In these turbulent times in the Middle East, I have found myself
working on the rise and fall of a late antique Jewish kingdom along
the Red Sea in the Arabian peninsula. Friends and colleagues alike
have reacted with amazement and disbelief when I...
The security of a nation and the safety of its population
versus the protection of constitutional liberties and human rights
is a quandary that arose in the aftermath of 9/11, but it is not
novel to the twenty-first century. Discrimination between...
Albert O. Hirschman became a permanent Faculty member of the
Institute in 1974, moving from Harvard’s economics department to
join Clifford Geertz in the creation of the School of Social
Science. By then, Hirschman was not just famous for his...
For me, being a Member of the School of Historical Studies in
2002–03 was the best sort of retreat. I had been working on my
second book, Romulus’ Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of
Alexander to the Age of Hadrian, for five or six years when
I...
Historians today can hardly answer the question: when does
history begin? Traditional boundaries between history,
protohistory, and prehistory have been blurred if not completely
erased by the rise of concepts such as “Big History” and
“macrohistory...
In Greek religion, the encounter between mortals and gods was
dominated by fear. The belief in the power of gods was based on
experience and enhanced through rituals. Cult regulations,
narratives of punitive miracles, confession inscriptions,
and...
In 1935, Professor Benjamin Meritt took the first steps to build a Repository of Squeezes—impressions of inscriptions that allow scholars to more easily study them. He wrote to Director Abraham Flexner that it “will be second only to that in Berlin.” Today, the Institute houses one of the world’s largest collections of squeezes.
We do not know who made the first paper squeeze of an
inscription. The practice is quite old; large numbers of them were
made by Richard Lepsius on an expedition to Egypt (1842–45) and by
Philippe Le Bas in Greece (1843). The invention of the...
“Who are you?” A simple question sometimes requires a complex
answer. When a Homeric hero is asked who he is (e.g. Iliad
7.123 ff.), his answer consists of more than just his name; he
provides a list of his ancestors. The history of his family is
an...
