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This chapter focuses on funerary stelae in Pannonia in ancient Rome which portray affectionate family groups attired in both Roman and local traditional dress, making a statement about family identity in a way that is not exclusively Roman, yet is congruent with Roman attitudes. Evidence from the provinces illustrates the formation of new regional cultures and identities through the blending of Roman and local forms. New debates about the meaning of ‘Romanization’ and the extent to which local cultures adopted and absorbed Roman norms, practices, and ideologies add another complicating element in the search for the family in the Roman provinces. A remarkable number of Pannonia's tombstones represent children, at all ages, together with their parents and other members of their family. The affectionate nuclear family enabled presumably distinct identities in Pannonia to be negotiated and accommodated.

Chapter 6 treats the Ming princes’ literary patronage of Daoism. Due to their lifestyle, Daoism became one of the most important themes for the Ming princes. For most of the time during the Ming, the princes followed the traditional pattern of royal patronage of literature, supporting disfranchised lower-status literati, or shanren (mountain men), and the princes’ subordinate officials/functionaries serving at their princely courts. This general picture of the relations between Ming princes and writers, however, underwent a change in the latter half of the sixteenth century. With the rise of the “Later Seven Masters” and the Archaist movement, these famous poets served as the masters of the princes and inspired them to write. The original hierarchy between the princes and nonimperial writers was turned upside down. Against this background, the chapter classifies the Ming princes’ literary patronage of Daoism into four categories: chanting of the Dao in their literary salons, writing in such Daoist genres as the “Poetry of Wandering in Transcendence” (youxian shi) and the “Stanza on Pacing the Void” (buxu ci), discourses on self-cultivation in verse, and publishing their lyrics on Daoist sacred sites.

Adolphe Reinach and Raymond Weill bought several objects in Cairo from the antiquities dealer Michel Casira, who said they came from Coptos. They were drawn to the site by the remains of Ptolemaic and Roman architecture which Petrie had explored some fifteen years previously (Petrie 1896). These attested to the importance of the city in Hellenistic and Roman times, the era of Reinach's specialization. On arrival in Cairo, archaeologists not only paid the obligatory call at the Service des antiquités to pick up their permits to excavate, but also made the rounds of the dealers who were officially authorized by license. Reinach's trust in the Coptos provenance that Casira provided for the pieces he sold in 1910 was based on two factors. Weill and Reinach bought Coptic-style funerary stelae at Coptos.

This chapter examines the Christian funerary stelae or tombstones excavated at the Fayoum Oasis in Egypt. Various regional conditions influenced the development of Christian funerary stelae in Egypt and they fall within the larger category of so-called Coptic art influenced at first by Greco-Roman funerary decorations. The decorative programs of the stelae from burial grounds in the Fayoum were varied, but generally fall into three types. These are the mother-with-child stelae, the aedicula type or orans type, and the stelae with elaborate crosses.

Even before the first colossus was unearthed in 1925, the public was aware of the unusual artistic achievements of this period. The colossi were not identically conceived. Apart from the obvious differences in headgear there are subtle distinctions in the treatment of the face. Different issues about colossus such as colossal statues that are presented in this chapter lead to the exception of the battered images of the king flanking his boundary stelae at Amarna. Moreover, the point of view is of significance for an understanding of the artistic concepts behind the colossi.

A stela brings us to the untold world of the Egyptian, but some of these stelae are too damaged to read in our present time. A duplicate of a stela set up in the Karnak complex shows figures when Tutankhamun is offering to Amun and Mut, with Ankhesenamun standing behind him. Below that figure is a thirty-line inscription stating that Tutankhamun “restored everything that was ruined, to be a monument for ever and ever” and “suppressed wrongdoing throughout the Two Lands.” Given the placement of the stela, and the known destruction of Amuns's names and images by Akhenaten, the next section of the stela is unsurprisingly focused on the king's resolution to do everything possible to benefit Amun by creating a new cult image, building on what survived from before Akhenaten's time. The stela continues, emphasizing the king's munificence toward the newly restored temples and their gods.

This chapter focuses on Naunakhte's son, Qenhirkhopshef the Younger, who received a larger share of her mother's inheritance in the form of a copper vessel and ten additional sacks of grain. It begins with some facts about Qenhirkhopshef: he was a regular workman, but some of the correspondence with his brother Maaninakhtef suggests that he also worked as a carpenter, perhaps as part of a family business. It then considers one ostracon (O. BM EA 50737) from Dynasty 20, which mentions both Qenhirkhopshef and his sister Khatanub; Naunakhte's daughters sometimes appear in the records buying carpentry. It also describes Qenhirkhopshef the Younger as one who seems to have been more versatile than other workmen. Finally, it analyzes one of Qenhirkhopshef's stelae, found in a Theban tomb and then acquired by the Earl of Belmore. The tomb has come to be known as Lord Belmore's Tomb.

More so than any other area of the eastern lowlands, southern Belize developed a distinctive regional tradition, influenced by its geographical isolation. The major sites in the region share common urban planning and architectural traits not seen in other parts of Belize. Following a description of the natural setting of southern Belize, this chapter discusses the four largest and best-documented sites in the region–Pusilhá, Uxbenka, Lubaantun, and Nim Li Punit. Southern Belize is notable for the high frequency of carved monuments, the small stela plazas, and the curious lack of textual reference to neighboring cities. Another important characteristic of the region is that the major cities lacked Preclassic antecedent architecture, as the region apparently was not heavily settled until the Early Classic period. Southern Belize, isolated and unique, is atypical when stacked along side the rest of the eastern lowlands in terms of chronology, architecture, use of stelae, settlement patterning, and concepts of city building.

This chapter examines three cities in northwestern Belize: La Milpa, Dos Hombres, and Chan Chich. The biggest city in the area, La Milpa boasts the largest public plaza in the eastern lowlands; Plaza A includes five temple-pyramids, two ball courts, large range buildings, a small acropolis group, and most of the site’s 23 stelae. Dos Hombres is smaller than is La Milpa, but the two cities share important urban features. They each have a pronounced north-south alignment of the monumental architecture, a massive public plaza at the northern end of the site core, an elevated acropolis at the southern end, and a sacbe linking the architecture together. Although a large center during the Late Classic period, Chan Chich arguably had its heyday in the Terminal Preclassic period when the city’s elite buried an early divine king in the Upper Plaza. Centuries later during the Late Classic period, the rulers at the city established Chan Chich’s visible site plan. The key urban features at the city are its massive Main Plaza, its east-west causeways, its immense range building on the southern side of the Main Plaza, and its rare form of attached ball court.

This critical chapter examines the development of Atenism, seeking an explanation for what prompted this revolution. Taking a clue from the name of the temple, Gem-Pa-Aten (used of a temple at Amarna and in Nubia), and means something like “the Aten is found,” it is suggested that this name refers to an original theophany that motivated the religious changes that followed. Other texts hint that he experienced a theophany and by revelation was urged to build a new capital, which occurred at Tell el-Amarna and was named Akhet-Aten. The boundary stelae around Akhet-Aten suggest that Aten discovered this sacred spot for the king, just as previously Aten was discovered by the king.

This chapter discusses research on south-western stelae. It suggests that a greater effort to obtain reliable and precise locations for the stelae is essential in order to undertake accurate studies of their spatial distribution; in this regard there is still a lot to do, but with the support of geographic information technologies a high-quality cartographic base can be produced. These same technical resources can be a valuable asset in guiding research on the functional and general interpretation of the stelae. Starting with the large-scale study of their distribution within the Iberian peninsula, a range of spatial analysis techniques enable new perspectives, in particular allowing for the varied density and distribution of the stelae to be objectified.

The warrior stelae constitute one of the most debated topics of Spanish late prehistory, with a substantial literature that, at the time of writing, comprises six monographs and catalogues and more than a hundred articles. In recent years, the discussion of these monuments has been reinvigorated, partly because the steady growth in their number has increased their variability, posing new challenges to research, but also because they still hold a somewhat disproportionate relative significance for the archaeological study of the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age societies in the region. This chapter makes a contribution to this recent upsurge of the debate. The discussion starts from a critique of some previous approaches and then, departing from the study carried out on the newly found Almadén de la Plata stelae, suggests new perspectives of analysis.

The above quote from a recent Hollywood film presentation of Colonel Percival Fawcett’s obsessive early twentieth-century search for the remains of the Lost City of Z (Gray, 2016) highlights the effort that it has taken to convince the academic world and the public alike that large urban forms can be developed in tropical forest settings. While the film, and the book by David Grann (2009) upon which it was based, grossly overplay the exploration credentials, respect for Indigenous peoples, and scientific abilities of Colonel Fawcett (Hemming, 2017), this quote encapsulates the difficult working conditions and environmental determinism in western thought that have led to perceptions of ‘impossibility’ of extensive settlements and social complexity in tropical forests. Beyond searches for debated ‘lost’ cities, even where the clear ruins of ancient urban sites have been found in tropical forests, as with the Classic Maya in North and Central America and the Khmer Empire in Southeast Asia, their collapse has been seen as almost inevitable given necessary forest clearance, soil erosion, and population pressure on these delicate environments (Webster, 2002; Diamond, 2005; Chen et al., 2014; Lentz et al., 2014). In particular, the intensive agriculture seen as necessary to fuel the ‘urban revolution’ (Childe, 1950) and the development of cities and elite structures familiar to most archaeological definitions of cities (Adams, 1981; Postgate, 1992), has been considered impossible on the fragile, low nutrient soils of tropical forest habitats (Meggers, 1954, 1971, 1977, 1987). Other, less-discussed threats include natural disasters, such as mudslides and mass-flooding, that continue to trouble tropical regions prone to high annual or seasonal rainfall (Larsen, 2017). Nevertheless, new methodologies and theoretical shifts are highlighting the clear emergence of social complexity and extensive human populations prior to the arrival of European settlers in many of the world’s tropical forest settings. Here, I review the growing dataset of past ‘urban’ forms in tropical forests. As with ‘the origins of agriculture’ in Chapter 5, tropical forests have been crucial in demonstrating that traditional ideas of ‘urbanism’ in archaeology–namely ‘compact’, bounded, and dense populations documented in early Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean, and that dominate European thought—do not capture the whole wealth of ‘urban’ diversity and settlement networks that began to develop from the Middle Holocene.

Lucian’s architectural descriptions reveal the moral and cultural pressures that were exerted on new building in the age of the Antonines. Legendary archetypes such as the Persian king’s golden plane tree and the palaces of Homeric epic offered a yardstick by which the monumentality of future buildings could be measured. But they also warned builders of the limits to be avoided. On the one hand, to make its mark in history, monumental architecture needed to exhibit a grandeur, exuberance, and brilliance that would inspire spectators with awe; on the other hand, there was perceived to be something ‘uncivilized’ about buildings which set out only to impress and which reduced viewers to irrational beings. Antonine architecture wanted to be seen as more ‘cultivated’ than that, and to appeal to viewers’ humanity and culture. There was a real dilemma here, one which has preoccupied many subsequent periods of architectural history: if the architecture of the past set the standard of monumentality, how truly ‘monumental’ could the buildings of the modern age be? Older works seemed ‘larger’ than new ones because they inspired more noteworthy memories. To Marcus Piso in the late Republic, the new Sullan senate-house seemed, despite its greater height, ‘smaller’ than its ancient predecessor, the Curia Hostilia, which, when he looked at it, brought him visions of famous senators of the past. Modern buildings, which, by definition, lacked associations, could, it seemed, only make an impression by being more imposing and on a scale too large to invite direct comparison; but, in that, they ran the risk of appearing inhuman. For example, the very first work of Antoninus Pius’ reign, the Tomb of Hadrian, produced a clear impression of monumental scale. The bronze chariot on the summit was said to be ‘so large . . . that a very fat man would be able to pass through the eye of each horse, but, to men on the ground, the horses and statue of Hadrian still look very small, because of the extreme height of the construction’.