Just a brief announcement that I will be defending my dissertation on 16 December, more here and here. The examiners at a PhD defense are in Denmark (and in Sweden and Norway as well, I think) called “opponents” which gives certain connotations to boxing matches or the like. We’ll see how it goes… Troels Myrup […]
Category archives: Thesis Rant
A Break
The “Byzantine Esplanade” at Caesarea Maritima, Israel, discussed in one of the articles below. Photo: TMK, June 2009. Things have been slow on this blog, not only recently, but for a while. This will not change in the near future (although posts may randomly appear), due to a little thing called Dissertation. Instead, I will […]
Oxford Seminar
If you find yourself in Oxford in early March, here’s your chance to hear something of what I’ve been doing lately (instead of blogging, that is…): The Roman Discussion Forum Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford Week 7, 04 March 2009 Troels Myrup Kristensen (Aarhus) “Archaeology of Response: Christian destruction of sculpture in Late Antiquity”
Sculpture in the Roman Near East
The Sphinx’s Nose
The Sphinx at Giza, Egypt. Photo: TMK, May 2007. I have previously written about the ever present problem of dating the destruction and mutilation of monuments. Naturally, this is a big concern to me when writing a dissertation on Christian iconoclasm in Late Antiquity. I found a further, useful reminder of this at Giza in […]
Breaking the Forma Aedificii Gatesensis
To state that almost all extant Roman sculpture is fragmented in one way or another is fairly banal. To answer why, when and how it was broken is anything but. Differentiating between the many different ways that fragmentation of sculpture occurs has been one of the main challenges of my thesis work. There are several […]
A Mutilated Aphrodite in Istanbul
I have previously mentioned the mutilated statue group of the Three Graces, now in the Antalya Museum, that is going to form part of the core argument of my chapter 5 “Before the Fig Leaf: Body & Society in Late Roman Perge.” The statue group is only one of several statues from Perge’s South Baths […]
Thesis Status and Things to Come
As I’m about to leave Winnipeg (a place so cold that the bus stops have heating!), I thought it would be a good time for an update on my thesis work. I have just recently completed very advanced drafts of two chapters (2 and 4 – check the outline here). Chapter 2 deals with the […]
Scythopolis I: A Mutilated Statue of Venus
I have been looking for parallels to the mutilated sculptures at Perge, since they will be at the centre of a chapter on the body and society in late antiquity. One group of material comes from Scythopolis in modern Israel, where the excavations of the Eastern Bathhouse revealed a series of sculptures. I will be […]
The Erechtheion and the Process of Christianization
I have previously talked about the Parthenon and the possibility that its metopes were damaged by early Christians. Just this week Bill Caraher (thanks!) put me on to the work of Alexandra Lesk, whose PhD dissertation was on the Erechteion and its reception over 2500 years. I was, of course, especially happy to read her […]