From the Formation of anthrôpos in Ancient Greece to its Contemporary Dissolution

François Hartog
Professor Emeritus, Modern & Antique Historiography, EHESS, Paris

Tuesday, October 8, 2024, 4:00pm
Room 103, Foster Hall, 1130 E. 59th St.

A much-acclaimed scholar, François Hartog is a French historian and Professor Emeritus of Modern and Antique Historiography at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. A former student of Jean-Pierre Vernant and assistant to Reinhart Koselleck, Hartog’s early work focused on the intellectual history of ancient Greece and historiography, while his recent work deals mainly with temporality, historicity, and the human condition in recent times. This discussion will be about his forthcoming book, Départager l’humanité, Humains, humanismes, inhumains (Paris: Gallimard, 2025).

A copy of Professor Hartog’s paper may be downloaded here.

Organized by the Department of History, Department of Classics, Franke Institute for the Humanities, and Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization

Register here.

Hi everyone,

Here is the handout for Lex’s presentation:

ASW Lex Ladge Handout

Best wishes,

Eduardo

Hi everyone,

It is my pleasure to announce the Ancient Societies Workshop schedule for winter quarter. Following the guidelines set by the university, all of these presentations will be hosted virtually on Zoom. If you have any questions, feel free to send me an email (egarciamolina@uchicago.edu)

1/12: Maria Liston (University of Waterloo) “Epidemics and Plagues in Early Byzantine Thebes”

1/26: Debby Sneed (CSU Long Beach) “Disability and Disasters: Differential Experiences of War in Ancient Greece”

2/9: Timothy Clark (University of Chicago) “Parthians in the Flesh: A New Image of the East in the Great Parthian Altar of Lucius Verus at Ephesus”

2/23: Mills McArthur (University of Chicago) “A Forgotten Battle of the Peloponnesian War”

3/9: Amanda Gaggioli (Stanford University) “Deciphering Earthquake Disaster and Resilience in Mediterranean Archeology”

Best wishes,

Eduardo

Hi everyone,

I am using the site as a way of conveniently providing the handout for the presentation tomorrow in case I cannot share it via Zoom.

Yanxiao He ASW Nov 20 Handout

See you all then,

Eduardo

Hi everyone,

Here is the abstract for our upcoming lecture that is co-sponsored with the Interdisciplinary Archaeology Workshop. Because of this, we are not meeting on our usual Tuesday slot. We will instead be joining IAW on October 22^nd (Thursday) at 4:00pm CT (note the earlier time).

The Zoom link will be sent out today and on Thursday morning to everyone in the mailing list. If you do not receive it or want to be included, feel free to reach out to me at egarciamolina@uchicago.edu.

Here is the abstract Dr. Bestock gave for her talk:

Taking the notion of a line as a motif, this talk will introduce recent excavation and survey at the Sudanese site of Uronarti as a means of looking at, and blurring, boundaries both past and present. Uronarti, a fortress at the southern frontier of Egypt in the early 2nd millennium BC, was the location of a stela in which the king Senwosret III claimed to have established his border against the craven and vile Nubians to his south. Yet not only do we know Nubians were encouraged to cross this boundary, we also find that behind the supposedly stark political divide the project of drawing a line between people of different ethnicities is an impossible task. Perhaps no clearer indication of this comes from lines of architecture: strictly planned rectilinear mudbrick construction is typically regarded as “Egyptian” and round dry stone construction as “Nubian”. Where do we draw the line at Uronarti when we find an extramural settlement with dry stone round huts and 100% “Egyptian” pottery? The question of lines and the limits of thinking them absolute is no less relevant in the modern era; while Uronarti lies in modern Sudan, well south of the current border, its regional landscape was effectively re-colonized by Egypt in the mid-20th century by the construction of the Aswan High Dam and the attendant displacement of local populations. Finally, this talk will ask how the lines of archaeologists – be they physical lines of a trench or transect, or notional disciplinary lines – impose rather than reflect order. The work of the Uronarti Regional Archaeological Project to develop a universal tablet based recording system has given us a chance to examine our own methodology and ask what archaeologists have in common and what not; to discover, often to our amusement, where our own lines lie.