Rhys Carpenter

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Rhys Carpenter (born August 5, 1889 in Cotuit , Massachusetts ; died January 2, 1980 in Devon , Pennsylvania ) was an American classical archaeologist .

Life

Rhys Carpenter was the son of William Henry Carpenter, director of the Columbia University in New York , where Carpenter made his Bachelor of Arts when he was 19 . A Rhodes scholarship enabled him to continue studying at Balliol College , Oxford , where he received a further Bachelor's degree in 1911 and a Magister Artium in 1914 , after having studied at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens the previous year and his interest in Classical ancient studies had discovered. In the same year he published a volume of his own poems under the title The Sun-Thief, and Other Poems .

When the young Carpenter became aware, Martha Carey Thomas , then President of Bryn Mawr College , entrusted him with the task of establishing the College's Classical Archeology Department. He successfully pursued this task, although he was still working on his dissertation himself, and created his own future job. In 1916 he received his doctorate, in 1918 he was a full professor at Bryn Mawr College and married Eleanor Houston Hill, a student at the college. After the end of the First World War he was appointed a member of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace , which was involved in the Versailles peace negotiations . He published the fruits of an extensive trip through Guatemala in 1921 as The Land beyond Mexico .

His book The Aesthetic Basis of Greek Art , published in 1921, was influential , in which he broke with the purely aesthetic view of Greek art and focused on the practical aspects of the Greek art business. In 1926 Carpenter became professor at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in addition to his obligations at Bryn Mawr , and from 1927 also its director, an office that he held until 1932. During this time he not only initiated the American excavations on the Agora of Athens , but also founded the American School's magazine , Hesperia .

Returning to Bryn Mawr, he gave the Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin College , Ohio . He published the results of these lectures in 1931 as The Humanistic Value of Archeology . During the Second World War he revised lectures and lectures. 1944/45 he was a Sather Professor at the University of California at Berkeley . In the resulting book Folk Tale: Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics , Carpenter put forward the still controversial thesis that the works attributed to Homer owe their substantive basis to a considerable extent to European folk tales.

One of his last students before his retirement in 1955 was Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway , who graduated with him as a Magister Artium in 1954 . Visiting professorships took him to the University of Pennsylvania in 1960 , to the University of Pittsburgh from 1961 to 1962 , and to the University of Washington from 1963 to 1964 . In his 1966 Discontinuity in Greek Civilization , Carpenter put forward the theory that migratory movements and accompanying catastrophes in the cultural continuity of ancient peoples were caused by climate change. In 1969 he received the gold medal from the Archaeological Institute of America for his achievements . Since 1977 there has been the chair of the Rhys Carpenter Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archeology at Bryn Mawr College . The Art and Archeology Library of the College Rhys Carpenter Art and Archeology Library , which opened in 1997, was named in his honor . Since 1935 he was a member of the American Philosophical Society .

Publications (selection)

  • The Sun-Thief, and Other Poems . H. Milford, London 1914.
  • The Ethics of Euripides . Columbia University Press, New York 1916.
  • The land beyond Mexico . 1920.
  • The Esthetic Basis of the Greek Art of the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BC Longmans, Green and Co., New York 1921.
  • The Greeks in Spain . Longmans, Green and Co., New York 1925.
  • with Bernard Ashmole : The sculpture of the Nike temple parapet . Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA) 1929.
  • The Humanistic Value of Archeology . Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA) 1933.
  • Humanistic Value of Archeology . Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA) 1933.
  • Ancient Corinth a Guide to the Excavations. Hestia, Athens 1936.
  • Type: a Bryn Mawr Symposium . Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr (PA) 1940.
  • Folk Tale: Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics . University of California Press, Berkeley 1946.
  • Greek Sculpture: a Critical Review . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1960.
  • Greek art - A study of the formal evolution of style . University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1962.
  • with James Sloss Ackerman: Art and Archeology . Prentice Hall, New York 1963.
  • Discontinuity in Greek Civilization . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1966.
  • The Architects of the Parthenon . Penguin, Harmondsworth 1970, ISBN 0-14-021119-5 .

literature

  • Linda M. Medwid: The Makers of Classical Archeology: A Reference Work . Humanity Books, New York 2000, pp. 48-51.
  • Mortimer Chambers: Rhys Carpenter . In: Nancy Thomson de Grummond (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archeology . Greenwood Press, Westport (CT) 1996, pp. 245-46.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Member History: Rhys Carpenter. American Philosophical Society, accessed May 30, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Carpenter, Rhys
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American classical archaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH August 5, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Cotuit
DATE OF DEATH 2nd January 1980
Place of death Devon, Pennsylvania