Universal- und kulturhistorische Studien. Studies in Universal and Cultural History – serie

Oswald Spenglers Kulturmorphologie diente als Ausgangspunkt einer internationalen und interdisziplinär angelegten Tagung, deren Beiträge in diesem Band vorliegen. Sie behandeln eine Vielfalt an Themen, die von der Menschwerdung, über die Kulturen des Altertums bis hin zu aktuellen politischen und sozialen Fragestellungen reichen. Schließlich sind auch Studien zur Spenglerforschung im engeren Sinne vertreten.

While Human-Animal Studies is a rapidly growing field in modern history, studies on this topic that focus on the Ancient World are few. The present volume aims at closing this gap. It investigates the relation between humans, animals, gods, and things with a special focus on the structure of these categories. An improved understanding of the ancient categories themselves is a precondition for any investigation into the relation between them. The focus of the volume lies on the Ancient Near East, but it also provides studies on Ancient Greece, Asia Minor, Mesoamerica, the Far East, and Arabia.

Battle descriptions are usually seen as the raw material of the military historian, who uses them to explain why generals won or lost a given battle. This volume does not aim to contribute to this discussion; it rather approaches battle descriptions as literary texts that interact with the expectations of a given audience. Therefore literary traditions in structure, vocabulary and topics of battle descriptions should be explored. The transgression of genre-borders – also literary and fictional texts are included – and a broad comparative approach, combining evidence from the third millennium BC up to the 20th century AD, makes cultural specifics and differences more easily perceivable.ContentsWith contributions by Marcos Such-Guttiérrez, Pavel Čech, Hilmar Klinkott, Wolfgang Oswald, Kai Ruffing, Oliver Stoll, Martin M. Bauer, Reinhold Bichler, Christian Mileta, Simon Lentzsch, Sven Günther, Dennis Pulina, JohannaLuggin, Sonjar Koroliov, Magdalena Gronau and Martin Gronau.The EditorsDr. Johanna Luggin is a post-doc researcher in the ERC-funded project “NOSCEMUS – Nova Scientia: Early Modern Science and Latin” in Innsbruck, Austria.Dr. Sebastian Fink is a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence “Changes in Sacred Texts and Traditions”.

The volume will focus on a comparative level on a specific group of states that are commonly labelled as “empires” and that we encounter through all historical periods. Although they are very successful at the very beginning, like most empires are, this success is very ephemeral and transient. The era of conquest is never followed by a period of consolidation. Collapse and/or reduction to much smaller dimension run as fast as the process of wide-ranging conquest and expansion. The volume singles out a series of such “short-term empires” and aims to provide a methodologically clearly structured as well as a uniform and consistent approach by developing a general set of questions that guarantee the possibility to compare and distinguish. This way it intends to examine not only already well established empires but also to illuminate forgotten ones.

The present book is a compilation of studies on narratives of mythical origins in different cultures written by outstanding specialists. It aims to provide a broad view on creation-myths from different times and areas of the world with a particular focus on how these texts contributed to the conception of the past as “universal history”, as a common origin of mankind or as the great opening, the theatrum mundi. On the other hand, the purpose of this book is to study the phenomenon from a typological point of view, analyzing the specific characteristics of this particular type of texts, rather than finding influences between the different cultures in the genesis of these narratives.

By applying a comparative approach the volume focuses on a select group of „empires“ which are generally not in the focus of empires studies. They are studied in detail and analyzed due to a strict concept that takes into account real history and reception history as well. Reception history becomes more and more an important element in empire studies although this topic is still often more or less underdeveloped. The volume singles out a series of such “forgotten empires”. It aims to provide a methodologically clearly structured as well as a uniform and consistent approach. It develops a general set of questions that help to compare and distinguish these entities. This way the volume intends to examine and to illuminate empires that are generally ignored by modern scholarship.

Eighteenth and nineteenth century European, British and American newspapers constitute a rich and largely untapped source of contemporary, often eyewitness accounts of historical events and opinions concerning Iran from the late Safavid (1712) through the Qajar (c. 1797-1920) period. This study collects and annotates thousands of articles published in the Colonial and early Republican American newspapers, from the first mention of events in Persia in the American press (1712) to the death of Mohammad Shah (1848), unlocking for the first time a wealth of information on Iran and its place in the world during the 18th and early 19th century.

Eighteenth and nineteenth century European, British and American newspapers constitute a rich and largely untapped source of contemporary, often eyewitness accounts of historical events and opinions concerning Iran from the late Safavid (1712) through the Qajar (c. 1797-1920) period. This study collects and annotates thousands of articles published in the Colonial and early Republican American newspapers, from the first mention of events in Persia in the American press (1712) to the death of Mohammad Shah (1848), unlocking for the first time a wealth of information on Iran and its place in the world during the 18th and early 19th century.

The articles of this comprehensive edited volume offer a multidisciplinary, global and comparative approach to the history of empires. They analyze their ends over a long spectrum of humankind’s history, ranging from Ancient History through Modern Times. As the main guiding question, every author of this volume scrutinizes the reasons for the decline, the erosion, and the implosion of individual empires.All contributions locate and highlight different factors that triggered or at least supported the ending or the implosion of empires. This overall question makes all the contributions to this volume comparable and allows to detect similarities, differences as well as inconsistencies of historical processes.

Religion is closely linked to social development as it often serves as the ideological fundament of a society and one of the foremost expressions of its culture. The articles in this volume are devoted to the study of religious crisis in Anqituity and deal with these pheonomena in the Ancient Near East, Rome, Greece, China and India.

Dieser Band bietet eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Konzept der „Krise“ in der Geschichtsschreibung. Die einzelnen Beiträge behandeln längere Abschnitte altorientalischer und antiker Geschichte, vergleichen moderne und antike Analysen von „Krisen“ und zeigen sich wiederholende Muster der Erklärung geschichtlicher Veränderungen auf. Dieser räumlich und zeitlich breite Zugang zum Phänomen der „Krise“ problematisiert das gängige Erklärungsmuster von „Verfall – Krise – Untergang“ und regt zur Suche nach alternativen und komplexeren Antworten für geschichtlichen Wandel an.

The contributions to this volume represent a range of case studies that provide perspectives on the question of how deeply Hellenic influence penetrated into the lives of the subjects of the Hellenistic monarchies. Greek became the language of international discourse of the ruling elites in the kingdoms formed after the conquests of Alexander. But to what extent were the institutions and practices of these monarchies shaped by ideologies brought by Greek-speaking rulers? To what extent did the customs of the complex cultures they ruled over shape the practices of the ruling elites, conserving ancient institutions in traditional ways?