The current scholarly terminology for the incomplete hieroglyphs phenomenon of the late Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period needs an update. The “incomplete hieroglyphs system” focuses solely on the modification of the signs. The practical element must be acknowledged …
The fifteenth-century Buddhist monk and paṇḍita Vanaratna lived a remarkable life that unfolded across the length and breadth of South Asia and crossed the Himalayan range. As a teacher, author, and pilgrim, Vanaratna traveled through and lived among many of the diverse Buddhist…
This paper examines how Greek Christian authors engaged with the topics of poverty and wealth during the second and third centuries CE - a period of major transition for the Christian Church. Beginning with the latest documents in the Greek New Testament (c. 90 - 120), this stud…
In the plays of Plautus, enslaved characters joke and make witty remarks about brutality so frequently that it may be called a hallmark of Plautus’ comedy. Through re-readings of scenes from select Plautine plays, I ask what humor about brutality can tell us about non-elite pers…
The aim of this project is to present an updated critical edition of the hexaplaric fragments for the book of Genesis. The reconstruction, nevertheless, will not be presented in its columnar order, which Origen originally organized. This reconstruction will follow the project fo…
Don’t Get Me Started About the Water analyzes the food in the dinner of Juvenal’s fifth satire from the perspective of Roman foodways in the first and second centuries. This analysis provides a surprising conclusion: although the guest and host are served dishes differing vastly…
This paper aims to highlight the different forms of writing within the Americas, establish connections between the systems, and discuss the impact of European colonization. Writing systems within the American Continents contain a vast array of different indigenous systems that f…
At its height, the Achaemenid Persian Empire (550–330 BCE) stretched from Egypt and the Balkans to Central Asia and the Indus. How was this continental empire able to endure at such scale for over two centuries? This dissertation provides an answer to this question through the a…
In the final extant letter of his Epistulae Morales, Seneca the Younger attributes the human good to the work of cura, “care” or “concern,” before abruptly discussing how humans, unique among animals, have access to future time. This dissertation argues that Seneca’s distinctive…
In this dissertation, I argue that Tacitus used humor as an important rhetorical strategy in his historical works. Well-known features of Tacitus’ style, including variatio, weighted alternatives, and appendix sentences, can create and are used to create humor. I employ a combin…
This dissertation seeks to answer the question of whether the Byzantine (Byz) text type has a significant role to play for improving the text of the Acts of the Apostles as found in standard editions of the Greek New Testament (GNT) by means of textual criticism (TC). If evidenc…
This thesis addresses the deities of domestic Roman religion, i.e. the lares, penates, and genii, and how references to these deities in Latin literature evolved during the first century CE. I chart how domestic religion became discursive as a consequence of Augustan religious r…
This dissertation examines the early Buddhist attitude toward anger (G kros̱a, OIA krodha) through the lens of an unpublished verse text, hereafter referred to as the *Kros̱a-gas̱a, from a newly discovered collection of Buddhist texts in the Gāndhārī language and Kharoṣṭhī script. …
This dissertation examines the 2nd Millennium BC pottery from Çadır Höyük, a multi-period archaeological site in Yozgat, Turkey. The research shows that a painted ceramic tradition existed contemporaneously with the expected North Central Anatolian ceramic tradition (Hittite War…
This project is a comprehensive study of a Syriac legal text of the late seventh century CE of the literary heritage of the Church of the East. The text is known as Īšō‘-boḵt Corpus Juris (ICJ) after its author. In this regard, this dissertation consists of two main parts: 1) a …
The goddesses in the Hypostyle Hall in Karnak reflect specific patterns of iconographic meaning that are illuminated via the use of statistics.
The Homeric poems have a keenness of observation for nature: they describe wildlife with attention to the subtle gestures of animal behavior, emotions in terms of physiology, and battle wounds with a level of detail that reveals an interest in human internal anatomy. The next ge…
Digital Humanities has grown in popularity in ancient studies such as Egyptology in the past decades, and has contributed to the overall study of the past, particular in regards to material culture. Previous study of individual objects, such as the cippus studied here, have reli…
This study examines a well-established idea in normative Egyptological discourse, that there exists in the inventory of Egyptian symbolism a distinct and unique symbol called sed-em-ra ('tail-in-mouth') in Egyptian, though usually referred to today by the Greek term ouroboros ('…