Changing Identities at the Turn of the Common Era: The Case of Semiramis

Babylon, a city of shifting identities, was a constant point of reference for the Mediterranean world. This article explores the portrayal of the Babylonian queen Semiramis in Greek and Roman sources, demonstrating how ancient Near Eastern identities were constructed from the external perspective of Mediterranean cultures. Herodotus first mentioned Semiramis in the fifth century bce, associating her with Babylon’s architectural wonders. Ctesias described her as an outstanding, but in many respects flawed military leader. In contrast, during the final stage of the Roman Republic, Diodorus Siculus reshaped Ctesias’ narrative and portrayed her more positively, emphasizing her beauty, virtues, courage, and intelligence. During the Roman Empire, Semiramis remained a remarkable figure who accomplished great deeds, but later authors introduced negative aspects to her story. The Augustan Age portrayed her negatively, with new elements added, such as sodomy and murder, and used her as a stand-in for Cleopatra. Both queens were denigrated as female rulers and foreigners, emphasizing cultural differences between Mesopotamian and Roman identities. The portrayal of Semiramis served to categorize and describe Mesopotamian culture, rather than to understand it. Ultimately, this article shows how Semiramis reflects different perceptions of Babylonia/Assyria and how her portrayal shifted over time in ancient literature, serving as part of Augustan propaganda to pass judgment on Cleopatra and emphasize cultural differences

Assyrians and Babylonians in Classical Sources

Peer reviewe

Textile Crossroads: Exploring European Clothing, Identity, and Culture across Millennia

Research from COST Action “CA 19131 – EuroWeb” These essays on various aspects of textile research encompass a wide chronological perspective and vast geographical area, enriching traditional disciplines with innovative methodologies such as isotopic tracing of provenance, textile analysis, protein analysis, digital motion capture, and exploration of textile expressions in texts and folklore. All essays in this volume have been written by international teams of scholars from the participating countries. The anthology serves as a comprehensive and innovative resource, consolidating the research outcomes and insights gained from the interdisciplinary exploration of textiles in European history within the framework of EuroWeb. This volume has the potential to contribute to the advancement of European scientific excellence and competitiveness, fostering a deeper understanding of the cultural, technological, and societal significance of textiles and clothing in shaping European identity and heritage through the millenia. We hope that the anthology will find a wide and interested readership, and that it will inspire many new research projects in the field of textile history. Contributors: Dimitra Andrianou, Giacomo Bardelli, Magali An Berthon, Tina Boloti, Cecilie Brøns, Ana Cabrera-Lafuente, Francesca Coletti, Roxana Coman, Catarina Costeira, Cristina Cumbo, Camilla Cziffery Nielsen, Klara Dankova, Anna Maria Desiderio, Kerstin Droß-Krüpe, Arianna Esposito, Astrid Fendt, Nade Genevska Brachikj, Francisco B. Gomes, Judith Goris, Audrey Gouy, Karina Grömer, Morten Grymer-Hansen, Mary Harlow, Susanna Harris, Sophia Larissa Hayda, Angela Huang, Floor Huisman, Alina Iancu, Zofia Kaczmarek, Marisa Kerbizi, Meghan Korten, Tetiana Krupa, Karolina Anna Kulpa, Lena Larsson Lovén, Ronja Lau, Yuliia Lazorenko, Susanne Lervad, Petra Linscheid, Christina Margariti, Maria João Melo, Elena Miramontes Seijas, Leyre Morgado-Roncal, Juliane Müller, Paula Nabais, Jasemin Nazim, Marie-Louise B. Nosch, Tim Parry-Williams, Irina Petroviciu, Louise Quillien, Marie-Alice Rebours, Kalliope Sarri, Kayleigh Saunderson, Francesca Scotti, Joana Sequeira, Agata Ulanowska, Magdalena M. Wozniak, Anna Zimmermann 378 pages, color illustrations DOI: 10.32873/unl.dc.zea.1800 Individual chapters are available online at https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/texroads/https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook/1161/thumbnail.jp

Frontmatter for \u3ci\u3eTextile Crossroads: Exploring European Clothing, Identity, and Culture across Millennia\u3c/i\u3e

Title and copyright pages, Acknowledgments, Contents, Prefaces. We believe this volume has the potential to contribute to the advancement of European scientific excellence and competitiveness, fostering a deeper understanding of the cultural, technological, and societal significance of textiles and clothing in shaping European identity and heritage through the millenia. We hope that the anthology will find a wide and interested readership, and that it will inspire many new research projects in the field of textile history

How (not) to organise Roman textile production. Some considerations on merchant-entrepreneurs in Roman Egypt and the ἱστωνάρχης

For almost the last 100 years, various ancient historians have suggested that organisations comparable to the “putting- out” system existed in the Roman Imperial period. They are most commonly believed to have occurred in textile production. As early as 1913, Theodor Reil assumed that the production of textiles in Roman Egypt was organised through the putting-out system. This idea can subsequently be traced through more than a century to recent publications. However, as this assumption is rarely based on genuine source material, it seems appropriate to get to the bottom of this hypothesis. In this context, special attention will also have to be paid to the question of large textile companies and the professional title of ἱστωνάρχης, which has been associated with the putting-out system in the past. In order to avoid terminological blurring, let us briefly outline what is understood in economic history and modern economics by the term “putting-out system”. This term is used to describe a form of economic organisation that is mainly typical of modern textile production, in which craftsmen who are not independent produce goods at home. A merchant-entrepreneur provides the resources and/or raw materials. He is also the one who collects the goods after completion and markets them centrally. This production system was particularly frequent in the production of bulk goods, which were in high demand and could be produced in a decentralised manner without either complex technical equipment or costly investments in the necessary production material. The skills required in the putting- out system were usually low. Work in the putting-out system was especially common in rural areas, where only narrow agricultural yields could be achieved and where it was an important additional income for poorer farming families. While wages were often very small, they were available in those phases of the year when there was no work on the fields. The depressed living conditions endured by most of those employed in the system are illustrated by Thomas Hood’s poem The Song of the Shirt from 1843. Another condition for the putting-out system to exist was for labour to be paid as piecework, since working at home made the monitoring of time impossible. From the point of view of economic rationality, the advantages of this kind of production are obvious: a large number of products could be produced according to season or demand without the necessity of having central workshops, and especially without the investments connected with their construction. Central to this is the separation of capital and labour characteristic of a capitalist system: the merchant-entrepreneur bears the entire financial risk, since he has to lay out his capital in order to procure the materials and work equipment and pay the workers, before trying to sell the products they have produced on the market. However, he also has the exclusive and unrestricted right to dispose of the work products. Resulting from this, he also has a decisive influence on the production process and he determines production output and workforce wages. Another premise for this decentralised way of manufacturing goods is that the putting-out system is advantageous only as long as the production processes were short and did not require a division of labour. In this paper, we will begin by exploring the genesis of the idea of a Roman putting-out system in Classical scholarship, before the individual characteristics of publications about textile industry (briefly outlined above) are compared with the available ancient sources on the Roman textile economy of the Imperial period. For this, the papyri from Egypt are of central importance. They provide a particularly good impression of the complex conditions of the Roman textile industry, since many thousands of documents have been preserved from the province of Egypt, which offer more insights into the ancient realities of normal everyday life than any other source. From contracts, letters, receipts, petitions and the like we get an almost voyeuristic view into the economic, social and legal realities in this province, and thanks to these texts we are informed much better about Egypt than all other regions of the Imperium Romanum or the rest of the ancient Mediterranean world

Χιτών – δαλματική – μαφόρτης – σύνθεσις: Common and Uncommon Garment Terms in Dowry Arrangements from Roman Egypt

With regard to ancient textile terms, dictionaries could potentially generate a false sense of security. Their formal accuracy might let us think that we are, without doubt, provided with the term that corresponds perfectly with a particular expression from an ancient Greek and/or Latin document. However, translations in dictionaries are almost exclusively based on reading and interpreting ancient literary sources and tend to neglect documentary evidence. But documentary sources, such as papyri, are a valuable and unique resource for research, referring to manifold aspects of social and economic history. Above all, they offer an insight into the minutae of individual lives, an aspect of ancient history that is rarely available to current research. These kinds of sources significantly deepen the understanding of the ancient world – compared to information retrieved only from literary sources. The present contribution derives from a research project made possible by the Pasold Research Fund.1 It focuses on ancient marriage documents from the province of Egypt with its abundance of papyrological evidence as a case study on the terminology of everyday dress in Roman Imperial times. Source material: Dowry contracts from Roman Egypt -- Before paper and parchment were common writing materials, people used wooden tablets, papyri or potsherds (ostraca) for private correspondence as well as for official documents. Especially the abundance of papyri and ostraca broadens our perspective on antiquity from literary sources. Mainly originating from Egypt, these documents provide a direct and unfiltered view of real life circumstances for all classes of population in this region.2 After Alexander III (‘the Great’) had conquered Egypt and introduced the Greek language in this part of the Mediterranean in 332 BC, it was used for official documents. Until the Arab invasion in 640-642 AD, the Greek language also played an important role in private correspondence. Thus most papyri and ostraca were written in Greek. The majority of Greek papyri and ostraca date back to the first three centuries AD, when Egypt was a province of the Roman Empire. They consist of a variety of documents – works of literature, letters, horoscopes, accounts, receipts, tax registers, declarations, contracts, and more. Making the individual tangible, they let us explore an ‘individual micro-history’ and bring administrative trading records to life. Their evidence provides an unfiltered view of real-life circumstances of all population classes. With regard to the economic procedures of Roman textile production, they allow for a more detailed analysis. Marriage and dowry arrangements are of particular value for research on female dress of the Roman period. “One of the main purposes for the composition of a marriage document was to record the delivery of a dowry, its value and contents, and to regulate its position both in the course of the marriage and after its dissolution.”3 The detailed description of every item of the dowry was very important because, in case of divorce, it enabled the woman to enforce her right of regaining this dowry within a short time. However, some contracts record the overall value of the dowry rather than its original components. In these cases, which mostly date back to Augustean times, the husband could possibly dispose of dowry components without any special restraints as long as he was still capable of returning the total value. However, in later marriage documents the components are usually listed in great detail. A typical dowry from the first three centuries AD in Roman Egypt usually includes clothing, along with cash instalments, jewellery and household implements. The typically high level of detail offers a unique chance to learn about women’s garments which were actually worn in everyday life in this part of the Roman Empire. We can discover details about the terminology of female garments, their colours and sometimes even the value of an actual garment

\u3ci\u3eArs polymita, ars plumaria\u3c/i\u3e: The Weaving Terminology of \u3ci\u3eTaqueté\u3c/i\u3e and Tapestry

In Roman Egypt papyrologists and archaeologists sometimes seem to inhabit two different, if parallel, worlds, each apparently unaware of the treasures to be found in the other. This paper, however, is a co-operative venture between an ancient historian with papyrological interests – Kerstin Droß-Krüpe – and an archaeologist – John Peter Wild. In the research field of textiles we overlap, and we want to offer you insights from each of our worlds. At some point in the later 2nd century AD an unnamed magnate in the territory of the Lingones in central Gaul dictated a will in which he stipulated that a number of his prized possessions should be cremated with him on his funeral pyre. Among those listed are vestes polymitae et plumariae. What do these two textile terms mean? And what did the textiles themselves look like? The images in Figures 1 and 2 are our provisional suggestions. The two items shown here are of wool – they are actually from Roman Egypt – and at first glance they look in decorative terms rather similar to one another;4 but the textile in Figure 1 is in taqueté – vestis polymita, we argue – mechanically woven – while the piece in Figure 2 is in tapestry weave, vestis plumaria, and hand-woven. The structures of the two weaves can be characterised as follows: Tapestry weave, made famous by the Gobelin workshops in Paris, is essentially a mosaic in coloured wool yarns, constructed free-hand, and concealing the underlying warp. The weaver has available on individual spools a selection of dyed yarns which he or she interlaces with the warp threads according to the requirements of the pattern. A distinctive feature of tapestry is the oblique lines or even vertical slits where weft yarns in different colours meet one another and turn back (Fig. 3). Across an area, an accomplished weaver can achieve the subtle, gradual, changes in colour visible in the highest-quality floor and wall-mosaics and in wall painting. Taqueté, also known as ‘weft-faced compound tabby’ and in German Leinwandschusskompositbildung, aims for a similar decorative effect, but rarely in more than two colours. It is created mechanically by means of a complex planned sequence of different sheds on the loom, which the weaver memorises. The overall decorative scheme is constructed by repeating a single pattern unit, sometime in mirror image. The weave structure can be recognised by the fact that a weft thread in one colour disappears to the reverse side of the cloth behind an adjacent thread in a different colour as the pattern changes, only to re-appear on the obverse again later when it is required (Fig. 4). A variety of ancient sources can be deployed to inform discussion and argument about textile structure and terminology. Roman inscriptions and papyri in Greek and Latin are crucial documents, but tend to be laconic: both the writer and the reader knew exactly what was meant by a given technical expression, but we are left in the dark. Authors of classical literature write at greater length, and at first sight more helpfully; but their reliability is variable and often difficult to check. Poets, for example, treat of technical matters with artistic licence, especially when the vocabulary does not fit the metre. Scholars who consult another much-quoted source, the late Roman and early medieval encyclopaedists and glossators like Hesychius and Isidore, are well advised to exercise caution: for such compilers may simply be guessing. Ancient art, particularly funerary art, is a rich source of textile images, but, taken alone, the latter usually lack the necessary detail for precise technical identification. Surviving archaeological textiles are a relatively new and growing resource, and one might expect to find examples of vestis polymita and plumaria somewhere in the extant textile corpus. Both techniques are described explicitly as woven-in, and not decoration added afterwards, so that narrows the range of possibilities

How (not) to organise Roman textile production. Some considerations on merchant-entrepreneurs in Roman Egypt and the ἱστωνάρχης

For almost the last 100 years, various ancient historians have suggested that organisations comparable to the “putting- out” system existed in the Roman Imperial period. They are most commonly believed to have occurred in textile production. As early as 1913, Theodor Reil assumed that the production of textiles in Roman Egypt was organised through the putting-out system. This idea can subsequently be traced through more than a century to recent publications. However, as this assumption is rarely based on genuine source material, it seems appropriate to get to the bottom of this hypothesis. In this context, special attention will also have to be paid to the question of large textile companies and the professional title of ἱστωνάρχης, which has been associated with the putting-out system in the past. In order to avoid terminological blurring, let us briefly outline what is understood in economic history and modern economics by the term “putting-out system”. This term is used to describe a form of economic organisation that is mainly typical of modern textile production, in which craftsmen who are not independent produce goods at home. A merchant-entrepreneur provides the resources and/or raw materials. He is also the one who collects the goods after completion and markets them centrally. This production system was particularly frequent in the production of bulk goods, which were in high demand and could be produced in a decentralised manner without either complex technical equipment or costly investments in the necessary production material. The skills required in the putting- out system were usually low. Work in the putting-out system was especially common in rural areas, where only narrow agricultural yields could be achieved and where it was an important additional income for poorer farming families. While wages were often very small, they were available in those phases of the year when there was no work on the fields. The depressed living conditions endured by most of those employed in the system are illustrated by Thomas Hood’s poem The Song of the Shirt from 1843. Another condition for the putting-out system to exist was for labour to be paid as piecework, since working at home made the monitoring of time impossible. From the point of view of economic rationality, the advantages of this kind of production are obvious: a large number of products could be produced according to season or demand without the necessity of having central workshops, and especially without the investments connected with their construction. Central to this is the separation of capital and labour characteristic of a capitalist system: the merchant-entrepreneur bears the entire financial risk, since he has to lay out his capital in order to procure the materials and work equipment and pay the workers, before trying to sell the products they have produced on the market. However, he also has the exclusive and unrestricted right to dispose of the work products. Resulting from this, he also has a decisive influence on the production process and he determines production output and workforce wages. Another premise for this decentralised way of manufacturing goods is that the putting-out system is advantageous only as long as the production processes were short and did not require a division of labour. In this paper, we will begin by exploring the genesis of the idea of a Roman putting-out system in Classical scholarship, before the individual characteristics of publications about textile industry (briefly outlined above) are compared with the available ancient sources on the Roman textile economy of the Imperial period. For this, the papyri from Egypt are of central importance. They provide a particularly good impression of the complex conditions of the Roman textile industry, since many thousands of documents have been preserved from the province of Egypt, which offer more insights into the ancient realities of normal everyday life than any other source. From contracts, letters, receipts, petitions and the like we get an almost voyeuristic view into the economic, social and legal realities in this province, and thanks to these texts we are informed much better about Egypt than all other regions of the Imperium Romanum or the rest of the ancient Mediterranean world