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The Priestly story of Jacob at Bethel in Gen. 35.9–15 is commonly interpreted as a Priestly delegitimization of the pre-Priestly Jacob/Bethel story in Gen. 28.10–22*. This interpretation has arisen largely from the different ways in which the texts conceptualize the maqôm and maṣṣēbôt, with the Priestly text supposedly desacralizing the standing stone and turning the 'place' into merely a location of remembrance, not the dwelling of the deity. This article challenges this assumption, especially addressing the similarities between the Priestly conceptions of Bethel and the redactional 'vow narrative' in Gen. 28.20–22*. It then relates the redaction-critical findings with the historical situation at sixth-century Bethel, which seems to have been the main cultic site in Yehud during the Neo-Babylonian and early Persian periods. On the basis of this analysis, the article concludes with the suggestion that Bethel be taken more seriously as a possible compositional context of P. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Establishing plausible causal associations between the impact of climate and/or environment and past human societies presents many challenges, as the case of the decline of the S. Arabian kingdom of Himyar in the sixth century CE indicates. Evidence from a new high-resolution stalagmite record for the last 2,600 years shows that a period of drought in the early sixth century, hardly mentioned in the sources, was of unusual duration and severity. We argue that, while this likely contributed to undermine the sociopolitical resilience of Himyar and thus contributed to the societal changes in the region from the 520s to the late sixth/early seventh century, identifying the exact causal relationships involved is fraught with difficulty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of women exercising power and influence appears to be central, if not fundamental, to gender studies, as it allows an in-depth reflection on both societal norms and the way we perceive them today. The historian’s vision has been biased for a long time by a dichotomic consideration of society, with a clear gendered partition where women would have been confined to the private, domestic sphere. Their actions were thus perceived as inconsequential at best, invisible at worst, for they were perpetually limited to private quarters and familial intimacy, while men’s authority and actions supposedly influenced the public sphere and politics in a larger measure. It would be a mistake, however, to keep considering that politics and familial intimacy should be studied separately. The palace environment in particular proves to be especially favorable to women’s authority, for they often benefit from a specific access to the sovereign that even major dignitaries can be deprived of, seeing as they are generally not received privately by the ruling dynasty. Studying women’s quarters thus brings to light a mosaic of interdependent relationships, of intercessors, factional processes, and intricate political networks. Although women can be, and often are, limited in some specific ways, such as their physical presence within the public space, they can still achieve political relevance and play a key role within the palace hierarchy and court mechanics. In other words, women are not only instrumental in displaying royal authority but can, at times, fully embody it without specifically causing a break with tradition. Merovingian private quarters in particular offer a very meaningful example, in that they are a reflection of the Merovingian matrimonial practice—polygyny. By multiplying the female pole within the palatial structure, power and authority come into play, taking various shapes and influencing many areas of the political and private life of the sovereign.

This viewpoint is meant as a contribution to debate over the nature and significance of the 'Justinianic Plague', which struck Western Eurasia between the sixth and eighth centuries ce , and the methodological challenges posed by attempting to reconcile historical evidence with that derived from the realm of the Natural Sciences. In recent years, major advances have been made in our genetic understanding of the Justinianic Plague. Yet growing scientific interest in the disease has coincided with a concerted effort amongst some historians to seek to downplay its historical importance. This article surveys our current state of historical and scientific understanding with respect to the sixth-century pandemic, responds to the recent attempts to argue that the disease had only a minimal impact on the societies that it struck, and considers how historians should respond to the burgeoning scientific evidence in order to take study of the plague forward. For co-operation between geneticists, environmental scientists, archaeologists and historians, it argues, offers the chance to transform our understanding of how, when and where the plague spread and to assess its impact across the Afro-Eurasian world as a whole, and not just on the Mediterranean, for which we have our best written sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sixth century is the Seljuk period from exciting times to different centuries in Iran. This study analyzes the causes and factors of changes in the style of poetry and its content and themes and changes the sponsors of poetry and finding poetry among the common people Mysticism and Sufism have dealt with the needs of the troubled society of that century. In this study, due to the tendency of the monasteries towards the monasteries in the sixth century and the lack of attention of the Seljuk kings to the poets, there was a lack of introspection of the poet and interesting mystical agreements in his view and attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The objective of this article is to place the study of urban protest and violence in the period from about 300 to about 600 CE in a broader perspective and to subject the investigation of plebeian activism to the basic precepts of analysis of collective action developed by social scientists and historians studying other periods. Its main argument is that, contrary to wide held assumptions in the historiography, what characterized Late Antiquity was not simply the exacerbation of violence or its tighter control, but the crisis of aristocratic hegemony and the expansion of opportunities for popular intervention in city life. What has been perceived as the product fanaticism, irrationality and deprivation of the masses, of the manipulation of bishops and aristocrats or of the failure of the mechanisms of coercion was actually the result of a dramatic social change that, on the one hand, involved a new dynamic of power and, on the other, a shift in the way the people understood their role and power in local communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses twenty-six Latin and Greek letters dating to the fifth and sixth centuries CE, written under the name of empresses and queens and originating from the later Roman Empire, Ostrogothic Italy and Merovingian Gaul. Where these letters have received attention, scholars have usually approached them with the intention of analysing a single letter’s content for evidence of a specific woman’s biography. This article studies them as a corpus instead. Comparing them with the male letters most of them travelled with and using insights from linguistic research on gender-specific language in antiquity, the article argues that probably none of the letters expressed an individual woman's ‘authentic voice’. Written by the equivalent of modern speech-writers trained in adopting a female register, they are testimony to political strategies common to the late Roman and post-Roman world that used the female voice to publicly perform sentiments that male rulership on its own could not. They are therefore evidence for wider late antique trends towards male and female co-regency visible also in art and ceremony of the period. These female letters are a specific late antique art form, which nonetheless holds truths for all scholars of female writing in antiquity and the early Middle Ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]