Chronoi
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Herausgegeben von:
Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum
Chronoi. Zeit, Zeitempfinden, Zeitordnungen – Time, Time Awareness, Time Management ist eine akademische Buchreihe, die Forschungsergebnisse publiziert, die aus der Arbeit des Einstein Center Chronoi hervorgegangen sind. Das Einstein Center Chronoi wurde gegründet, um Zeit und verwandte Aspekte wie Zeitbewusstsein, Zeitmanagement, Zeitwahrnehmung und Zeitlichkeit in interdisziplinärer und transdisziplinärer Weise zu untersuchen.
The discovery of the 'Code of Hammurapi' in 1902 sparked widespread discussion in Imperial Germany and attracted considerable attention beyond the academic sphere. For conservative Christian and Jewish theologians, the discovery of the Old Babylonian law appeared to challenge the authenticity of biblical law. Other scholars were enthusiastic: historians identified allegedly striking similarities between the Old Babylonian king from the eighteenth century BC and highly esteemed German rulers such as Frederick II of Prussia and Kaiser Frederick William I. Legal scholars praised the supposed rule of law in ancient Babylonia, thereby drawing a direct line to the modern German “Rechtsstaat.” Such comparisons did not arise from a lack of historical reflection; contemporaries were, of course, aware of the historical, social, and cultural differences. However, as this book argues, the temporal entanglement between ancient Babylonia and modern Germany was prompted by specific political, legal, and religious issues that seemed to be similar in both worlds. This was one of the reasons why Hammurapi became a historical reference figure in various ideological branches in Imperial Germany, including nationalism, racism, and antisemitism.
The Middle Ages witnessed a shift in thinking about the way God is related to time. For most of the earlier Middle Ages, scholars had followed an earlier patristic tradition of describing God as eternal and thus as timeless or outside of time. In the early thirteenth century, however, members of the Franciscan order, who played a significant role in the development of the recently-founded universities, re-defined God’s relationship to time in terms of his everlastingness. On their account, God is infinite in temporal duration, rather than simply ’timeless’, since he has no beginning and no end. So construed, God encompasses and is able to relate to every moment in time in a way that the Franciscans believed was not possible on the eternalist account. This book will discuss some of the factors that contributed to their shift in thinking about God as everlasting instead of eternal. Among these, the book will identity a transition in defining the basic nature of God as either simple (for proponents of eternity) or infinite (for proponents of everlastingness) as well as the Franciscan adoption of the metaphysics of the eleventh-century Islamic philosopher, Avicenna.
What did ancient Mesopotamian, Greek, and Roman scholars know about the cyclicity of astronomical phenomena, how did they conceptualize cyclicity, and which other phenomena did they consider to be cyclical? This study explores astronomical, astrological, and other scholarly sources, including previously ignored ones, in order to answer these questions. Particular attention is paid to the role of planetary cycles and questions of cross-cultural knowledge transfer. A new account is given of how knowledge of cyclicity, its conceptualization, and its use in predictive practices developed in Babylonia and the Greco-Roman world from the first millennium BCE until Late Antiquity. It is argued that the predictive turn in Babylonian astronomy and astrology led to a new understanding of how astronomical and earthly phenomena are interconnected through time and space. The emergence of horoscopic astrology led to the question of whether human existence is determined by cycles. Even the universe as a whole is governed by cycles according to Plato and later Greco-Roman scholars.
This book offers the first comprehensive presentation and analysis of the innovative theory of time advanced by early modern French scholar, Denis Pétau.
Denis Pétau (1583–1652) was the model of an early modern erudite. Proudly Catholic, the Jesuit scholar was a keen participant in the scientific and religious debates of his time. In the 1620s and 30s, he made major contributions to the burgeoning literature on scientific chronology respond-ing especially to the work of Joseph Scaliger. As part of this effort, Pétau developed a fascinating theory of time and history. Societies inevitably exist in a temporal frame and therefore develop communal practices of timekeeping. For this, they adapt cosmic time to the needs and purposes of human societies. They create calendars and arrange their historical records in chronological form. This is a scientific task but, since time is ultimately sacred reality, its study has always been assigned to priests. Pétau therefore sees science and religion as intimately connected, progress-ing jointly through history and culminating in his own time.
The book will be of interest to philosophers of time, and historians of early modern science, reli-gion, and theology.
Wie entsteht Geschichtsschreibung? Die Studie untersucht die Anfänge hethitischer Historiographie und analysiert, wie Erinnerungen in kulturelles Gedächtnis übergehen. Im Mittelpunkt stehen Berichte zu den frühen hethitischen Königen, besonders der sogenannte Zalpa-Text, und einem bisher in diesem Kontext noch wenig bekannten König Ḫuzzija. Jörg Klinger liefert damit eine fundierte Analyse zur Entstehung historiographischer Traditionen im hethitischen Kontext.
Textiles accompany us throughout our lives, au fil du temps, from the cradle to the grave. Aspects of time, seasons and chronology play an important role when exploring textiles and clothes in antiquity. The time of textiles appears highly gendered, embodied, tangible, and concrete. Textiles follow their own timeframes and paces, and they connect us to the past in an intimate and diachronic way because we still wear woven fabrics, as people did in antiquity.
Textiles themselves are ephemeral and rarely survive in archaeological contexts. But when they do, they can show evidence of a long life.
This book is about the time of textiles in ancient Greece: how time was articulated and conceived via clothing and textile production and how clothes conveyed time, seasons, ages, lifetimes and chronological periods. Textiles moreover symbolized eternity and destiny, as the spinning goddesses of fate called Moirai by the ancient Greeks. These goddesses spin, measure and cut the thread of a person's life.
The book invites university students in history, archaeology and classics, as well as interested readers, craft communities and Humanities scholars to reflect on diverse dimensions of time in ancient Greece through the study of textiles and clothes.
This book aims to study the perception of crises in Hittite Anatolia (1650–1180 BCE) from different perspectives: the one of the Hittites, the one of the neighboring polities, and ours as historians. Two concepts will be discussed in the introduction of the book: crisis and (a)synchronicity. The book has the goal to show – considering the written sources available from the Hittite kingdom – that in some cases, the perception of a crisis is asynchronic even in the same temporal frame. Regarding our perspective as historian, asynchronicity is at work since the temporal frame are far apart, yet if we rely on and correctly interpret the sources available to us, it becomes clear that we might perceive a crisis in Hittite Anatolia more synchronically than expected. Finally, even the perception of the Hittites can be both asynchronic and synchronic, since it is possible that they misinterpreted the signs of an actual crisis and perceived it only after the crisis took place or even after it ended. The book will consider four case-studies that are considered key moments in Hittite history. The final goal is to re-define crises in Hittite Anatolia considering the multi-temporality of the (a)synchronic perception of crises.
This collective volume explores societal crises in Hellenistic Egypt, focussing regionally on the Thebaid, from small-scale insurgencies to full-fledged secession. As a result of an international conference held at the Freie Universität Berlin (May 2-4, 2019), the presented case studies ask how actors – and modern scholars – of Ptolemaic Egypt shape and frame times of crisis and what traces remain thereof in the record.
As decisive moments in time, crises reveal fundamental features of societies and structure the flow of events into historically meaningful, yet potentially teleological, trajectories. In Ptolemaic historiography, from Polybius till today, the Great Theban Revolt (206–186 BCE) served as such a turning point, demarcating rise and decline. By confronting the historiographic record with independent – and yet partially unexploited – sources, such as temple epigraphy, Demotic (literary) texts, archaeological, numismatic and private documentation, the reunited studies aim at diversifying the perspectives on and in societal conflicts in Ptolemaic Egypt, in order to gain a fuller and more nuanced picture of how various actors, kings, queens, officials, and priests coped with times of crisis.
Obwohl es „die Zeit" nicht gibt, ordnet sich doch alles, was wir erleben, zeitlich. Auch die großen Schlagworte unserer Tage betreffen allesamt von zeitlichen Herausforderungen: Nachhaltigkeit, Resilienz, Transformation, Zeitenwende.
Dieses Buch handelt davon, was Zeitliches ausmacht, warum sich die Wirklichkeit zeitlich ordnet und was das mit der wechselseitigen Taktung von Ereignissen und Autonomieerfahrungen zu tun hat. Es werden Missverständnisse aufgelöst, indem aufgezeigt wird, inwiefern es „die Zeit" nicht gibt, es oftmals sogar leidvolle bis hin zu pathologischen Konsequenzen mit sich bringt, wenn Zeit als Gegenstand oder Ressource betrachtet wird. Es ist ein Buch über den Vergleich von Abläufen und darüber, was es bedeutet, wenn Ereignisse miteinander im Takt sind, und wie sie durch Wiederholung und Variation Bedeutung gewinnen und damit „intakt" wirken.
Musik und vor allem das Hören dienen als Modelle, um diese allgemeinen zeitlichen Struktureigenschaften der Wirklichkeit begrifflich anklingen zu lassen. Darüber hinaus regen Hyperlinks zu konkreten Hörbeispielen dazu an, sich direkt auch auf besondere Erfahrungen von Zeit einzulassen. – Ein Buch für all diejenigen, die Grundlegendes über Zeit nicht nur lesen wollen, sondern sich im Idealfall auch für einen taktvollen Umgang mit Zeit motivieren lassen möchten.
Die im Band besprochenen Hörbeispiele können Sie der folgenden Playlist entnehmen: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLl3KYcmP425_xCx0eqWj-E696QqcKDKqK.
How can time become festive? How do festivals manage to make time ‘special’, to mark out a certain day or days, to distinguish them from ‘normal’, everyday time, and to fill them with meaning? And how can we reconstruct what festive time looked like in the past and what people thought about it?
While a lot of research has been done on festivals from the point of view of several scholarly disciplines, the specific temporality of festivals has not yet attracted sufficient attention. In this volume, scholars from different fields provide answers to the questions raised above, based on a fresh analysis of astronomical documents, calendars, and literary texts. Cultures as diverse as ancient Babylon, Greece and Rome, and medieval China all share a sense of calendrically recurring festive time as something special that needs to be carefully mapped out and preserved, often with great sophistication, and that gives us precious insights into the broader religious, political, and social dimensions of time within past cultures.
Die verschiedenen fachwissenschaftlichen Gesprächsgänge über Zeit-Konzepte, Zeit-Vorstellungen und Zeit-Empfindungen werden normalerweise eher getrennt geführt. Historiographische Einsichten und naturwissenschaftliche Theoriebildungen werden selten ins Gespräch gebracht. Deswegen wurde in der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften aus Anlass des sechzigsten Geburtstags ihres Präsidenten versucht, diese unterschiedlichen Sichtweisen ins Gespräch zu bringen. Eine Altorientalistin und eine Sinologin, eine Neurologin und ein Quantenphysiker, eine Primatenforscherin und ein mediävistischer Germanist sprachen miteinander über Zeit in ihren verschiedenen Dimensionen; der Band vereint diese unterschiedlichen Gesprächsgänge, die von den Beteiligten nochmals gründlich durchgesehen wurden. In einem ausführlichen Schlusswort versucht der Geehrte, aus den drei Gesprächsgängen Ideen für die künftige Weiterarbeit am Thema „Zeit und Zeitempfinden" zu gewinnen und bindet dadurch die Zwiegespräche zu einer Einheit zusammen. Im Band sind auch zwei Grußworte dokumentiert, die ebenfalls eigene Einsichten zum Thema vortragen. Der schmale, aber gehaltvolle Band ist für alle die von Interesse, die an einem interdisziplinären Gespräch über Zeit auf der Basis von strenger Disziplinarität interessiert sind und sich an der unterhaltsamen Form des Gesprächs erfreuen.
How could ancient astronomers accurately calculate celestial phenomena on the scale of several centuries? The Table of Kings is a simple list of rulers with the duration of their reigns, which allowed Ptolemy, an Alexandrian astronomer, to have a count of the years that had passed since the Babylonian king Nabonassar (8th century BC). Initially used for astronomy, this table captivated historians and chronology specialists from Antiquity. Rediscovered in Europe in the modern era, it is a crucial source for establishing a chronology of the Ancient Near East. The Table of Kings has always been a living text, modified by generations of scribes, completed over the centuries, sometimes up to the fall of Constantinople. This document with multiple lives is often quoted but has been little studied for its own sake. Historians of the Near East and specialists in the history of texts and sciences will find in this volume the first critical edition of Ptolemy's Table of Kings based on all known manuscript witnesses, accompanied by an investigation of the history of this document from its elaboration by Ptolemy to its use by modern historians.
Comment les astronomes de l’Antiquité pouvaient-ils calculer avec précision des phénomènes célestes à l’échelle de plusieurs siècles? La Table des rois est une simple liste de souverains avec la durée de leurs règnes, qui permettait à Ptolémée, astronome alexandrin, de disposer d’un comput des années écoulées depuis le roi babylonien Nabonassar (VIIIe siècle av. J.-C.). D’abord mise au service de l’astronomie, cette table a captivé historiens et spécialistes de chronologie dès l’Antiquité. Redécouverte en Europe à l’Époque moderne, elle est une source cruciale pour l’établissement d’une chronologie du Proche-Orient ancien. La Table des rois a toujours été un texte vivant, modifié par des générations de copistes, complété au cours des siècles parfois jusqu’à la chute de Constantinople. Ce document aux multiples vies est souvent cité mais a été peu étudié pour lui-même. Historiens du Proche-Orient et spécialistes de l’histoire des textes et des sciences trouveront dans ce volume la première édition critique de la Table des rois réalisée sur la base de tous les témoins manuscrits connus, accompagnée d’une enquête sur l’histoire de ce document depuis son élaboration par Ptolémée jusqu’à son utilisation par les historiens modernes.
La Table des rois de Ptolémée, astronome alexandrin du IIe siècle, présente une liste continue de souverains depuis l’Empire néo-assyrien jusqu’à l’Empire romain. Elle est une source cruciale pour notre approche chronologique du Proche-Orient ancien et du monde méditerranéen. Cette étude présente une description des témoins manuscrits grecs de la Table des rois, une nouvelle édition critique et une histoire du texte jusqu’à l’époque moderne.
The late Platonist philosopher Damascius both reassumed and rejuvenated the rich and long-established Greek thinking about time. In distinguishing between different perceptions of time, by Plato, Aristotle and his Neoplatonist predecessors, Damascius offered novel perspectives, which can be seen as anticipating modern and contemporary theories of time, such as McTaggart’s series and presentism. The greatest merit of his philosophy of time, however, is his deep reflection on what it is for a living being to have its being in becoming – as it happens with us human beings – and how this relates to stillness, temporality and temporalization. Time is interpreted by Damascius not merely as a concomitant of the celestial motions, nor as an abstract entity existing in the human soul, but as a power of ordering, which is active at different levels. Damascius’ time comprises the biological and the historical time but is also the time that pertains to the essence and the activity of heaven, in which there is neither past nor future. The present book explores the richness of Damascius’ thought by going into the fundamental concepts of his philosophy of time: the indivisible now and the present time, the flowing now and the non-flowing now, the flowing time and the whole of time, in which past, present and future coincide. Damascius fully developed his thoughts about time in his treatise On Time, which is lost. The preserved fragments of this treatise are translated and annotated in an Appendix.
Can time exist independently of consciousness? In antiquity this question was often framed as an enquiry into the relationship of time and soul. Aristotle cautiously suggested that time could not exist without a soul that is counting it. This proposal was controversially debated among his commentators. The present book offers an account of this debate beginning from Aristotle’s own statement of the problem in Book IV of the Physics. Subsequent chapters discuss Aristotle’s Peripatetic followers, Boethus of Sidon and Alexander of Aphrodisias; his Neoplatonic readers, Plotinus and Simplicius; and early Christian authors, Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine. At the centre of the debate stood the relation between the subjective time in the soul and the objective time of the cosmos. Both could be seen as united in the world soul as the seat of subjective time on a cosmic scale. But no solution to the problem was final. No theory gained general acceptance. The book shows the fascinating variety and plurality of ideas about time and soul throughout antiquity. Throughout antiquity, the problem of time and soul remained as intriguing as it proved intractable.
A thematic exploration of different concepts of time is a significant yet overlooked aspect of apocalyptic literature. The purpose of this collection of essays is to demonstrate the varied ways in which time is portrayed in Rabbinic and Christian texts pertaining to the end of the world. The essays in this volume, which are based on the proceedings of a workshop held in May 2021 at the Einstein Center Chronoi in Berlin, provide individual studies centered on lesser-known texts such as the rabbinic Midrash on the Song of Songs, the apocryphal apocalypses of Thomas and of John the Theologian, as well as political-historical apocalyptic texts composed as a reaction to the emergence of Islam. Furthermore, the volume provides systematic overviews on theological responses to political eschatology and the history of research on apocalyptic time. Scholars and students of the history of religions will discover valuable insights in this volume, shedding light on a crucial feature of apocalyptic imagination.
Die zeitliche Dimension von Kulturgeschichte wurde lange Zeit durch die Schilderungen der Bibel, ergänzt um die Darstellung klassischer Autoren bestimmt. Mit dem frühneuzeitlichen Aufkommen der Naturwissenschaften bildete sich allmählich ein alternatives Paradigma heraus, das religiöse Gewissheiten in Frage stellte und geistige und geistliche Autoritäten herausforderte. Im Rahmen dieser weltanschaulichen Auseinandersetzung erhofften sich beide Seiten Unterstützung durch die Erkenntnisse der sich zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts ausbildenden Altertumswissenschaften. Ihre Vertreter waren sowohl durch die Verfahren des kritischen Quellenstudiums geprägt wie auch durch die Anwendung naturwissenschaftlicher Untersuchungsmethoden.
Dabei verlief die Entwicklung von einer „biblischen Chronologie" hin zu naturwissenschaftlich und durch historische Belege gesicherten Geschichtsschreibung keineswegs linear und einseitig. Gerade aufgrund der doppelten Prägung früher Altertumswissenschaftler durch religiöse Weltbilder und die Schulung in (natur-)wissenschaftlichem Denken, entstanden immer neue Vorstellungen und Konzepte über das Alter menschlicher Kultur.
Der Band setzt sich in mehreren wissenschaftshistorischen Fallstudien mit diesen Entwicklungen auseinander.
The book presents the author's latest research on ancient perceptions of time; it centres on medical discussions, especially of the doctor-philosopher Galen, while also contextualizing his work within Graeco-Roman evidence and discussions – archaeological, medical, technological, philosophical, literary – more broadly. The focus is on questions of medical or experiential significance: life cycles, disease cycles, daily regimes for mind and body, clinical assessment, including the vital area of diagnosis through the pulse, technologies of time measurement. But the philosophical background is also examined: questions of the nature and definition of time and its relationship to space and motion. Galen offers original contributions in all these areas, at the same time as shedding important light on both contemporary attitudes and previous discussions.
The book thus offers an accessible and vivid overview of key issues in ancient time perception and awareness, while also offering the first in-depth exploration of the insights that the Galenic texts add to this picture.
Five thematic chapters – Time Measurement, Year and Life Cycles, Biography, Medical Cycles – consider a wide range of evidence and of recent scholarship, while highlighting the contribution of medical texts.
