ANTIQUITY and the Old World

Antiquity in Antiquity Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World

The origin and antiquity of syphilis revisited: an appraisal of Old World pre-Columbian evidence for treponemal infection.

For nearly 500 years, scholars have argued about the origin and antiquity of syphilis. Did Columbus bring the disease from the New World to the Old World? Or did syphilis exist in the Old World before 1493? Here, we evaluate all 54 published reports of pre-Columbian, Old World treponemal disease using a standardized, systematic approach. The certainty of diagnosis and dating of each case is con...

Old World Econometrics and New World Theory

This paper summarizes recent work on the econometrics of identification in rational expectations models by myself and Andreas Beyer. In this work, we discuss the relationship between structure and reduced form in linear rational expectations models and we apply our analysis to a class of new Keynesian models that are frequently used to inform the policy debate. We argue that the identifying ass...

Late Antiquity and Early Islam

In this paper, an investigation on the relation between state-building and Near Eastern religion is attempted. Analyzing the city-state of Ḥaṭrā (Iraq, close to Kirkuk), it is demonstrated that pre-Islamic state craft in the region was dependent on the initiative of the Parthian monarchy in Iran. The kings of the Arsacid dynasty attempted to bestow the local Arabic tribes in the Jazira with a c...

Cabrillo, the Chumash, and Old World Diseases

Focusing on the Chumash, we examine the potential impacts of Old World epidemic diseases on protohistoric peoples of the southern California coast. Our study indicates that: (1) coastal peoples would have been highly susceptible to Old World disease epidemics; (2) native contacts with several sixteenth and seventeenth century European maritime expeditions were extensive; and (3) Old World disea...