Anna Kotłowska, "Zwierzęta w kulturze literackiej Bizantyńczyków" ["Animals in Byzantine literary culture"] – "᾽Αναβλέψατε εἰς τα πετεινὰ...", Wydawnictwo UAM, Poznań 2013, pp. 262 (original) (raw)
Related papers
In: H. Baron / F. Daim (eds), A Most Pleasant Scene and an Inexhaustible Resource. Steps Towards a Byzantine Environmental History. Byzanz zwischen Orient und Okzident 6 (Mainz 2017) 171-198., 2017
In Byzantine Studies, the exploration of human-animal relationships is a topic of minor interest. This applies to the archaeological branch as well as those branches that deal with written and pictorial sources. In the case of the written sources, this is largely due to the fact that animals do not feature much in them: they were perceived as common components of everyday life that did not require mentioning. Archaeology, however, being actually rich in relics of human-animal relationships, did not perceive animal bones as cultural artefacts for a long time and thus did not see the informational value of their analysis. Even though now this perception is widely regarded as outdated, little is known about the potential of human-animal studies beyond those circles primarily targeting these issues. An environmental history of the Byzantine Empire, however, is unthinkable without the consideration of human ac- tivities associated with animals. Large parts of the Byzantine population were engaged in professions that dealt with animals; most of all, of course, animal husbandry and agriculture, but also many processing occupations. Animals were led into the landscape (pasturing livestock), animals were taken out of nature (fishery), and people cohabited more or less harmoniously with animals (like dogs, rats, and mice). The objective of this contribution is to raise awareness of the role of animals in the living environment of the Byzantines. Focusing on 1) domestic livestock, 2) sh, and 3) other wild creatures, this role, as well as the question of how the environment shaped human-animal relationships is investigated. Hence, regional forms of animal husbandry, fishery and the wild fauna are considered. Another important question is whether these activities led to interdependencies between man, creature and environment, which can be detected in overexploitation or adaptation strategies (for instance the colonisation of cities by animals and strategies to keep vermin at bay). The exploration of these issues includes archaeological, as well as written and pictorial sources in order to show how different sources can contribute to a common research question. In the end, some perspectives for an interdisciplinary approach to a Byzantine environmental history are sketched, with regard to method as well as content.
Byzantine Parades of Infamy through an Animal Lens
History Workshop Journal
In this article, I discuss humiliation parades as described by eleventh-century Byzantine historians, focusing on the role of mules and donkeys in them. More specifically, I examine how the presence of these equids could change the meaning of a scene in the works of Michael Attaleiates, John Skylitzes, and Michael Psellos. I argue that, as the social and religious connotations of mules and donkeys interacted with the social and religious status of their riders, humiliation could turn to humility and emasculation to masculinity, transforming the animals themselves into carriers of political rhetoric. When reading these scenes we need to consider whether our rider is a man or a woman, a cleric or a layman, a general or scholar, but also what kind of equid they are riding and how that might be juxtaposed with other animals in the text. In addition to emphasizing the role of animals in Byzantine political life, I consider the animals’ own experience of these parades, attempting to recon...
2017
The horse was the most important and the most valuable animal of Byzantine society for its extensive use in daily life and in battle. Although the warhorse has received considerable attention from historians, their interest has concentrated particularly on the military aspect of the horse, at the expense of non-military subjects such as horse breeds, stables and horse management. Despite the absence of scholarly works devoted to the history of horse breeding in Byzantium, archaeological studies along with historical documents from various contexts do in fact offer rich information. Intending to serve as a departure point, the present paper combines such textual and archaeological evidence in order to investigate the nature and the significance of horse breeding in the Middle Byzantine period. Focusing on the example of Cappadocian magnates of the tenth and eleventh centuries CE, who presumably bred horses in their monumental mansions, this study ultimately intends to demonstrate how the study of horses and horse breeding can contribute to the social and economic history of the Middle Byzantine period.
Wild Animals in the Byzantine Park
Byzantine Garden Culture, Washington DC Dumbarton …, 2002
In early autumn of 1996, before the true gravity of his heart condition had been publicly revealed, Boris Yeltsin entertained a visiting head of state at a country retreat sixty miles north of Moscow. According to the New York Times, on this occasion Yeltsin shot forty ducks and a wild boar weighing more than 440 pounds. Later, he and his guest, Prime Minister Helmut Kohl of Germany, along with their respective entourages, feasted on the spoils of their hunt in the halls of the rural estate. 1 In another notice three years earlier, the New York Times reported on the death of Pablo Escobar, drug lord of the Medellín cartel. The article included a description of Escobar's 7,000-acre ranch in the mountains of Colombia: "he landscaped it with artificial lakes and imported hundreds of exotic animals, including giraffes, camels, bison, llamas, a kangaroo and cockatoos." 2 These two recent notices suggest that little has changed when it comes to the interests and pursuits of royal, or quasi-royal, personages. In this essay I investigate the types of preserve evoked in these modern accounts-the game park and the animal park or menagerie-in the Byzantine period. While our evidence for the former, Byzantine game parks, is scattered and that for the latter meager indeed, the popularity of animal preserves among Byzantium's neighbors and contemporaries makes us wonder whether Byzantium was really as uninterested as the scarcity of Byzantine sources on the subject might suggest. A closer look at the evidence is therefore in order. The material assembled here is limited for convenience to the middle Byzantine period and divided into three sections: game parks, menageries, and animal parks. This is still a preliminary study, however, and it should be stressed that the distinctions made here, if not downright anachronistic, were surely less clear-cut in the Byzantine period under review.
Slavs and Dogs: Depiction of Slavs in Central European Sources From the 10th-11th Centuries
Over the past few years there has been an increasing interest in the animal world in the humanities. This attention has been directed towards several aspects: economical, legal, cultural, symbolical. Some medieval literary genres ?such as bestiaries and hagiography? devoted particular attention to animals and their symbolism, although in different levels. This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of the relationship between the depiction of animals and the construction of identities in Central European sources from the 10th to 11th centuries. Our interest focuses on a selection of chronics, passions of martyrs and lives of saints related to the Christianization of Central Europe and the characterization of Slavs as dogs, with the goal of contextualizing those textual references and explaining the use of such image.
H. Kroll, Animals in the Byzantine Empire - An Overview of the Archaeozoological Evidence. Full text
Archeologia medievale XXXIX, 2012, 93-121., 2013
The present study reviews the current archaeozoological state of knowledge for the Era of the Byzantine Empire. By analysing how animal husbandry, hunting, fowling, and fishery find expression in the faunal materials, new insights into the diet of this era can be gained. Most of the faunal materials originate from the Early Byzantine Period (395-642). To isolate the factors that determine the composition of the faunal materials, the area of research was split into seven regions, which were first examined separately. Meat diet in the Byzantine Empire was based on livestock husbandry, and for the choice of which animals were to be kept their respective secondary products were crucial. The composition of the main domestic livestock in the different areas demonstrates that the transition from the Roman to the Early Byzantine Era took place without any major shifts in the animal husbandry patterns. The economic focuses were maintained with minor amendments particularly in the utilisation of the less important species. The Byzantines tackled famine and shortages by an increased exploitation of natural resources, as can be evidenced by punctually high shares of game, fish or wild fowl, which were shot, trapped, or fished in close vicinity of sites.