Marc Mendoza – författare

This book explores cases of decapitation found in sources on the reign of Alexander the Great. Despite the enormous literature on the career of Alexander the Great, this is the first study on the characterisation of violent deaths during his hectic reign. This historiographical omission has involved the tacit and blind acceptance of the details found in the ancient sources. Therefore, this book seeks to illustrate how cultural expectations, literary models, and ideological taboos shaped these accounts and argues for a close and critical reading of the sources. Given the different cultural considerations surrounding decapitation in Greek and Roman cultures, this book illustrates how those biases could have differently shaped certain episodes depending on the ultimate writer.This book, therefore, can be especially interesting for scholars focused on the career of Alexander the Great, but also valuable for other Classicists, philologists, and even for anthropologists because itrepresents a good case of study of cultural symbolism of violent death, semantics of power, imperial domination and the confrontation between opposite cultural appreciations of a practice.

This book explores multicultural religious interactions in Ancient Central and South Asia. Besides encompassing a vast chronological and geographical range, the themes of this book represent a broad illustration of the current main approaches, methodologies, and perspectives on Ancient Central and South Asia studies, including the establishment of new sacred spaces; the introduction of new rituals, ceremonies, and convivial practices; archaeological evidence for religious interaction, coexistence, and conflict, among others. In this book, archaeologists, historians, art historians, and linguists come together to demonstrate the intensity and complexity of cultural interactions within the religious landscape from the fourth century BCE till the fourth century CE.Moving beyond traditional approaches of acculturation, the book reveals the dynamics between cultures and emphasizes local agencies in selecting and appropriating religious praxis, thus highlighting not only the impact of religious interactions but also the wider cultural impact of human interactions. The book provides both specialist and non-specialist audiences with new data and fresh perspectives regarding interactions between cultures in Ancient Central and South Asia, in turn allowing us to comprehend similar nodes of interactions within the modern context. Its geographical and temporal scope will be interesting to readers working on both European and South Asian history, art, and archaeology. This volume is relevant to scholars studying other areas as well, as it traces the spread and transformation of religious conceptions, objects, representations, and practices, with our regions serving as key nodes in this global system.