A conventional view of the pre-Indo-European West is that it belongs to linguists and cranks. The first shot across the boughs is that it's a double-hyphenated area of study. The second is the overwhelming fact that the evidence is so fragmentary that any claim made about it amounts to a Rorschach test. Meanwhile, there's the half-true assumption that the only people motivated to go back this far are pushed by some agenda, from proving Odin's indigeneity to supplying Atlantis

Genesis dedicates just five verses to Nimrod. In a book which gives several chapters to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Nimrod gets a paragraph. He is the son of Cush, a "mighty one on the earth," a hunter of some distinction, the ruler of a string of Mesopotamian cities, and then the narrative moves on without so much as a backward glance. This is unusual. Biblical minimalism usually means that either figure is unimportant, or the figure is so important that the tradition cannot q

A dying man quotes a psalm in the vernacular. Everything follows from that. There is a moment in the Passion narratives that has always disturbed commentators more than they tend to admit. From the cross, according to both Matthew and Mark, Jesus cries out: Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani? “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The Church Fathers wrestled with it. Hilary of Poitiers, in De Trinitate, noted that some took the cry as proof that Christ had been deserted and redu

He could diagnose thinning but not see clearly what might be taking shape in the shadow of that thinning, because doing so would have required him to admit that liberalism was one historical formation among others, subject to exhaustion like any other. What comes next is not, in the first instance, a philosophical problem in his sense. It is practical, liturgical and reproductive. It concerns the communities that build worldviews in people, well or badly, while the old admini

Identities endure not because they are ancient, nor because they are invented. They endure because they make the future cheaper. Everything else—origin stories, bloodlines, myths of awakening—is post-hoc decoration. Consider the Greeks, who manage the extraordinary feat of being Greek for centuries before thinking to mention it. Homer's warriors know nothing of fighting for Hellas or invoking "the Greek people" in their interminable speeches about honor and inheritance. In th

Orthodoxy is usually encountered in full dress. You know the drill: there’s domes 'afloat,' mosaics 'suspended between heaven and earth,' and (over)confident hierarchies. Seen from this angle, survival appears almost tautological; a system so ceremonially complete, so intellectually self-assured, and so visibly intertwined with power has endurance in its DNA. History, however, has a habit of stripping costumes. Byzantium did not survive as an empire; it survived empire. And

I t would be an error to treat the Christian story as merely the gradual sedimentation of various Greek philosophies narrowing and...

I t is impossible to understand the actions of the martyrs––though Roman reactions to Christianity were fluid and erratic––without...

T he fate of parties engaged in the intersectarian fighting that marked much the late Second Temple period was often decided by levels of...

B y the early second century AD gentile forms of Christianity began to dominate sources. Exactly how this transition occurred is...

N arratives concerning the journey from Christ to Nicene Christianity tend to fall into two camps with one implying that its...

‘A love-hate relationship.’ [1] Spyros Troianos on Christians and Jews ‘This Jew would be dear to my heart were it not for his abominable...

C5th Vergilius Romanus, Folio 101 recto, Biblioteca Apostolica, Cod. Vat. lat. 3867. The conventional view of late antiquity is that...

Recently I enjoyed talking about Byzantine Thessaloniki at the Hellenic Centre, Marylebone, London, at an event held by the Macedonian...

SLAVIC BRAKES (3.1) The first half of the ninth century saw Croats and other polities emerge. A group named Narentines were particularly...

REMILITARISATION OF ITALY (2.1) Italian society had not contributed large amounts of manpower to the Roman military since the mid-third...

St Theodore’s Column, Venice, Sydney Vacher (1919) AIM: This paper is split into four parts and seeks to address the source scarcity that...

During the Reformation Protestants accused Catholics of harbouring ideas that were less Christian than Greco-Roman i.e. pagan. It was a...

“To go to Rome Is much trouble and little profit. The King whom you seek there Unless you take Him with you, you will not find.” – An...

I spent 2021’s Indian Summer (Sept–Oct) in Rome documenting the city’s Byzantine churches. My appetite had been whetted by days 5–7 of...