There has been an upswing in attention to South African biography in the past few decades, with a welcome trend towards remaking or revising the canon of important figures from the South African past. This has included edited collections of the works of prominent individuals, and notable among these have been early-twentieth century black African politicians and writers. Historical Publications Southern Africa (renamed from its previous moniker, the Van Riebeeck Society) has published four edited collections of the writings of such individuals since 2008, including Isaac Williams Wauchope, Richard Victor Solope Thema, and A.B. Xuma. A Life in Letters, a collection of Solomon T. Plaatje's correspondence, is the fourth such volume in just over a decade. There are 260 letters, written from 1896 to 1932, included in the book. Most are in English, but some are in Setswana, Dutch/Afrikaans, and a few are in German. Although a number of the letters are from the collections of the Cullen Library at the University of the Witwatersrand, the reviewer counted twenty-seven different collections across three continents. The book is thus an excellent resource not only for historians, but also for students and the general public who now have access to a wide range of Plaatje's thoughts, opinions, and emotions that are evident in his letters.

The emergency measures of the Union government under Jan Smuts had a strong impact on the Ossewa-Brandwag (OB) during the Second World War. The OB was especially targeted by the government because of its overt pro-German and anti-British stance and its active resistance against the war effort. The ideology of the movement was built upon a strong basis of Afrikaner nationalism in conjunction with National Socialism which was supposed to legitimise the movement as an alternative to party politics. OB members expressed Afrikaner nationalist sentiments which meant resistance against Britain with the goal of attaining an independent republic - the so-called "ideal of freedom". Consequently, the OB's active resistance led to high numbers of internment. This article focuses on the South African internment camps of the Second World War. The nationalist iconography reflected in the artefacts created by OB members during their internment are analysed within the broader context of Afrikaner nationalism and the ideology of the OB. The OB had a very specific brand of Afrikaner nationalism and the ideal of freedom, central to its ideology, was combined with existing Afrikaner nationalist goals and subsequently nationalist iconography manifested itself in internees' creative expressions of their own personal nationalist sentiments. The artefacts also reflect the integration of Afrikaner nationalist iconography and the OB's ideal of freedom with personal contexts of imprisonment illustrating how political myths can be reshaped to provide meaning for the present realities of contemporaries.

This study was aimed to track how the history of plantations in Jember from the 1850s-1930s. When did plantations arise in Jember? What types of plants were developed on Jember plantations? How was the development of the plantation quantitatively? And what was the impact of the existence of plantations on the development of Jember and its people. The method in this study is a historical method which includes heuristic, criticism, interpretation and historiography. The results of this study are that plantations in Jember developed along with the development of colonial power in the Belada Indies, precisely since the VOC era, but experienced rapid development starting from the implementation period culture stelsel, but reached its peak in liberal times, and plantations also experienced a period of ebb as colonial power receded as well. The conclusion is that there is a parrarel relationship between plantation development and the development of colonial power.

When Vespasian captured Jerusalem in 70 AD, he put a palm tree on some of his victory coins. Is this palm tree a symbol for victory or rather for the subdued Jews? This controversial question can be clearly answered by making an iconographical distinction between palm trees and palm branches. This article discusses especially numismatic, but also philological, literary, pictorial, and botanical evidence, to defend that only the branches and wreaths of palms were used as symbols for victory, whereas the entire palm tree stood for Phoenicia or Judaea.

Hospitality can be considered a key institution in the social relationships in the ancient Mediterranean. To identify the people involved in a hospitality agreement, in certain contexts small objects were used in a similar way to a password, which the Greeks called symbolon and the Romans tessera hospitalis. We know how the latter were used thanks to Plautus’ Poenulus. At least 64 pieces are currently known which may be identified as tesserae hospitales. All come from the Western Mediterranean. The majority contain brief inscriptions, written in Etruscan, Latin, Greek, or Celtiberian. They share a series of common features, which impart a clear family resemblance beyond geographic, cultural, or linguistic borders

Many have felt to be anachronistic the casting of proskynesis in the court of Alexander the Great as a matter of worship of the king. Taking this premise as its starting point, this article explores the possible origins of this presentation of Alexander’s proskynesis, an understanding that is articulated most fully in the ‘proskynesis debates’ of Arrian (4.10-12) and Curtius (8.5-6). It is argued that the misrepresentation was a deliberate strategy cultivated in the Peripatos, and that it was designed to deflect opprobrium away from Callisthenes and, by extension, away from the Peripatos itself.

It has generally been assumed since the 1950s that the African elephant known to classical antiquity, and thus the one used, inter alia, by Carthage and Ptolemaic Egypt, is the forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis), which is even smaller in stature than the Asian or Indian elephant. Yet a recent scientific study using DNA evidence has asserted that it was the larger bush or savannah elephant (Loxodonta africana) that was used in antiquity. This study adduces literary sources pertaining to habitat and representational evidence to explore the issue of the most likely species of African elephant known to the ancient Mediterranean world.

In which historical constellation and with which meaning one erected the most accurate copy of the early classical group of the tyrannicides near the Fides temple on the Capitoline hill in Rome? As the copy of the early classical group of the tyrannicides remained on the Capitoline hill until medialval times, a widespread acceptance may be assumed. It is unlikely that Augustus was tolerating the statues of his enemies Brutus or Sulla. In fact there was on the capitoline hill a tradition to keep a balance of statues, erected for the leader of different political parties, which only the summi viri of the Augustusforum ostensible still pursued. The copy of the famous group is probably an initiative of Pammenes from Marathon, a descendant of the tyrannicides, and probably represents Eleuteria/Libertas, won in the civil war by Augustus Soter and Agrippa Euergetes. The term Demokratia, closley linked with the Tyrannicides and Eleuteria, became the key word substituting the aristocracys’ demand of political participation at the beginning of the Principate.

In classical times, inhabitants of perioicic towns that were subjected by the polis Elis were called “Eleians”. In this paper I will argue that this designation referred to people who shared partial Elian citizenship. Before the background of Elis’s loss of territory in 364 and the accompanying decrease in the number of Elian phylai, it is safe to assume that perioecic regions hosted territorial Elian phylai prior to their liberation. Since the possession of Eleian citizenship required the membership in a phyle, Elis seems to have granted some kind of citizen-right to their assimilated perioeci. The aim of this paper is to identify this act of integration with the reported but thus far unexplained event of 471 which went down in history as ‘synoecism of Elis’. Arguably, this political enfranchisement is not to be understood as a mere relocation of local communities but rather as a purely political fusion.