Images as records for the history of music

ZPE 223, 2022, 219ff.

Huberto Rohden - Filosofia da Arte

Images of Demeter/Ceres on Anatolian glyptics, 2025

This is the abstract of a lecture in Constanţa, Romania which will be held at a conference in September 2024. The program of the conference as well as Zoom links will be announced at hereby soon. In ancient Graeco-Roman religion and mythology Demeter (Roman Ceres) was the Olympian goddess of the harvest and agriculture, presiding over the crops, and the fertility of the earth. Although Demeter is mostly known as a goddess of cereals, she was also concerned with health, birth, and marriage, and had connections to the Underworld where her daughter, kore, was destined to spend six months of the year. In this brief paper we focus on glyptic depictions of Demeter/Ceres as exemplified by a few examples of gems from various Turkish museums. The aim is to compile an iconographic repertory of Demeter gems in the Roman East and in doing so bring to life the cult associated with her. Representations of Demeter/Ceres shown on gems are fairly standardised throughout the empire. The goddess holds ears of wheat and sometimes heads of seeding poppies, as well as an offering dish. She is frequently accompanied by her cult animal, an ant. On the Roman Imperial coinage she is equated with Fides Publica. Many gems show Tyche/ Fortuna, with her usual cornucopia and rudder, but also holding wheat and poppies, thus equating her with Demeter. A remarkable intaglio from Kocaeli in the Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum of Kocaeli, ancient Nicomedia, recently published by the authors depicts an ear of wheat but also a torch, the latter indicative of nocturnal rites of Demeter, similar to those of the Eleusinian mysteries. Indeed, the chief divinity of Graeco-Roman Nicomedia was Demeter and indeed the most important religious shrine in Nicomedia was the temple of Demeter, which stood in a sacred precinct on a hill above the harbour. Arrian of Nicomedia served as priest of the goddess ”to whom the city is dedicated”, and where she was venerated, as at Eleusis, with her daughter, Kore. Arrian mentions the Mysteries of Demeter, who is often seen on the civic coins, holding her torch. So, this gem is an example of a local cult reflected in the material culture of Roman Asia Minor. As stated, Demeter had a universal reach, for example there are many examples of intaglios showing her in Britannia, in the far west of the Roman Empire, including, for example, one from a sanctuary site at Marcham-Frilford, near Oxford on which the gem cutter has used the two colours of the stone, green and brown to signify the growing crops and the ripened grain. Keywords: Demeter, Ceres, Underworld, engraved gems, intaglio, cameo, Hellenistic period, Roman period, Graeco-Roman glyptics, Turkish museums, Anatolian archaeology, museum studies, classical archaeology.

Nature, 2024

Western Eurasia witnessed several large-scale human migrations during the Holocene 1-5. Here, to investigate the cross-continental effects of these migrations, we shotgun-sequenced 317 genomes-mainly from the Mesolithic and Neolithic periodsfrom across northern and western Eurasia. These were imputed alongside published data to obtain diploid genotypes from more than 1,600 ancient humans. Our analyses revealed a 'great divide' genomic boundary extending from the Black Sea to the Baltic. Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were highly genetically differentiated east and west of this zone, and the effect of the neolithization was equally disparate. Large-scale ancestry shifts occurred in the west as farming was introduced, including near-total replacement of hunter-gatherers in many areas, whereas no substantial ancestry shifts happened east of the zone during the same period. Similarly, relatedness decreased in the west from the Neolithic transition onwards, whereas, east of the Urals, relatedness remained high until around 4,000 bp, consistent with the persistence of localized groups of hunter-gatherers. The boundary dissolved when Yamnaya-related ancestry spread across western Eurasia around 5,000 bp, resulting in a second major turnover that reached most parts of Europe within a 1,000-year span. The genetic origin and fate of the Yamnaya have remained elusive, but we show that hunter-gatherers from the Middle Don region contributed ancestry to them. Yamnaya groups later admixed with individuals associated with the Globular Amphora culture before expanding into Europe. Similar turnovers occurred in western Siberia, where we report new genomic data from a 'Neolithic steppe' cline spanning the Siberian forest steppe to Lake Baikal. These prehistoric migrations had profound and lasting effects on the genetic diversity of Eurasian populations.

2019

Despite the enormous personal, social and economic costs associated with gang and gender-based violence in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, outside the region there exists a generally limited and distorted understanding of the sociopolitical context within which violence occurs. This paper examines the sociopolitical context of gang and gender-based violence; the factors that undermine the ability and the willingness of governments in the region to protect the public; and the social, cultural, economic, gender and criminological variables that typically undermine internal relocation as a strategy for escaping life-threatening risk.

in Culturopoing, 2015

Entretien avec Antoine Gaudin, réalisé par François Oualia, édité par Enrique Seknadje, pour la revue Culturopoing.

Este ensaio pretende discutir o problema dos limites que se impõem a um governo conservador. Para tanto, ele aborda principalmente a relação entre Constituição e identidades coletivas. A conclusão é no sentido de que o conceito de “identidade constitucional” é um conceito constitucional dogmático e de que a partir dele os limites de um governo conservador podem ser mais bem-entendidos e tornados efetivos.

Publicat in Monitorul Oficial, Partea I nr. 86bis din 26/01/2005 Ministerul Mediului şi Gospodăririi Apelor Modificat de Ordin nr. 1230/2005</ Face parte din Ordin nr. 757/2004</ Aprobat de Ordin nr. 757/2004</