Scientia Danica, Series H. Humanistica – serie

The vast collections of Egyptian objects on display in Western museums attract millions of visitors every year, and they reinforce a cultural fascination for this ancient civilisation that has been a feature of European intellectual history since Roman times. This book tells the story of how these objects arrived in the West.The book presents the first in-depth analysis of this market during Egyptology's "golden age" in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is primarily based on the archival material of the Danish Egyptologist H. O. Lange (1863-1943) who, during two prolonged stays in Egypt (1899/1900 and 1929/1930), bought objects on behalf of Danish museums. The travel diaries, and the accompanying photographs, are complemented by a wide range of other sources, including contemporary travel guides and various travel memoirs, which together paint an extraordinarily detailed picture of the extensive antiquities trade.

The spectacular ancient desert city of Palmyra was heavily destroyed during the Civil War in Syria. Shortly before the conflict escalated in 2011, the Palmyra Portrait Project was initiated. The research project is funded by the Carlsberg Foundation and headed by Professor and Centre Director Rubina Raja. The project's important work with the Syrian cultural heritage has since been widely published, and the latest edited volume within the project is now available as part of the Palmyrene Studies series published by The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.This book covers the roles of women and children within the family in Palmyra during the Roman period (1st-3rd centuries CE). The nine chapters are written by leading scholars of Palmyra who all participated in a two-part workshop held at Aarhus University in October 2016 and February 2017 under the auspices of the Palmyra Portrait Project. The chapters discuss different aspects of family constellations and assess which implications different representations of women and children may have carried in relation to the Palmyrene family structure and wider Palmyrene society.By looking at portraiture and the written evidence from the city, this volume adds further aspects to our understanding of how women and children were perceived in Palmyra and how identity aspects were included in their portraiture and the written evidence.

This is an edition of an extensive Latin commentary on Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations composed about 1205 by an anonymous Parisian master who was a philosophically perceptive close reader of the Aristotelian text. The only extant manuscript of his work is now in Cambridge. This commentary is an important source of information about the development of logic at the time when the masters in Paris were beginning to organise themselves into what was to become the University of Paris.

For more than 30 years, from 1949 till 1982, the two influential linguists Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) and Eli Fischer-Jørgensen (1911-2010) regularly exchanged letters. The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters has published the entire collection of preserved letters in which we are introduced to two strong personalities: the Russian born linguist Roman Jakobson and the Danish phonetician and general linguist Eli Fischer-Jørgensen, both members of the Royal Academy, Eli being the first ever Danish woman elected a member.They were both leading representatives within the field known as phonology, and their letters are no doubt to be considered important documents in the history of international linguistics. Moreover, reading the letters provides a personal dimension to a field in which the usual scholarly articles are often devoid of personal content.

This book includes 14 contributions to the study of structuralism as a historical current in the history of European ideas, and more particularly in the study of language.The studies combine to contextualise structuralism in both its unity and its diversity, hence the title. In the first section, the reader is introduced to the broader canvas of disciplines and competing ideas surrounding structuralism, starting with Claude Lévi-Strauss's anthropological structuralism. The second section views structural linguistics from without and investigates its legacy in relation to contemporary linguistics, analysing its relationship to functionalism and its forerunners. The third section explores structuralism from within, with particular attention to a specific output: Louis Hjelmslev's theory of glossematics. This constitutes the focus from where the immediate past within the Danish tradition is reanalyzed and its heritage for today's semiotics and linguistics is discussed.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Second Discourse on the origin of equality (1755) is generally consider his most brilliant and most influential philosophical essay. Studied in universities over the world to this day, interpretations of the essay differ widely, as they have done ever since it was enthusiastically welcomed by his contemporaries and slated by Voltaire. The reason for the dissensions is that Rousseau, in the Second Discourse, lives fully up to his reputation as "a man of paradoxes", permitting himself to defend a thesis as well as its opposite.The aim of the book is to show that behind the paradoxes a profound mind is striving to produce a new and coherent picture of the childhood of mankind. To clear the way for Rousseau's "deep thought" one must first eliminate the misleading interpretations which have marred the philosophical reception of the Second Discourse. Even some of its most fundamental concepts are often misunderstood by critics, for instance the so-called goodness of natural man, the idea of going back to nature or the equally incorrect assumption of the historic reality of the state of nature.The author's first step is to propose a clear definition of Rousseau's basic concepts (liberty, compassion, perfectibility, reason et cetera). Secondly, he discusses the evidently contradictory arguments which render a consistent definition so arduous, trying to explain the paradoxes as results of the permanent conflict going on inside the man. This was the conflict between visionary reformer (whom we know from the Social Contract) and anthropologist/sociologist who conducts his investigation as rationally as any other modern scientist. Finally, the author establishes the evolutionary model constructed by Rousseau. According to him, humanity evolved through six stages (state of nature, family, landed property, bellum omnium in omnes, social contract, revolution of the slaves) before arriving at the actual conformation.At the very end of the essay, Rousseau surprisingly launches an ambitious research project in social psychology. He proclaims the need to study not the social, but the mental mechanisms which, operating throughout the evolution, have changed the very nature of man, producing "an assembly of artificial men". The visionary philosopher aims at laying the ground for a new human nature, that is to create "the new man".