A Youth Organization in the Roman Empire
In Roman Egypt, 14-year-old boys were enrolled in a youth organization in order to learn to be good citizens.
REVIEW: Ancient Lives – New Discoveries at the British Museum
This is a review of the Ancient Lives: New Discoveries exhibit at the British Museum until November 30th, 2014.
Family matters, Economy, culture and biology: fertility and its constraints in Roman Italy
However, the theory concerning fertility behaviour during the Late Roman Republic that has been put forward by Brunt depends largely on such viewpoints as have become controversial in the discipline of demography. Rather than purely economic and rational in scope, decision making processes – such as those concerning marriage and procreation – are embedded in specific cultural and social settings that affect outcomes through the creation or upholding of practical, structural, normative or perceived constraints.
Hierarchy of Women within Elite Families. Iconographic Data from the Old Kingdom
When the hierarchy of women is concerned, the range of data is limited, since women were virtually excluded from the bureaucracy, and the number of their own tombs is relatively low. In spite of this, over recent decades the studies focusing on women have been steadily increasing our knowledge on the position and roles of women in the Egyptian society of the Old Kingdom
Mesolithic Childhoods: Changing Life-Courses of Young Hunter-Fishers in the Stone Age of Southern Scandinavia
The children seem to have started to engage in the adult world by the age of seven or eight, and by the age of around fourteen years, their graves are inseparable from those of the adults.
Hail the Conquering Gods: Ritual Sacrifice of Children in Inca Society
The focus of this paper is to evaluate the Capacocha (also referred to as capac hucha) or child sacrifices in Inca society.
The Divine Power of Childhood in Ancient Mesoamerica
I will explore the role of children in the spiritual life of the ancient cultures of Mesoamerica, first briefly summarizing what is currently known about the experience of childhood in these cultures, and then exploring the spiritual authority of childhood as a privileged stage of life.
Birth prevention before the era of modern contraception
It is generally agreed that the Gynaecology of Soranus is the most rational medical treatise on birth control in the classical literature.
Play and childhood in ancient Greece
Play, childhood and physical education have formed an inseparable union throughout history, and Greece is no exception. Classical authors provided ample documentation on how children played, making it possible to identify analogies in play over the centuries.
Did Ancient Romans Love Their Children? Infanticide in Ancient Rome
This paper will focus on infants that were abandoned in the first centuries B.C. and A.D. in ancient Rome with a practice known as infanticide, also called exposure. It occurred often in the ancient world and there were many reasons why it happened. Parents endangered their children in this way because they loved their children, the ones they raised as well as the ones they exposed.