This collection employs a multi-disciplinary approach treating ancient childhood in a holistic manner according to diachronic, regional and thematic perspectives. This multi-disciplinary approach encompasses Classical Studies, Egyptology, ancient history and the broad spectrum of archaeology, including iconography and forensic science.
This collection employs a multi-disciplinary approach treating ancient childhood in a holistic manner according to diachronic, regional and thematic perspectives. This multi-disciplinary approach encompasses classical studies, Egyptology, ancient history and the broad spectrum of archaeology, including iconography and bioarchaeology.
With a chronological range of the Bronze Age to Byzantium and regional coverage of Egypt, Greece, and Italy this is the largest survey of childhood yet undertaken for the ancient world. Within this chronological and regional framework both the social construction of childhood and the childs life experience are explored through the key topics of the definition of childhood, daily life, religion and ritual, death, and the information provided by bioarchaeology. No other volume to date provides such a comprehensive, systematic and cross-cultural study of childhood in the ancient Mediterranean world. In particular, its focus on the identification of society-specific definitions of childhood and the incorporation of the bioarchaeological perspective makes this work a unique and innovative study.
Children in Antiquity
provides an invaluable and unrivalled resource for anyone working on all aspects of the lives and deaths of children in the ancient Mediterranean world.
Introduction: investigating the ancient Mediterranean childscape PART
I: What is a child?
1. The ancient Egyptian conception of children and
childhood
2. What is a child in Aegean prehistory?
3. Ideological
constructions of childhood in Bronze and Early Iron Age Italy: personhood
between marginality and social inclusion
4. Defi ning childhood and youth: a
regional approach to Archaic and Classical Greece: the case of Athens and
Sparta
5. The child in Etruscan Italy
6. Children and the Hellenistic period
7. Roman childhood revisited
8. From birth to rebirth: perceptions of
childhood in Greco-Roman Egypt
9. Looking for children in Late Antiquity
10.
From village to monastery: fi nding children in the Coptic record from Egypt
PART II: Daily life
11. The childs experience of daily life in ancient Egypt
12. Changing states: daily life of children in Mycenaean and Early Iron Age
Greece
13. Children in early Rome and Latium
14. Being a child in Archaic and
Classical Greece
15. The daily life of Etruscan babies and children
16. Being
a child in the Hellenistic world: a subject out of proportion?
17. Different
lives: childrens daily experiences in the Roman world
18. Children as
instruments of policy in Hadrians Egypt
19. Daily life of children in Late
Antiquity: play, work and vulnerability PART III: Religion and ritual
20.
Child in the nest: children in Pharaonic Egyptian religion and rituals
21.
Children and Aegean Bronze Age religion
22. Initiating children into Italian
Bronze and Early Iron Age ritual, religion and cosmology
23. Children in
Archaic and Classical Greek religion: active and passive ritual agency
24.
Children in Etruscan religion and ritual
25. Childrens roles in Hellenistic
religion
26. Children in Roman religion and ritual
27. Children, religion and
ritual in Greco-Roman Egypt
28. The child in Late Antique religion and ritual
PART IV: Death
29. Child, infant and foetal burials in the Egyptian
archaeological record: exploring cultural capacities from the Predynastic to
Middle Kingdom Periods (c. 44001650 BC)
30. Do not say I am young to be
taken : children and death in ancient Egypt: Second Intermediate Period to
the Late Period
31. Children and death in Bronze Age and Early Iron Age
Greece
32. Children, death and society in Late Bronze Age and Iron Age Sicily
33. Children and death in Archaic and Classical Greece
34. Infancy and
childhood in funerary contexts of Early Iron Age Middle Tyrrhenian Italy: a
comparative approach
35. Child death in the Hellenistic world
36. Death of a
Roman child
37. Death of a child: demographic and preparation trends of
juvenile burials in the Graeco-Roman Fayoum
38. Infant mortality, Michael
Psellos and the Byzantine demon Gillo PART V: Bioarchaeology
39. The
bioarchaeology of children in Greco-Roman antiquity
40. Infancy and childhood
in Roman Egypt: bioarchaeological perspectives
41. The greatest of
treasures: advances in the bioarchaeology of Byzantine children
Lesley A. Beaumont is Associate Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Sydney. Her many publications on children in classical antiquity include Childhood in Ancient Athens: Iconography and Social History (Routledge 2012). She co-organised the 2015 international conference on "Children in Antiquity" at the University of Sydney and co-curated the accompanying Nicholson Museum exhibition.
Matthew Dillon is Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of New England, Armidale, Australia. He has written extensively on Greek religion and society.
Nicola Harrington is an Egyptologist and Honorary Research Associate of the University of Sydney. She received her DPhil from the University of Oxford, and her doctoral thesis formed the basis of the monograph Living with the Dead: Ancestor Worship and Mortuary Cult in Ancient Egypt (2012). Her research interests include religion, childhood, and mental illness in antiquity.
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