George Maxim Anossov Hanfmann | |
---|---|
Born | November 1911 |
Died | 13 March 1986 74) | (aged
Alma mater | Harvard University |
Occupation | Classical archaeologist and art historian |
George Maxim Anossov Hanfmann (born November 1911, in St. Petersburg, Russia; died March 13, 1986, in Watertown, Massachusetts) was a famous archaeologist and scholar of ancient Mediterranean art. [1] [2]
He studied at the University of Jena under Ernst Buschor and Hans Diepolder, and then at the University of Berlin with Werner Jaeger, where he earned his first doctorate. He emigrated to the United States, becoming naturalized in 1940. Hanfmann became a student of David Moore Robinson, earning a second Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in 1935. During World War II he served in the Office of War Information in London as radio editor. He returned to Harvard and became a curator at the Fogg Art Museum. By 1956 he had progressed at Harvard from junior fellow to full professor. He was one of the first to be awarded the title University Professor, which is the position from which he retired shortly before his death. [Note: The title of University Professor was created in 1935 to honor individuals whose groundbreaking work crosses the boundaries of multiple disciplines, allowing them to pursue research at any of Harvard's Schools.] He established the Department of Ancient Art and trained students, including Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule III. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1953. [3] In 1958 he began excavations at ancient Sardis and continued there until 1976. [4] [5] He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1970. [6] In 1978 he received the Gold Medal from the Archaeological Institute of America. He retired from Harvard in 1982 after teaching his legendary course, "Greek Art & Culture," for the last time spring semester 1981–82. [7]
Sardis or Sardes was an ancient city at the location of modern Sart, near Salihli, in Turkey's Manisa Province. Sardis was the capital of the ancient kingdom of Lydia, an important city of the Persian Empire, the seat of a Seleucid satrap, the seat of a proconsul under the Roman Empire, and the metropolis of the province Lydia in later Roman and Byzantine times. It is mentioned in the New Testament. Its importance was due first to its military strength, secondly to it being situated on an important highway leading from the interior to the Aegean coast, and thirdly to its commanding the wide and fertile plain of the Hermus.
The Lydians were Anatolian people living in Lydia, a region in western Anatolia, who spoke the distinctive Lydian language, an Indo-European language of the Anatolian group.
Mount Spil, the ancient Mount Sipylus, is a mountain rich in legends and history in Manisa Province, Turkey, in what used to be the heartland of the Lydians and what is now Turkey's Aegean Region.
William Bell Dinsmoor Sr. was an American architectural historian of classical Greece and a Columbia University professor of art and archaeology.
Rhys Carpenter was an American classical art historian and professor at Bryn Mawr College.
Michael Weishan is perhaps most widely known as the host of the American public television series, The Victory Garden, a position he held from 2001 through 2007. He was the fourth host of the series, and retired after five seasons to resume active direction of his landscape design firm, Michael Weishan and Associates, which specializes in creating traditionally inspired landscapes for homes across the US and Canada.
The Harvard Art Museums are part of Harvard University and comprise three museums: the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, the Fogg Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum and four research centers: the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, the Harvard Art Museums Archives, and the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. The three museums that constitute the Harvard Art Museums were initially integrated into a single institution under the name Harvard University Art Museums in 1983. The word "University" was dropped from the institutional name in 2008.
Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule III was an American scholar of ancient art and curator of classical art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 1957 to 1996. He was also well known as a numismatist. He also used the pseudonyms Wentworth Bunsen, Isao Tsukinabe and Northwold Nuffler.
David Moore Robinson was an American Classical archaeologist credited with the discovery of the ancient city of Olynthus. While he was a prolific writer and advisor, he also has gained notoriety due to his plagiarism of one his students.
The Library of Celsus is an ancient Roman building in Ephesus, Anatolia, now part of Selçuk, Turkey. The building was commissioned in the 110s A.D. by a consul, Gaius Julius Aquila, as a funerary monument for his father, former proconsul of Asia Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus, and completed during the reign of Hadrian, sometime after Aquila's death. The library is considered an architectural marvel, and is one of the only remaining examples of a library from the Roman Empire. The Library of Celsus was the third-largest library in the Roman world behind only Alexandria and Pergamum, believed to have held around twelve thousand scrolls. Celsus is buried in a crypt beneath the library in a decorated marble sarcophagus. The interior measured roughly 180 square metres.
Sardis Synagogue is a synagogue located in Manisa Province, Turkey, and it is the biggest known synagogue that belongs to ancient world. Sardis was under numerous foreign rulers until its incorporation into the Roman Empire in 133 BCE. The city served then as the administrative center of the Roman province of Lydia. Sardis was reconstructed after the catastrophic AD 17 Lydia earthquake, and it enjoyed a long period of prosperity under the Roman rule.
Paul Joseph Sachs was an American investor, businessman and museum director. Sachs served as associate director of the Fogg Art Museum and as a partner in the financial firm Goldman Sachs. He is recognized for having developed one of the earliest museum studies courses in the United States.
Susan Irene Rotroff is an American classical archaeologist, classicist, and academic, specialising in the art, archaeology, and pottery of Ancient Greece. She was Jarvis Thurston and Mona Van Duyn Professor in the Humanities, at Washington University in St. Louis.
John Peter Oleson is a Canadian classical archaeologist and historian of ancient technology. His main interests are the Roman Near East, maritime archaeology, and ancient technology, especially hydraulic technology, water-lifting devices, and Roman concrete construction.
Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus, commonly known as Celsus, was an Ancient Greek Roman citizen who became a senator, and served as suffect consul as the colleague of Lucius Stertinius Avitus. Celsus Polemaeanus was a wealthy and popular citizen and benefactor of Ephesus, and was buried in a sarcophagus beneath the famous Library of Celsus, which was built as a mausoleum in his honor by his son Tiberius Julius Aquila Polemaeanus.
Alf Thomas Kraabel was an American classics scholar and educator who worked extensively in Greek and Hellenistic Judaic studies. He served as a faculty member in the classics department at the University of Minnesota from 1963 to 1983, and served as the Dean of Luther College in Iowa before retiring in 2000.
Crawford Hallock Greenewalt Jr. was an American classical archaeologist at the University of California, Berkeley who made contributions to the study of Lydia through his excavations at Sardis.
William Hepburn Buckler, FBA (1867–1952) was a French-born American classical scholar, archaeologist, diplomat and lawyer. He practised as a lawyer in Baltimore before serving in a number of diplomatic posts, which included service in London during the First World War and membership of the US delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. While a lawyer, Buckler had developed an interest in archaeology and classical scholarship. He was part of the US archaeological expedition (1910–14) to Sardis in modern-day Turkey and returned there in the 1920s to catalogue and decipher ancient inscriptions uncovered at the site – a project he remained involved with throughout the 1930s. He became an expert in the Lydian language and authored two monographs and three volumes of Monumenta Asiæ Minoris Antiqua. His scholarship was recognised with three honorary doctorates, a Festschrift and fellowship of the British Academy.
Elspeth R. M. Dusinberre is Professor of Distinction and President's Teaching Scholar in Classics at the University of Colorado Boulder. She focuses on cultural interactions in Anatolia, with an emphasis on the history of the Achaemenid Persian Empire in Anatolia. She received her AB in 1991 from Harvard University and her PhD in 1997 from the University of Michigan. Dusinberre has received twelve University of Colorado teaching awards and been awarded the Wiseman Award by the Archaeological Institute of America for her 2013 publication, Empire, Authority, and Autonomy in Achaemenid Anatolia. In 2018 she was named Distinguished Research Lecturer at the University of Colorado Boulder. Most recently, her work has focused on the seal impressions on the Persepolis Fortification Archive and on the archaeological site of Gordion, capital of ancient Phrygia, in Turkey.
Rudolf Meyer Riefstahl was a German art historian and specialist in Islamic art who spent the majority of his career in America where he moved in 1915. His numerous obituaries attest to his distinguished career and the loss felt in his field of study at his sudden and early death from pneumonia.