A great metropolis of the ancient world, "golden" Sardis was the place where legendary Croesus ruled, where coinage was invented. Since 1958 an archaeological team has been working at the site to retrieve evidence of the rich Lydian culture as well as of the prehistoric Anatolian settlement and the Hellenistic and Roman civilizations that followed the Lydian kingdom. Here is a comprehensive and fully illustrated account of what the team has learned, presented by the eminent archaeologist who led the expedition. George Hanfmann and his collaborators survey the environment of Sardis, the crops and animal life, the mineral resources, the industries for which the city was famed, and the pattern of settlement. The history of Sardis is then reconstructed, from the early Bronze Age to Late Antiquity. Archaeologists who have done the excavating contribute descriptions of shops and houses, graves, the precinct and Altar of Artemis, the Acropolis, gold-working installations and techniques, the bath and gymnasium complex, and the Synagogue. The material finds are studied in the context of other evidence, and there emerges an overall picture of the Lydian society, culture, and religion, the Greek and subsequently the Roman impact, the Jewish community, and the Christianization of Sardis. Historians of the ancient world will find this account invaluable.

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“To understand the immediate cultural and societal background of the cities to which John wrote in Revelation 1 and 2, we must first understand the broader background of Roman civilization and its impact upon Asian province,” writes Roland H. Worth in the introduction to this fascinating, information-packed work. It is an in-depth study of the history, culture, society, economics, and environment of early Christians living in Roman Asia. Drawing on a multitude of resources from diverse disciplines, Worth surveys Roman life and attitudes in general, and demonstrates how Roman power developed and was exercised in Asia. He describes life in Roman Asia: what it was like to live in that province, how the imperial cult grew and prospered there, as well as the nature of official governmental persecution in the first century. A second book, The Seven Cities of the Apocalypse and Greco-Asian Culture, will fill in the details of the local background of the Christians for whom the “mini-epistles” in the book of Revelation were written.

This volume in the ongoing Late Antique Archaeology series draws on material and textual evidence to explore the diverse religious world of Late Antiquity. Subjects include Jews and Samaritans, orthodoxy and heresy, pilgrimage, stylites, magic, the sacred and the secular.

A collection of essays, most of which were published previously. Partial contents:

Studies about rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity that investigate the literary and archaeological evidence by which the evolution of the synagogue can be traced.

Emil Schürer's Geschichte des judischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, originally published in German between 1874 and 1909 and in English between 1885 and 1891, is a critical presentation of Jewish history, institutions, and literature from 175 B.C. to A.D. 135. It has rendered invaluable services to scholars for nearly a century. The present work offers a fresh translation and a revision of the entire subject-matter. The bibliographies have been rejuvenated and supplemented; the sources are presented according to the latest scholarly editions; and all the new archaeological, epigraphical, numismatic and literary evidence, including the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bar Kokhba documents, has been introduced into the survey. Account has also been taken of the progress in historical research, both in the classical and Jewish fields. This work reminds students of the profound debt owed to nineteenth-century learning, setting it within a wider framework of contemporary knowledge, and provides a foundation on which future historians of Judaism in the age of Jesus may build.

Twenty-seven interdisciplinary essays on aspects of Judaism in the Greco-Roman world, exemplifying a wide range of techniques, by a well-known scholar. Three are previously unpublished, including a reappraisal of the Judaism and Hellenism debate and a study of the Sardis synagogue. The book's overall coherence derives from the author's long-standing interests in the analysis of texts as documents of cultural and religious interaction, and in how Jewish communities were woven into the social fabric of Greek cities in the Hellenistic and Roman East. The four sections are: Greeks and Jews, Josephus, The Jewish Diaspora and Epigraphy, and finally Beyond the Greeks and Romans, essays which extend into Christian literature and on to the nineteenth century reception of the Judaism/Hellenism dichotomy. Scholars and students from a wide variety of backgrounds will benefit. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.

In his Histories, Herodotus of Halicarnassus gave an account of Xerxes’ invasion of Greece (480 BCE). Among the information in this work features a rich topography of the places visited by the army, as well as of the battlefields. Apparently there existed a certain demand among the Greeks to behold the exact places where they believed that the Greeks had fallen, gods had appeared, or Xerxes had watched over his men. This book argues that Herodotus’ topography, long taken at face value as if it provided unambiguous access to the historical sites of the war, may partly be a product of Greek imagination in the approximately fifty years between the Xerxes’ invasion and its publication, with the landscape functioning as a catalyst. This innovative approach leads to a new understanding of the topography of the invasion, and of the ways in which Greeks in the late fifth century BCE understood the world around them. It also prompts new suggestions about the real-world locations of various places mentioned in Herodotus’ text.

The menorah was the most important and dominant symbol in Jewish art, both in the Land of Israel and the Diaspora. The menorah was an integral part of the Temple ritual and was the most important of the Temple vessels. Its later representation served the purpose of reminding the Jews of their previous glory as well as their pride in the Temple, and expressed the longing and hope for the renewal of the Temple services and worship. Following the destruction of the Temple, the menorah took on the profound significance of the Temple. It also came to symbolize Judaism, when it was necessary to distinguish synagogues, Jewish tombs, and catacombs from Christian or pagan structures in the Land of Israel and the Diaspora . The menorah image has been found depicted in synagogues, public buildings, homes, and the funerary context throughout the Land of Israel and the Diaspora, leaving no doubt as to which are Jewish structures. The prominent position of the menorah in Jewish art emphasizes its significance. The book is presenting the art, archaeological, historical and literary evidence for the development, form, meaning, and significance of the menorah during the Second Temple period and the Late Antiquity.