Chapter 2 begins with an overview of existing definitions of art and connects these definitions with philosophical ideas about the fundamental nature of reality – including the arts – in the form of ontologies or worldviews. It analyzes the properties of those ontologies in the context of the visual arts and concludes with the introduction of process ontology (readers who don’t like philosophy and definitions might wish to skip this chapter, or read it later once they have come to think that philosophy and definitions are not uninteresting after all).

In the Wicked Tenants parable, a landowner plants a vineyard, a symbol of Israel, and lets it out to tenants who resort to violence when the landowner sends first servants and then his own son to report on how the vineyard is faring. Underlying the parable is the hostile, violent behavior of Joseph’s brothers when their father, Jacob, sent Joseph to bring back a report on them.

Toward the end of the Iron I, the vast majority of the many rural villages excavated in the highlands were abandoned. At the same time, a handful of settlements began to grow into fortified towns. Why did these dramatic changes take place at this time, and what is the relationship between these two phenomena? The chapter reviews the evidence and evaluates the various possible explanations for such widespread abandonments, including climate change, nomadization, incentives to move to other regions, forced resettlement, death, and security (external threats), and concludes that the first phase of this abandonment could have only been a result of an external threat (the second phase of the abandonment will be discussed in subsequent chapters, and especially Excursus 12.1). The chapter then identifies the threat with the Philistines, analyzes the nature of Philistine–Israelite interaction, and assesses the impact of the Philistine pressure on social complexity in the highlands and the emergence of leaders there. This is also the phase in which the first Iron Age fortifications appear in the highlands. Taken together, these changes signify the emergence of the Israelite monarchy toward the end of the Iron Age I and the transition into the Iron II.

The evidence from Transjordan reveals a pattern: Most areas in the Transjordan experienced a wave of abandonment at around the middle of the tenth century BCE, whereas some regions flourished. The common denominator of the former is that it includes territories associated with Ammon and Moab, whereas the latter pattern is typical of regions that the Bible describes as Israelite. It appears that as Israel expanded, some groups opposed it and were defeated, suffering the consequences. Other groups, perhaps of similar backgrounds, joined Israel and adopted its identity (e.g., in the Gilead); subsequently, they flourished. Israelite expansion can therefore explain the changing pattern in Transjordan, even if not all the areas that suffered abandonment were actually conquered by Israel. It is likely that Israelite aggression resulted in a wave of abandonment beyond the area of actual Israelite control.

This chapter collates the archaeological evidence presented in Part II. It begins with a reassessment of the evidence put forward to refute the historical plausibility of the United Monarchy, showing that it did not stand the test of time and that in the long run, the challenges raised failed to shake the kingdom’s foundations. The chapter then moves on to integrate the archaeological evidence into a coherent picture of the United Monarchy’s establishment, expansion, and solidification. Finally, it reviews the theoretical underpinning of the discussion, arguing that much of the debate was based on a red herring, leading to an evaluation of the United Monarchy in comparison to well-established empires such as Assyria and Rome, rather than short-lived empires, which is further developed in Chapter 14.

This article examines the relationship between the late antique and medieval Dyothelete Chalcedonian community of the Middle East–commonly referred to as the Melkites or Rum–and surveys the evidence for the use of Syriac by these communities. Because Melkites have more commonly been associated with the use of Greek and Arabic, an argument is made that a number of factors–among them the Monothelete/Dyothelete split in the Middle Eastern Dyothelete church, liturgical Byzantinization, and the destruction of manuscripts–have distorted more recent understandings of the relationship of this church with the Syriac language and obscured the reality that a number of medieval Melkites used Syriac for Christian purposes.

This chapter charts soldiers’ journeys across the Western Front. Drawing on the concept of ‘place attachment’, it explains how men developed an emotional relationship with Belgium and France. Beginning with their arrival by boat, it narrates their experiences in ports, bases, and camps and from there through the countryside and towns to the frontlines. It follows this journey, investigating the processes by which English infantrymen explored and were exposed to the war zone. This allowed them to internalise and reconceptualise Belgium and France. Subtle psychological processes allowed men to familiarise the sights, sounds, and scents that they encountered. These were both conscious and unconscious products of both purposeful action and unconscious psychological mechanisms. Repeated exposure habituated soldiers to the sights, sounds, and scents that confronted them, even in the frontlines. Elsewhere, men made use of language to craft new narratives and to normalise the violence and death that surrounded them. They developed very personal relationships with landscapes, spaces, and places. The Western Front became the locus of important life experiences and memories and was littered with graves that represented personal and collective loss. The landscapes of Belgium and France became a metaphysical space as their features were increasingly associated with ideas of duty, German barbarity, and sacrifice.

This topic comprises Themes #3 and #4, whose central thrusts are, respectively, cheap military successes and paths to the same larger political end using civilian approaches – i.e., winning without major fighting (at least in a classic military sense). Although it does not capture the sum total of Sun Tzu’s Theme #3 thinking, a core part of that thinking focuses on extremes of both benefits and costs – reaping the former and avoiding the latter.

Post-First World War intellectual relief failed; violence against intellectuals and sites of learning proved to be a reality of modern warfare, as demonstrated by attacks on universities in the Spanish Civil War and the Sino-Japanese War, and the flight of intellectuals both within and from Europe after 1933. The symbolically rebuilt library at Louvain was destroyed again in 1940 during the Second World War. Meanwhile, the rise of totalitarianism showed that intellectuals were not bulwarks of democracy as post-war rhetoric had implied. The epilogue shows how post-First World War intellectual relief influenced the rescue of intellectuals fleeing Nazi persecution as well as the way in intellectual life was rebuilt following the Second World War, notably through the establishment of UNESCO. The reconstruction of intellectual life after the Great War continues to resonate in the twenty-first century.

The book opens with an exploration of the cultural violence of the First World War and sets this in wider historical and historiographical contexts. It explores three key themes which inform the monograph: cultural destruction, humanitarianism, and the role of the intellectual. While none of these themes began with the First World War, the conflict transformed them in significant ways. Cultural destruction was a key component in how the First World War was presented to belligerent and neutral populations and intellectual sites were particularly important in this process of cultural mobilization. The introduction argues that because cultural destruction was crucial to popular understandings of the war, its opposite, cultural and intellectual reconstruction, would in turn be an important part of the process of post-war stabilization.

This essay examines W.G. Sebald’s relationship to the region of his birth, the Allgäu and explores its significance for his literary work. In his stories, he refers several times to his region of origin, to places and memories there, making his Allgäu past on the one hand a point of repulsion and on the other a reservoir of themes and images from which he draws for his prose. In this way, his “Heimat” (homeland) becomes literarily charged in a way that makes Sebald’s literary writings both fascinating and revelatory in terms of their poetics.

The nature of the cosmos and its maintenance are central issues in Mesoamerican philosophy. The correlative metaphysical systems of Mesoamerica, with their focus on interdependence, transformation, and continual creation, rely on particular views about the nature of the world and its operation that are covered in this chapter. The chapter covers the development of key concepts connected to creation and change, as well as the particular ways these are developed in creation stories across Mesoamerica. Creation stories serve an important purpose in Mesoamerican thought. They should not be thought of as only myth grounding the overall tradition and system, but also as discussions of the nature of being, change, and continual creation.

Comparisons between low- and high-flux PDR conditions are discussed in relation to the Horsehead Nebula and the Orion Bar. Contrasting observations of selected species between the PDR margin and the inner dark cloud allow chemical modellers to test formation and destruction reaction networks against quite closely constrained physical conditions. The anomalous abundance of CH3CN is considered here in the Horsehead context in the presence of other nitrile COMs observed, as are comparisons of sulphur chemistry in the low- and high-flux cases and the latest ideas on the ISM sulphur reservoir.

Cebes’ challenge leads to what is typically called Socrates’ four “immortality arguments,” which structure the core of the dialogue. Despite this common label, Cebes’ challenge does not ask Socrates to show that the soul is immortal, and Socrates’ first three arguments do not claim to show immortality. Instead, Cebes challenges Socrates to address people’s fear that the soul disperses and so is destroyed when someone dies; not being destroyed upon death is, I argue, different from being immortal. After discussing Cebes’ challenge, the chapter turns to the cyclical argument, providing a new account of its basic structure. It is based on an agreement that does not require Socrates to say anything here about the nature of the soul. Nonetheless, the argument is important for aiming to show that a Pythagorean view is correct – reincarnation – by understanding death and rebirth as part of a much larger phenomenon: the coming to be and passing away of opposite things.

Trakl was the master of transfiguration and poetic enigma. His poetry uses a very specific number of colours (black, purple, blue), strikingly simple rhyme and – at times obstinate – repetition to unmatched effects. The expressive quality of his poetry never amounts to dogmatic expressionism but relates, and reflects, the deeper qualities of introspection. It tries to identify the very roots of expression in the troubled human existence. His poetry originated in feelings of guilt (often connected with the biographical fact that he had induced his sister to the misuse of drugs) and utter desolation. We have seen already that to him the self-destruction of occidental culture was a certainty years before the outbreak of World War One. This chapter discusses whether it can be argued that Trakl’s poetry reflects, to a certain extent, an anticipation of the horrors that became manifest and unbearable to him already in the very first weeks of this European tragedy with disastrous global implications.

This chapter situates the work of the German writer W. G. Sebald within Foucault’s paradigm of biopolitical war, which is torn between a concern with State racism and a concern with extinction. Sebald’s work is often considered in relation to World War II and the Holocaust, in other words, in relation to State racism. The chapter seeks to shift this frame of reference toward the Cold War and the reality of Mutually Assured Destruction, which are important concerns in Sebald’s oeuvre as well. This invites us to consider Sebald as an author engaged not only with State racism but also with what Foucault calls “the atomic situation.” Specifically, the chapter considers the use of lists in Sebald’s work not only as a memorial effort in response to the destruction of World War II but also as an effort to record all of life in anticipation of its disappearance. Finally, it shows that such a use of the list exceeds Sebald’s fiction and can be found in a range of related contemporary fiction and theory. Today, in the Anthropocene, the biopolitical war exceeds the issue of State racism and includes that of extinction, human and otherwise – including the extinction of literature itself.

Chapter 4 shows how Pseudo-Hegesippus participates in the common ancient Mediterranean historiographical discourse of national decline. In De Excidio 5.2, the author juxtaposes five biblical figures (Moses, Aaron, David, Joshua, Elisha) of the Hebrew past to the first-century Jews of his narrative in a way that exposes the relative lack of virtue, faith, and strength among the “latter-day Jews.”