Denkschriften der philosophisch-historischen Klasse

The urban development of a city is often closely linked to its fortifications. Comprehensive research, undertaken by a multidisciplinary team from the University of Vienna between 1974 and 2001 in the Lower town of Velia, studied the evolution of the city walls in relation to the urban development of the Phocaean polis on the Tyrrhenian coast and provided new information on the development of the city mainly between the 5th and the 2nd c. BC. The study focused on the architecture of the...

The book opens up a completely new perspective on Roman catacomb painting. As key monuments of Christian Archaeology, the catacombs of Rome repeatedly have been the focus of research since their rediscovery. Nevertheless, overarching questions concerning the conceptual design of their burial sites decorated with paintings, have hardly been addressed so far. The present study fills this research gap by using a comprehensive material base to analyze which guiding principles were decisive for the...

This is the first book-length palaeographic study of about a thousand fragments in Syriac and Sogdian languages discovered between 1902 and 1914 in the Turfan area on the ancient Northern Silk Roads. This manuscript material, probably dating between the late 8th and 13th /14th centuries, is of utmost relevance for the history of an area that represents a crossroads region of various communities, languages and religions, not least the East Syriac Christian community. Palaeographic factors such...

The publication deals with the importance and function of inscriptions in residential homes in the upper layer from around 400 BC to AD 600. It investigates commonalities, differences and the development of the use of text in residential homes. The inscriptions are found on architectural components such as façades, door frames and pillars, as well as featuring in mosaics and wall paintings and on sculptures. In wall paintings we find both dipinti and spontaneous graffiti, including drawings....

Im Laufe der letzten 120 Jahre wurden im Boden der antiken Stadt Lauriacum, an der Mündung der Enns in die Donau gelegen, knapp 32.000 antike Münzen gefunden, die überwiegend im Museum Lauriacum der Stadt Enns verwahrt werden. Schon aufgrund der Menge, und noch mehr aufgrund der überragenden Bedeutung Lauriacums für das römische Österreich, zählen die Fundmünzen dieses Ortes zu den wichtigsten antiken Kulturgütern unseres Landes. Für die Geschichte Lauriacums als Militärstandort, Knotenpunkt...

The present volume contains 40 papers on the Roman Empire, published between 2004 and 2020. Several papers have as their starting point the province of Dacia. They focus upon themes like the conquest of Dacia; the foundation, the colonisation, the organisation and the urbanisation of the province; its economic, social and politic structures; its military history (legions, auxiliary units, hierarchy) and, finally, the reasons for its abandonment. Prosopographical studies deal with personalities...

The study of palimpsest manuscripts has a long tradition and has led to spectacular discoveries of new texts or new text versions. Recent decades have seen the development of advanced nondestructive methods of multispectral imaging and computer-based image processing. The focus of such research have been individual manuscripts, such as the Archimedes palimpsest that was studied in Baltimore, or the Dexippus fragments in Vienna. The Sinai Palimpsests Project broke new ground by studying for the...

The Late Bronze Age Mycenaean palaces in southern and central Greece stood at the head of the earliest state system on the European continent. The authors, all leading scholars in Bronze Age research and often engaged in excavating the palace sites themselves, focus in their contributions on the most recent progress in pottery studies, in order to arrive at precise relative chronological dates of the destruction events. The investigated archaeological sites range from Crete in the south to the...

From the 7th to the 1st century BC, daily observations of the sky were performed and their results written down on clay tablets in some Babylonian cities, especially in Babylon. The observations concern the moon and the planets and their phenomena, as well as the weather, the level of the River Euphrates and the prices of important commodities. While these "Astronomical Diaries" are mostly fragmentary and cover only a small part of the period concerned, they nevertheless provide important...

Built in the 6th century by order of Emperor Justinian, the Monastery of Saint Catherine in the Sinai desert preserves the oldest Christian monastic library with an uninterrupted history. This Greek Orthodox Monastery houses a significant collection of manuscripts in the world, including a large number of palimpsest manuscripts (over 170). Eleven different languages are attested in their erased layers as "scriptiones inferiores": they reflect the long history and the multicultural nature of the...

As a scientific reflection of today's "globalization", current studies in global history deal with the worldwide influence of former empire nations such as Great Britain or France. The classic studies on the Habsburg era have so far largely ignored the global impact of the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy. This is where the present publication, written from the viewpoint of a global architectural history, comes in. A major blind spot in existing research is Austria-Hungary’s participation in...