence as it has tended to be overshadowed in modern studies by the literary and epigraphic sources. This is the first monograph in English to undertake an in-depth and critical analysis of competition and contact between Rome and the early Sasanians in the Near East in the third and fourth centuries AD using literary , archaeological, numismatic and epigraphic evidence, and one which includes the complete range of mechanisms by which the two powers competed. It is an invaluable study for anyone working on Rome, Persia and the wider Near East in Late Antiquity.
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