Facilitating Interaction: Board Games as Social Lubricants in the Ancient Near East

This re‐evaluation of existing data on board games from the Near Eastern Bronze Age demonstrates their function as social lubricants in cross‐cultural interaction. Board games are situated theoretically as liminoid practices, which lie outside the bounds of normative social behaviour and allow for interaction across social boundaries. Utilizing double‐sided game boards, with an indigenous game on one side and a newly introduced game on the other, the games of senet, mehen and twenty squares provide evidence for social interactions. Cypriots had adopted Egyptian mehen and senet by the third millennium BC, and indigenized the games. This lies in contrast to the game of twenty squares, which had a particular role among elites in the Late Bronze Age interaction sphere. This anthropological discussion of evidence relating to gaming seeks to inspire further research on the role of board games in society.     

'The Golden Hunger Years': Music and Superpower Rivalry in Occupied Berlin

This article investigates the evolution of American and Sovietarts policy in Berlin between 1945 and 1947, with special attentionto the role of music. Music's political ambiguity, and its receptionas at once a uniquely German and international form of artisticexpression, made it an ideal medium through which Allied militaryofficials could project their country's aesthetic ideals andprogrammes for German cultural reform. If Berliners and theirSoviet occupiers largely agreed upon the importance of élitemusical tradition as an expression of national accomplishmentand the mark of a cultured society, American authorities tendedto treat music more as an entertaining, but non-essential diversion.Under the city' quadripartite military administration, it wasdifficult for any one occupation authority to pursue culturalobjectives that were aesthetically or politically more restrictivethan the others. Thus, superpower rivalry initially createdmore opportunities than limitations for Berlin artists. Americanofficers were compelled to consent to more lenient denazificationstandards for musicians than they had initially intended, whilethe Soviets permitted and even encouraged modernist musicalexperiments in their sector of occupation. In competition witheach other and seeking the loyalties of their German charges,the Allies encouraged Berlin to become a lively—and heavilysubsidized—city of the arts.