A Unique Drachm Coin of Shapur I

The Sasanian king Shapur I held a ten year series of campaigns against the Roman Empire. Returning to Iran after these campaigns, in order to immortalize his victories he built a series of reliefs and gave broad information in his famous work, Ka’be-ye Zardosht. However, the term he used to define himself in these articles, “King of Kings of Iranians and non-Iranians,” was not used on coins, which has become a subject of discussion. This work aims to clarify such arguments based on a unique drachm belonging to Shapur I which is present in the Elazig Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography.     

A Late Bronze Age Ship from Liman Tepe with Reference to the Late Bronze Age Ships from İZMIR / Bademgediği Tepesi and Kos / Seraglio

In this article, a Mycenaean pottery sherd from Liman Tepe is discussed. The piece, which was locally produced, probably belongs to a ring‐based crater (FS 281). Comparisons with other, similar sherds suggest that warriors aboard a ship are depicted. As one of the few examples of its period decorated in this way, the sherd has been dated to the early or middle phase of LH III C, belonging to the period after the collapse of the Hittite Empire in Anatolia and the Mycenaean kingdoms in mainland Greece. The depictions on this sherd are highly significant, as they contribute to the corpus of evidence for migrations from the western to the eastern Mediterranean and the unrest which characterized the period.     

Confronting a history of war loss in a Spanish family archive

The article discusses how relatives of left-wing Republicans killed and buried in mass graves by Francoist groups during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) recompose the stories of violent death of their ancestors in connection to documentary evidence that emerges during the search for their human remains. Mass grave searches have taken place in the midst of a process of historical investigation that has brought families, historians, activists and archaeologists together in order to document and seek official recognition for these extrajudicial executions. In so doing, they have also prompted the circulation of personal papers and official Francoist files that bear poignant information about the victims. Both sets of documents converge in the family archive, eliciting different re-readings and acts of memory. The article considers how familial interactions with these material sources attempt to grasp and recreate a history of loss marked by rupture and filled with absences. It also explores how such historical and familial uncertainties marks the experience of disappearance in the Spanish context.     

“If in Truth You are Odysseus” – Distrust and Persuasion in the Odyssey†

When Odysseus decides in the course of the Odyssey finally to reveal his true identity to a few chosen characters, he regularly meets with deep scepticism. The depth of this distrust is to no small degree owed to the unusually long duration of Odysseus’ absence and the concomitant loss of familiarity. With the typical skill of a versatile narrator, Homer subtly brings out the nature of the psychological gap in each case and shows the means by which it can eventually be overcome. The paper addresses the salient points and main characteristics of the relevant recognition scenes and ends by suggesting an explanation for the feature that some of Odysseus’ interlocutors tend to suppress his name for some time while others do not.     

FUTURE BY HISTORY: RETHINKING PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Philosophy of history has a threefold dimension: material, formal, and functional, which have largely been conceptualized as mutually exclusive. It is high time to mediate them into a coherent relationship, and Rohbeck's book is a decisive step toward such a new philosophy of history. The book is divided into three parts: the first deals with the relationship between history and the future, the second analyzes the relationship between history and ethics, and the third synthesizes these two aspects into a pragmatics of history. With regard to the first part, historical thinking is based on a perception of temporal otherness related to the past. Rohbeck prolongs the time perspective by bridging this time gap into the future. As to the second, Rohbeck replaces teleology by ethics. Teleology includes ethics but limits its scope to a one‐sided development. Ethics allows many more options. Finally, who is the agent for historical ethics? Rohbeck proposes the “generation” as the basic actor in historical change and the addressee of ethical commitment. At the end of his work, Rohbeck draws consequences for the idea of philosophy of history from his idea of historical ethics. He shows that history has a new perspective if it is viewed through the lens of ethical elements in the fundamental relationship between past, present, and future. Of course, many questions follow this fascinating new version of the old philosophy of history. I raise only three of them: (1) What synthesizes the three dimensions of time into one and the same history? (2) Did we not learn from historicism that values in ethics have an inbuilt temporality? This argument does not run against the idea of an ethics of history, but should sharpen its genuine historical character. (3) Who is the agent of this change: who brings it about and at the same is subjected to it? An anonymous sum of generations in space and time is not a convincing answer. We need an integrative idea that covers the vast field of experience of the human world in space and time and that covers the strong commitment to universal values. In this respect it would be worthwhile to pick up the idea of humankind as it was conceptualized as the red thread of history in traditional, modern philosophy of history.     

Coping with famine in Communist China (1949–62)

Several studies of Mao's Great Famine based on archival material have appeared over the past few years. This article is less focused on the famine than on how existing responses to starvation were gradually eliminated in the years before the launch of the Great Leap Forward in 1958, as well as how covert acts of resistance offered some hope to villagers during Mao's Great Famine from 1958 to 1962. China, after all, was a country well attuned to famine, and coping mechanisms existed at all levels of society, starting from a variety of survival strategies adopted by the villagers themselves and reaching all the way to international interventions by organisations like the Famine Relief Commission. Few of these were left intact in the wake of the Communist conquest in 1949, as is seen in the first part of this article. On the other hand, villagers were quick to learn how to lie, charm, hide, steal, cheat, pilfer, forage, smuggle, trick, manipulate or otherwise outwit the state. During the Great Leap Forward, these covert means of resistance were often the population's only hope for survival in many parts of the country reeling under the impact of famine, as seen in part two.     

Contested Understandings in the Global Garment Industry after Rana Plaza

This Introduction synthesizes the key themes of this special cluster of articles and explores the implications of the three contributions on garment supply chains after the Rana Plaza disaster. The three articles examine the perspectives of key stakeholders in garment value chains — global buyers, managers of garment factories in Bangladesh, and workers at these factories — and analyses their responses to the new governance initiatives that emerged in the aftermath of Rana Plaza. Placing the contrasting perspectives of these stakeholders alongside each other starkly reveals how their different positions within hierarchically organized global value chains form the particular lens through which they view post-Rana Plaza initiatives. This special cluster scrutinizes the particular understandings of these stakeholders and reveals the very different capacity for voice and influence that they bring to bear in shaping outcomes. It reflects on the contradictory imperatives faced by actors in the garment industry caught between a logic of competition on the one hand and global labour standards norms on the other. The Introduction concludes by examining the prospects for a re-embedding of the market in global value chains via the activation of civil society.     

Tropes of fear and the crisis of the west: Trumpism as a discourse of post-territorial coloniality*

We examine ‘Trumpism’ as a contemporary form of colonial domination, showing how this discourse represents both a crisis of coloniality and a stimulus for a movement of ‘decoloniality’. A critical discourse analysis is applied to seven speeches delivered by Donald Trump between his announcement of his presidential candidacy in June 2015 and his inauguration in January 2017. In assessing Trump's arguments, we focus mainly on those concerning national security, illegal immigration, and the threats posed by various foreign countries. Although these arguments sit within a long colonial tradition, they also indicate a crisis of modernity, as witnessed in the growing challenges to colonial masculinity, nationalism, and rationality. We conclude that Trumpism articulates a reaction to these challenges, and that Trump's rise to power is a symptom of the crisis of post-territorial coloniality in contemporary global society.