This is a statistical analysis of seasonal variation in the frequency of document issuance by the Byzantine imperial chancery. The general purpose of such an investigation is to quantify and analyze the work cycle of the imperial office in order to further our understanding of the realities of Byzantine administrative practices. The specific aim is to determine the seasonal factor in the activity of the imperial chancery, and to suggest some explanations for why the chancery tended to issue more documents in some months rather than others.

Despite the massive amount of scholarly literature on Iconoclasm and its aftermath, there are really only two major publications that deal specifically and synthetically with ninth-century art. One of these is André Grabar’s magisterial L’iconoclasme byzantin, a chronological analysis of monuments and texts; the other is Robin Cormack’s short but insightful essay in Iconoclasm, the collection of papers originally presented at Birmingham in 1975, which asks ‘whether the discussion of religious images stimulated by Iconoclasm changed the nature of Byzantine Art’. My aim is rather different. Rather than presenting an encyclopedic overview, this article attempts to crawl into the fabric of Byzantine culture: to see and understand Byzantine art of the ninth century as the Byzantines saw and understood it. It follows that the material presented has not been segregated into the familiar (and often useful) categories of style, iconography, and context, for, to the Byzantines, the three were neither exclusive nor separable. For similar reasons, I have deemphasized any linear progression that might imposed with art historical hindsight on the distant past, and have thereby underplayed the flashes of innovation, novelty and erudition that such detachment allows. These sparks are probably more visible (and certainly more appealing) to twentieth-century art historians than they were to the ninth-century Byzantines, for whom, as we shall see, the power of tradition militated against individual creativity, and artists on the whole remained anonymous artisans. In my attempt to look at Byzantine art from the inside rather than from the outside I have, in other words, concentrated on the fluid interface between objects, and the shifting dialogue between objects and context. This is because what interests me here is how Byzantine ideas about art (their theories), Byzantine perception (how the Byzantines saw), and the artifacts themselves (the practice) come together in the ninth century: how art, that preeminent social construct, worked in the years after Iconoclasm.

Sexuality is a term used to describe the conception of sexual being, a characteristic unique to humankind and, like any other concept, a product of culture. It is aspects of this cultural construct that I shall attempt to examine here. I shall focus on the conception of sexuality of one Byzantine individual, as this can be reconstructed from his voluminous writings: St. Neophytos the Recluse, the late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Saint of Cyprus. A holy man may seem a peculiar subject for an inquiry into conceptions of sexuality. But focussing on Neophytos has the advantage of offering us the rare opportunity, in terms of Byzantine sources, of examining the thought-patterns of a Byzantine man from close quarters, and concerning a subject as important, as intimate and as elusive as sexuality. For even though sexuality was as universal an experience as in any other culture, very few Byzantines discussed it in writing and even fewer in a manner as personal, as direct and as extensive as Neophytos the Recluse did. Why Neophytos discussed sexuality in his writings more extensively than other Byzantines is an interesting question, and one to which we shall return at the end of this paper.

By the early 1870s railway construction in Turkey, both Asiatic and European, was no longer a pioneering project. The Sublime Porte had already granted four concessions to British companies for railway lines in Asia Minor and in the Balkans. For more than one reason railways seemed to be a first class choice for raising the public revenue. They would open large areas to exploitation and would reinforce central government control over remote districts of the Empire. Naturally tax collection was expected to increase and cover a part of the country’s deficit. On the other hand, foreign capitalists and investors appeared to be willing to finance such enterprises, since faster transport in Turkey meant easier access to Ottoman sources of production and expansion of the distribution network. However, regardless of the long term economic benefits, railways were also a revolutionary innovation in the traditional rural economy and society of the Empire, both as a construction project and as a mode of transport.

Even the most desired reforms often become soured by doubt and hostile reaction. Since D(imotiki) replaced K(atharevousa) as the ‘official’ language of Greece after the fall of the Colonels’ dictatorship, public unease at the ‘state of the language’ has been marked.

Medieval Greek writers of biography and encomium, like their ancient models, conventionally began by extolling their subject’s (birth, kin, ancestry) and (native land or city) as the two basic co-ordinates of a social existence, which both conferred an honourable start in life, and gained glory from a life honourably lived. This was not just a rhetorical convention.

Between 1880 and 1910, Greeks constituted one of the largest foreign ethnic communities in Ethiopia and as such they played an important role in the modernization efforts of Emperor Menilik II (1889–1913). During his reign, Ethiopia’s modern economic development had its rudimentary beginnings when, with the participation of resident foreigners, he embarked on an ambitious, although haphazard program to raise his country’s material standards. The Italian defeat at Adua in 1896 not only secured Ethiopian independence, but the absence of a single colonial ruler enabled Menilik to seek among various foreign groups the skills and resources necessary for economic development which were then lacking among the indigenous population. Greek participation in construction, internal and external commerce, and in petty retailing contributed to the foundation of Ethiopia’s economic growth in the twentieth century.

The story of the conversion to Byzantine Christianity of Prince Vladimir of Kiev and of many of his subjects has, in the accounts of most modern historians, conformed more or less to the following pattern. In the summer of 987 the rebellious general Bardas Phocas, master of most of Asia Minor, proclaimed himself emperor, and marched on Constantinople. The legitimate emperor, Basil II, was in a desperate position. Some time during that same summer he sent an embassy to Kiev with an urgent request for help. By the terms of a treaty they had concluded with the Empire in 971, the Russians were bound to give the Byzantines military assistance in case of need. Vladimir sent him a contingent of six thousand Varangian soldiers. This expeditionary force, which arrived on Byzantine territory in the spring of 988, saved Basil II, who defeated his rival in the battles of Chrysopolis and Abydos. The second of these battles was fought on 13 April, 989.

The establishment of the Supreme Council of Judicious Ordinances, itself a product of modern Ottoman reform begun by Mahmud II (1808–39), added to the establishment of a new framework for an increasingly centralised concept of ‘Beneficient Re-Orderings’ (tanzimat-i hayriye) in the Ottoman Empire. Created on 27 Zilhicce 1253 (24 March 1838) as part of Mahmud’s strategy to dismantle the Grand Vizirate and shift the locus of power closer to himself, the Meclis-i Vala-yi Ahkam-i Adliye consequently figured prominently also in the famous Hatt-i şerif (imperial decree) of Gülhane of 3 November 1839, by which date the Tanzimat are usually understood to have begun ‘officially’.

Ürgüp is today an important tourist centre, since most visitors to the Byzantine churches and monasteries of Cappadocia use the town as a base for their excursions. Before the First World War the majority of its population were Orthodox Christians, many of whom enjoyed a high degree of prosperity. A large proportion of these were Turcophones, and the number of them who read karamanlidika (Turkish written in Greek characters) was substantial, to judge by the list of 232 citizens of the town who subscribed to a book printed in karamanlidika at Athens in 1876. There are a number of gravestones with inscriptions in karamanlidika at the municipal museum of Ürgüp.

Thanks to the work of Stylianos Alexiou, the Escorial version of Digenes Akrites (hereafter ‘E’) has taken its rightful place as part of the heroic poetry of medieval Christendom. Even if the claim for E’s priority over the Grottaferrata version (G) does not meet with universal acceptance, E is at least in the field as an alternative. There are, perhaps, three main types of argument against the priority of G. The first is that the linguistic idiom betrays a second-order, solecistic ‘translation’ of a work in a less learned language; the second is that E has preserved proper names, military terms and so on which derive from the Eastern borders and which have been lost in G. Both of these have been expounded by Alexiou in some detail. A third type of argument might concentrate on what we may call the ethos of the E version as distinct from that of G, and one small detail of this is the subject of this note.

When I think of G. Thomson one question which immediately springs to mind is: why was he, and why is he still, so popular in Greece, a country he visited only four or five times? Was it his scholarly work, his Marxist beliefs or his emphasis on the continuity of Greek culture that bestowed on him respect and acclaim among Greeks? It seems to me that it was a combination of all these three factors which resulted in the fact that Thomson is one of the few classical scholars whose major studies have been translated into Greek and enjoyed wide publicity. He is now considered in Greece not only an exception among classicists but an exception among those who have studied the historical development of Greek culture and vehemently stressed its continuity. Despite the fact that his views were largely ignored during the debate of the 1960s and early 70s concerning the question of continuity, and which centred around Byzantium, Thomson’s views on the subject must seriously be taken into account.

A computer is a machine which can receive, store, manipulate and yield up information. The use of computers can be traced back to C.1812 when Charles Babbage conceived his first main idea for automatic computation, but it is clear that development has been rapid and widespread especially in the last 20 years. Computers were originally developed for performing numerical calculations. However, although most forms of information can be translated into numbers, it is important to realise that computing today is no longer confined to numerical work. One of the most interesting and significant developments of the use of computers to research and teaching in the humanities is the growing body of material which has been put into machine-readable form. For example, censuses, parish registers, wills and accounts have been input to a computer, increasingly in the form of a structured database.