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We are pleased to inform you that Acta Asiatica Varsoviensia 37 (published by IMOC PAS) is now available on the journal’s website (http://aav.iksiopan.pl/index.php/en/current-issue).

This issue, co-financed by the programme of the Polish Ministry of Education and Science entitled “Development of Scientific Journals” (project no. RCN/SP/0163/2021/1), is mainly dedicated to various aspects of Buddhism (textual and visual), but also follows the traces of Islam in China and portrays Macau in Portuguese films.

As usual we encourage you to read this issue and would also like to invite you to contribute to the journal in the future.

On Tuesday, 11 March 2025, at 18.30, Dr Maria Carmela Gatto will give a lecture in Italian at the Museo Egizio in Turin.

The lecture will present the results of the BORDERSCAPE Project.

The lecture will be streamed live on the Museo Egizio Facebook page and YouTube channel.

 

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Nicola Laneri is a professor at the University of Catania and is the Director of the School of Religious Studies at CAMNES (Florence). He taught at the University of Chicago, the Middle Eastern Technical University of Ankara and the Oriental Institute of Naples.  Principal Investigator of the project PRIN 2020 (MUR) - Godscapes: Modeling Second Millennium BCE Polytheisms in the eastern Mediterranean. Since 2022, he is the director of the Baghdad Urban Archaeological Project (BUAP) linked to the excavation at Tell Muhammad (Iraq). 
 
Chiara Pappalardo is research associate in Archaeology of the Ancient Near East at the University of Catania, where she obtained her PhD with a dissertation titled Visible Dead: Ancestral Landscapes in Prehistory between the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East.
 As a member of the project Godscapes: Modeling Second Millennium BCE Polytheisms in the Eastern Mediterranean, her current focus is the analysis of the material data related to religiosity in the Levant during the second millennium BCE through a semantic approach.
 
Abstrakt
The Project ‘Godscapes: Modeling Second Millennium BCE Polytheisms in the Eastern Mediterranean’ aims at defining the basic material elements occurred in structuring forms of complex polytheisms practiced in the Levant during the Second Millennium BCE. In order to do so, we are trying to disentangle the new elements from the traditional aspects that had a long-term tradition throughout the second millennium BCE in framing religious architecture, funerary traditions, religious texts, iconographic elements. Based on these theoretical premises, the project proposes an innovative application of the artificial intelligence, namely the Semantic Web, to build ‘The Godscapes Ontology’ (TGO) through a deconstruction process of the elements recognizable in four pivotal aspects associated with material religiosity: religious architecture, religious iconography, funerary rituals/beliefs, and religious texts. After introducing the project’s scope and methodology, the paper will present the conceptual model for TGO, and the knowledge graphs resulting from the Godscapes dataset, mapping how various aspects of human life and knowledge are related to each other in the construction of religious belief, that is considered as a co-product of the enactment of ritual behaviors, as reconstructed from material correlates recognizable in the archaeological context, and cognitive representations that are especially embedded in the iconographic representation of other-than-human beings. Preliminary results highlight the potential of TGO to aid researchers in the understanding of religious phenomena by not only reconstructing the inherent missing information within the data, but also by delivering a powerful tool to query and analyse them.

 

The lecture by Professor Quack, originally scheduled for February 18, 2025, has been postponed
to April 2, 2025, at 1:00 PM.
Place: Maria Skłodowska-Curie Hall (1st floor), Staszic Palace, Nowy Świat 72, 00-330, and online.
The online meeting link remains unchanged.
 

Lecture Quack invitation

 

Abstract: The Egyptian micro-region of Gebelein was, during the later Ptolemaic period, the seat of a military garrison. At the same time, it looked back to a long tradition, with a temple devoted to the main goddess Hathor. There is a great amount of papyri preserved from this period, in Greek as well as Egyptian language and script. While many of the family archives have been now been studied quite thoroughly, one important archive remains seriously understudied. This is the temple archive, nowadays dispersed over several collections, most especially Cairo, Turin, Heidelberg, Berlin, London and Paris. It comprises several hundred items, even if many of them are fragmentary. Starting from reading the mostly unpublished original documents of Heidelberg, a project has formed which aims at editing and analyzing this archive. Most of the texts are of an economic and administrative nature, but there are also some literary and religious texts.

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