On the Periphery of a Great "Empire": Secondary Formation of States and Their Material Basis in the Shandong Peninsula during the Late Bronze Age, ca. 1000-500 B.C.E

The Shandong region has been of considerable interest to the study of ancient China due to its location in the eastern periphery of the central culture. For the Western Zhou state, Shandong was the "Far East" and it was a vast region of diverse landscape and complex cultural traditions during the Late Bronze-Age (1000-500 BCE). In this research, the developmental trajectories of three different types of secondary states are examined. The first type is the regional states established by the Zhou court; the second type is the indigenous Non-Zhou states with Dong Yi origins; the third type is the states that may have been formerly Shang polities and accepted Zhou rule after the Zhou conquest of Shang. On the one hand, this dissertation examines the dynamic social and cultural process in the eastern periphery in relation to the expansion and colonization of the Western Zhou state; on the other hand, it emphasizes the agency of the periphery during the formation of secondary states by examining how the polities in the periphery responded to the advances of the Western Zhou state and how local traditions impacted the composition of the local material assemblage which lay the foundation for the future prosperity of the regional culture. By utilizing the rich archaeological data, epigraphic evidence and textual sources, the dissertation focuses on two research questions: First, how did cultural interactions play out in the region through possible processes of cultural adaption, assimilation, persistence, and resistance, and what are their material manifestations in the archaeological record? Second, how did the political relationship between the peripheral states and the dynastic center change in variable degrees of dependency or autonomy? This study provides important insight into the issue of cultural interaction and secondary state formation and, by extension, into the social evolution of the Shandong area

The Oracle Bone Inscriptions from Huayuanzhuang East

The Huayuanzhuang East oracle bone inscriptions form a corpus of more than 2500 individual divination accounts, which were engraved on turtle shells and bovine scapulae in the late Shang dynasty (c. 1200 B.C.). The book offers the first complete English annotation of these fascinating epigraphic texts and introduces the reader to key aspects of daily life in early Chinese civilization

Israel's Kin Across the Jordan: A Social History of the Ammonites in the Iron Age II (1000-500 BCE).

The Hebrew Bible portrays the origins of the “sons of Ammon” or “Ammonites” in the hoary past, the product of incestuous relations between Abraham’s nephew Lot and his younger daughter (Genesis 19). The biblical book of Judges, traditionally thought to represent events of the twelfth century BCE, portrays the Ammonites with a king before Israel (Judges 11). On the other hand, extant primary sources—Neo-Assyrian texts, Ammonite epigraphs, and archaeological finds—refocus attention on the eighth through sixth centuries BCE as the main period of Ammonite sociopolitical and economic growth and complexity. This dissertation investigates the social history of the ancient Ammonites during the Iron Age II (ca. 1000–500 BCE) with a focus on the transformative role that the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires played in Ammonite sociopolitical and economic development. In addition to the biblical texts, this study examines the growing body of archaeological remains, Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian texts, and Ammonite epigraphs. Furthermore, this study reflects on the practices of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires in administering and controlling the Levant, and cites cross-cultural examples of how empires affect peripheral societies in order to understand changes among the Ammonites. During this period, the area saw growth in the number of elite items, growth in the use of writing for administrative and display purposes, growth in sedentary settlement, and a growth in the number of imported items. This period also brought the first secure references to Ammonite kings and their officials. Taken together in the light of imperial domination, one can explain the changes visible among the Ammonites as the product of several identifiable factors. In the ninth century, the need for security against Israel, Damascus, and the re-emerging Neo-Assyrian Empire provoked military organization. As time went on, other factors grew in importance, including: 1) the elites’ increasing access to wealth through long-distance trade; 2) elite access to and appropriation of internationally recognizable markers of status, authority, and power; 3) the elites’ role in securing and fructifying the Amman Plateau for their own needs and in order to supply the needs of the Assyrian military.Ph.D.Near Eastern StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/86256/1/ctyson_1.pd

The Materiality of Magic

The Materiality of Magic is an exciting new book about an aspect of magic that is usually neglected. In the last two decades we have had many books and proceedings of conferences on the concept of magic itself as well as its history, formulas and incantations in antiquity, both in East and West. Much less attention, however, has been paid to the material that was used by the magicians for their conjuring activities. This is the first book of its kind that focuses on the material aspects of magic, such as amulets, drawings, figurines, gems, grimoires, rings, and voodoo dolls. The practice of magic required a specialist expertise that knew how to handle material such as lead, gold, stones, papyrus and terra cotta – material that sometimes was used for specific genres of magic. That is why we present in this well illustrated collection of studies new insights on the materiality of magic in antiquity by studying both the materials used for magic as well as the books in which the expertise was preserved. The main focus of the book is on antiquity, but we complement and contrast our material with examples ranging from the Ancient Near East, via early modern Europe, to the present time

Amphiaraos Into Attica: The Rise of Athenian Healing Cults

This dissertation, “Amphiaraos into Attica: The Rise of Athenian Healing Cults,” uses epigraphic, literary, material, and visual evidence to examine the emergence of Attic healing sanctuaries during the years of the Peloponnesian War. Rooted in social history, the project explores how Athenians represented and negotiated their collective needs through alterations in the religious landscape, most notably through the importation of healing cults during the late fifth century BCE. Arguing that this healing cult “phenomenon” was something novel within the infrastructure of Greek religion, the project situates these cults amidst the social and political crises of the Peloponnesian War, and alongside the developing corpus of Hippocratic medicine. Evidence for new fifth century healing cults is synthesized and examined, including four cults of Asklepios, two cults of the Heros Iatros, the cult of Amynos, and the cult of Amphiaraos at Oropos. The project thus emphasizes the study not of a single healing cult, such as that Asklepios in the south slope Asklepieion, but rather examines all of the new healing cults that emerge in Attica during the late fifth century BCE. It was not an instance of a single new cult or deity, in other words, but rather a flurry of new healing cults—all of which catered primarily to health concerns—which took root across communities at the level of the polis, the deme, and even local, “sub-deme” units such as neighborhoods. By examining them together, as constituent parts of a larger healing phenomenon, these new cults reveal what Athenians sought from their deities during a time of change and crisis, as well as how religious innovation could reflect fluctuations in community identity over time. At issue throughout this project is the changing relationship between the polis and the Athenian individual. In the retooled society of late fifth century Athens, the realignment of traditional polis- vs. oikos-bonds augmented the appeal of cults promoting individual and family health

The Continued Creation of Communities of Practice – Finding Variation in the Western Zhou Expansion (1046-771 BCE)

This work explores the question of when and how China became Chinese by studying state sponsored colonial expansion and intercultural interactions during the Western Zhou period (1046-771 BCE). Because Confucius and his followers considered this period the golden age of civilization, scholars have traditionally paid little attention to existing ethnic and cultural diversity and created the illusion that Chinese culture, in Han style, already existed at this early date. However, my investigation of everyday activities, food preparation and ritual events surrounding mortuary customs, highlights the complex relationship between the Zhou the people they encountered. Following their conquest of the Shang polity in the middle of the 11th century BCE, the Zhou began a swift campaign of colonization during which members of the royal family were sent to defend and expand strategic zones around the new realm. The traditional narrative – one that focuses on the formation of the later unified Chinese Empire and civilization – sees the Zhou as those who, through military expansion and conquest, successfully Sinicized and acculturated the peoples that would make up the Chinese world. In fact the Qin state would draw heavily on this notion of a unified Zhou culture to unite all under heaven and create the first Chinese empire in 221 BCE. Yet this narrative, the product of later political discourse, overemphasizes the homogeneity of Zhou identity and fails to account for the multifaceted nature of Chinese culture and origins. These interpretations have relied heavily on later historical texts and information gleaned from inscriptions of bronze ritual vessels, themselves biased towards the Zhou elite world view, while archaeology has mainly played a second fiddle to historical reconstructions. My dissertation compared separate regions of the Zhou expansion: Gansu in the west, Shandong peninsula in the East and the Shanxi plains to the north of the Central Plains, which each represent different types of interactions between the local populations and the Zhou newcomers. Cemeteries are examined to investigate the mortuary customs of local people and ceramic vessels to study culinary traditions, in an effort to show how everyday practices and ritual culture were influenced by the Zhou. Culinary research involved the detailed study and usewear analysis of freshly excavated ceramic assemblages to understand community specific cooking and serving practices. Ceramic assemblages from four pre-Zhou and Zhou sites in Shandong province were compared to sites in the core zone of the Zhou polity to assess the impact of the Zhou arrival. My analysis shows that each of the four sites observed its own community specific culinary traditions: An increase in cooking vessel size at some ‒ indicating a shift from to larger eating parties ‒ while others the way food was cooked: from a mix of roasting and braising cooking modes to a focus on boiling and stewing. In Gansu the Zhou had little impact on the multitude of existing community-specific mortuary practices and remained separate from the local population, while in the Beijing area the Zhou invaders played down their military identity and allowed local groups to participate in their mortuary practices. Consequently my study finds that the Zhou expansion did not result in the homogenization of the ancient cultural landscape, but instead that the Zhou influence had unequal results: from acceptance to rejection and mostly to its reorganization to suit local needs and agendas. In effect these interactions created various new forms of localized social identities across North China that differ profoundly from the homogeneous Zhou elite culture depicted in the canonical histories, whic have traditionally been used to understand the period. The Zhou influence was regional in scope but local in outcome. Social identities were constantly in flux, and intensified interaction created new forms of localized social identities.Anthropolog

A distributional investigation of German verbs

Diese Dissertation bietet eine empirische Untersuchung deutscher Verben auf der Grundlage statistischer Beschreibungen, die aus einem großen deutschen Textkorpus gewonnen wurden. In einem kurzen Überblick über linguistische Theorien zur lexikalischen Semantik von Verben skizziere ich die Idee, dass die Verbbedeutung wesentlich von seiner Argumentstruktur (der Anzahl und Art der Argumente, die zusammen mit dem Verb auftreten) und seiner Aspektstruktur (Eigenschaften, die den zeitlichen Ablauf des vom Verb denotierten Ereignisses bestimmen) abhängt. Anschließend erstelle ich statistische Beschreibungen von Verben, die auf diesen beiden unterschiedlichen Bedeutungsfacetten basieren. Insbesondere untersuche ich verbale Subkategorisierung, Selektionspräferenzen und Aspekt. Alle diese Modellierungsstrategien werden anhand einer gemeinsamen Aufgabe, der Verbklassifikation, bewertet. Ich zeige, dass im Rahmen von maschinellem Lernen erworbene Merkmale, die verbale lexikalische Aspekte erfassen, für eine Anwendung von Vorteil sind, die Argumentstrukturen betrifft, nämlich semantische Rollenkennzeichnung. Darüber hinaus zeige ich, dass Merkmale, die die verbale Argumentstruktur erfassen, bei der Aufgabe, ein Verb nach seiner Aspektklasse zu klassifizieren, gut funktionieren. Diese Ergebnisse bestätigen, dass diese beiden Facetten der Verbbedeutung auf grundsätzliche Weise zusammenhängen.This dissertation provides an empirical investigation of German verbs conducted on the basis of statistical descriptions acquired from a large corpus of German text. In a brief overview of the linguistic theory pertaining to the lexical semantics of verbs, I outline the idea that verb meaning is composed of argument structure (the number and types of arguments that co-occur with a verb) and aspectual structure (properties describing the temporal progression of an event referenced by the verb). I then produce statistical descriptions of verbs according to these two distinct facets of meaning: In particular, I examine verbal subcategorisation, selectional preferences, and aspectual type. All three of these modelling strategies are evaluated on a common task, automatic verb classification. I demonstrate that automatically acquired features capturing verbal lexical aspect are beneficial for an application that concerns argument structure, namely semantic role labelling. Furthermore, I demonstrate that features capturing verbal argument structure perform well on the task of classifying a verb for its aspectual type. These findings suggest that these two facets of verb meaning are related in an underlying way

Papers on Ancient Greek Linguistics : Proceedings of the Ninth International Colloquium on Ancient Greek Linguistics (ICAGL9) 30 August – 1 September 2018, Helsinki

Peer reviewe

Memory, Story, History: The Formation and Change of Collective Memory and Narrative of the Past in Early China

Humans perceive and conceptualize who we are by making a consistent and coherent story of the past. Without making this story, existence is fragmented and dissolved into a series of physical, chemical, or biological states that we can only passively accept. Instead, we recall past moments, selecting and linking them to other ones in a logical manner, composing a reasonable story that explains our existence consistently and coherently. Only by choosing, connecting, and sequencing our experiences and signifying them with concepts, and thereby producing an understandable story, can we identify who we are and what we do. Constructing a story of the past is similar to composing a narrative fiction whereby we make sense of our identity with pre-existing signifiers, drawing upon values in the culture in order to establish meaning. The moments of existence that are not remembered or not selected in the story-making remain external to the being as if they had never existed. In this regard, we are creatures of our own story. The story provides us with an explanation of our identity through time and legitimizes how we will exist in the future. Likewise, to identify and explain who the people of a society are and how they should behave, society needs its own story. That is, a society must compose its own story about what it has experienced through time. This group remembrance is referred to as collective memory or social memory—the constructed ideas of particular past event(s) that individuals have communally experienced. The social memory goes through editing processes such as selecting, excluding, elaborating, emphasizing, deleting, and re-sequencing procedures in the pre-existing linguistic, conceptual, ethical, aesthetic orders of the culture. In this sense, society’s story is essentially “fictional” in nature. Unlike individual/personal memory, however, those who experienced the same past event are plural in the society. Due to this plurality, there is tension resulting from different story-making of the same event in the past. The attempt to compose a different story about the past is not entirely resolved, but remains as a possibility for alternative story. Diversity in collective memory necessarily causes, in the society, a competition among the plural memories for broader, deeper, and stronger acceptance and recognition of a particular memory by fellow society members. In the contest that is conditioned and affected in political and cultural power-relations, one specific memory and story wins out and becomes prevalent and dominant. It is then imposed and embodied in social regulations such as law and justice, and in cultural practices such as education and mass media. The social story is thus a doing, a performance to be done over and over. In this regard, what the modern mind has termed as “history” is a society’s own self-constructed story that is narrated, written and re-written by its members out of numerous coexisting and competing memories of the past in a repetitive, reconstructive manner. Concerned more with signifying the identity of the society than with concrete facts, history is a dominant story of the memory that the community has come to approve as the narrativistic legitimation of its own identity through time. Within this theoretical framework, this thesis studies how “history” emerged in so-called Early China, the period roughly from Warring States (ca. fifth to third century BCE) to Western Han (206 BCE-9 CE). It explores the cultural practice of sharing and transmitting various earlier collective memories of the past by representing them in the form of short narrative to establish an “authentic” and “official” memory, i.e., a “history,” by manipulating, editing, revising, or developing the earlier social memories and adopting a developed version of the memory and discourse into the works that had been canonized as the “true” representation of the past in the cultural tradition. For this, the current study first pays attention to a genre of writing, which I term “Episode Text.” Often termed as “anecdotes” that assumes to have trivial and inferior nature in cultural significance, the Episode Text represents an earlier social memory of a past event and its narrative representation in the culture. Consisting of a short story in various lengths, about a past event of political or cultural figures and their speech, it is free-standing and self-contained as one independent textual unit in nature. What makes the Episode Texts significant is that many stories in the Texts are comparable to those of transmitted classics of the past. Assuming that the Episode Text reveals earlier collective memory of the past and its literary representation, we can trace how the social memory of the certain past event has changed and developed. By comparing the parallels between the Episode Texts and received classics of “history,” we can see how earlier memories and stories have evolved or were modified when they were recognized and adopted as a part of the canonical texts in the later culture. The Episode Text remained relatively unknown and paid less attention to until it was re-discovered and re-signified in modern archaeological excavation projects in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. However, the Episode Text seems already popular in the socio-cultural reality around fourth century BCE, in which a robust cultural need arose for individual political entities to identify their connection to the past, particularly to their great earlier ancestors. The stories offered to explain and legitimize their current status by creating their own stories of the past after the breakdown of the former hegemonic Central State, Western Zhou, which had provided the conceptual, ethical, aesthetic orders to its subordinates with political and cultural power and imposed the Zhou’s story to the subordinate individual entities. In this sense, Episode Texts were made and shared as a social effort for individuated small states to be released from Zhou’s cultural hegemony after its breakdown, to cope with their new socio-political circumstances, to explain their origin, and to justify their existence. This was possible within the changing cultural environment where the one absolute cultural and political power no longer existed, and each entity pursued its own story of the past. This study focuses on the stories in two canonical classics of “history” in Chinese tradition, Zuozhuan and Shangshu, and compares them to the newly found narratives in the Episode Texts that reflect earlier memories of the same events. This study shows that the creation and establishment of these two seminal texts was a long-term process in which earlier social memories were edited and re-written in various ways, including detailing, refocusing, merging, splitting, re-messaging, re-didacticization, deleting, and excluding. Notably, the case of textual comparison between the received “Wuyu” in the Guoyu and a bamboo slip manuscript found at Cili, Hubei convincingly suggests that long passages that comprise thousands of written characters in the received “historical” texts such as Guoyu, Zuozhuan, Shangshu may have been formed by merging several separate Episode Texts into a single text coherently. Generally, how later people cognized, conceived of, and understood what had occurred in the early past has been shaped and framed with these key references. Nonetheless, despite the strong and steady efforts to establish specific memories as a socio-cultural norm in the imperial setting of the Han, there remained intellectual attempts to diverge from the growingly dominant memories and reconstruct “history” from different threads of social memory from earlier days in the culture. These disparate threads of memory were also represented in the form of short narrative and widely shared in the society. They were often explicitly critical about the figures or concepts in the increasingly dominant stories. They pursued alternative values, thoughts, and ideas by employing different personalities and a more fictive and imaginative tone and style. The disparate threads of memory explain the plurality of collective memory and the tension for appropriating the past in the society. The received Zhuangzi text exemplifies the intellectual conflict and struggle for domination in remembering the past in Early China. The cultural process of constructing, establishing, challenging, and reconstructing the normative discourse of the past through canonizing such works is understood as a part of the never-ending, repetitive process of a society’s own locating, identifying, and legitimating of itself through time. Thus, this thesis concludes that the process was the journey of the early communities to construct and reconstruct themselves as the ideal, the Center State of the cosmos, the state that now is rendered as China. In this course of consolidating discreet memories and producing the dominant ways of remembering and representing the past through canonical texts, the early societies were dreaming of themselves becoming that Center State—namely, China