Drug-related homicide (DRH) has the potential to act as a valuable indicator of wider drug-related crime. Yet DRH remains a knowledge gap within this broader field of study.

The Leiden University Centre for International Relations (LUCIR) is a multi-disciplinary platform promoting research and education on international relations at Leiden University.

The people who lived in Saqqara, City of the Dead in Egypt, died thousands of years ago, but they are not all that different from us. This is what a study by the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, The Netherlands concludes. If you wanted to prove that you had good taste in ancient Egypt then…

To what extent can Nietzsche's Amor Fati be seen as a Stoic concept?

Palaeography of an ancient nomadic writing culture

Over the last decades, the systematic investigation of urban settlements in Central-Tyrrhenian Italy led to the discovery of a growing number of contexts revealing both direct and indirect evidence of artisanal workshops. Such research commitment has yielded a vast amount of new data that greatly contribute…

Roderick Geerts, a PhD candidate of the Faculty of Archaeology in Leiden, takes us on a short journey through the rich history of the Red Sea port of Berenike in Egypt.

Nichiran kankei-shi o yomitoku [Revisiting the History of Dutch-Japanese Relations] is a new, two-volume Japanese publication with a chapter written by Wulan Remmelink. Both volumes offer a new look on the historical relations between Japan and The Netherlands during the Edo period by examining various…

Rafał Matuszewski and Kim Beerden, both university lecturers in Ancient History, received a grant from The A.G. Leventis Foundation.

In Renaissance Florence, humanists wrote Latin poems fashioning their city as the new Rome, and members of the Medici family as Roman rulers. How can we explain this practice?

Just published:

University lecturer Tazuko van Berkel has obtained a Vidi grant of 800,000 euros. This will enable her to research the image of man that emerges from economic texts from ancient Greece.

Do you live in Egypt and have you always wondered about all the pharaonic heritage surrounding you? This spring NVIC organizes a beginner’s level, introductory course in Egyptology. In 6 richly illustrated lessons, the history of ancient Egypt will be brought to life, both chronologically as well as…

Are you thinking about studying Global Order in Historical Perspective? Learn more and watch the introduction video.

Our mission is to advance the understanding of mental health of individuals with a history of stress and/or trauma through rigorous interdisciplinary research, integrating insights from clinical psychology, neurobiology, and social sciences. We are committed to translating our findings into innovative…

The precise psychobiological mechanisms leading to chronic physiological stress responses have not been sufficiently explained, although stress is a major risk factor for disease and early death. A problem for conventional stress theory is that most of these responses seem to occur in situations without…

The chair group of Ancient and Medieval History at the Radboud University organizes a series of lectures that are held between February and June 2024. The exact dates and titles can be found in the programme below.

If you had something important to write down in ancient times, you would usually write in Greek in the eastern Mediterranean. University lecturer Joanne Stolk has been awarded an ERC grant to explore the kinds of spelling mistakes that were made in these scripts. And, more importantly, what improvements…

This project uses archaeological, literary and epigraphic evidence to investigate urban development in Roman-period North Africa, compiling this in a GIS-linked database in order to analyse the development of urban settlement spatially over time.

Scientific research at the molecular level on a collection of medieval skeletons from Norton Priory in Cheshire, United Kingdom, could help rewrite history after revealing they were affected by an unusual ancient form of the bone disorder, Paget’s disease. Osteoarchaeologist Carla Burrell, attached…

This month marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. NINO, the Language Museum, Things that Talk and the National Museum of Antiquities are seizing the opportunity to organise the first Week of Ancient Writing.

Knowledge and culture subproject 3:

In the world of Ancient Greece the interpretation of supernatural signs was a versatile tool to facilitate decision-making. This is the central hypothesis of the PhD dissertation of historian Kim Beerden. Defence on 14 February.

For decades it was thought that the family system of the ancient Egyptians was very similar to our own. However, PhD candidate Steffie van Gompel explains that the reality is somewhat different. ‘In Egyptian families, it was often the eldest son versus the rest of the children.’

The Persian Empire (539-330 BCE) was the first world empire in history. At its height, it united a territory stretching from present-day India to Libya - and it would take 2,000 years before significantly larger empires emerged in early modern Eurasia. This territorial sweep is both a source of fascination…

The Institute for Philosophy at Leiden University is host to the NWO programme,

Henk Versnel's work on ancient religion has been seminal. For his 80th birthday, a group of scholars assembled to celebrate and analyze his oeuvre.

New sampling and analytical strategies give archaeologists a better understanding of the nutrition and survival of ancient populations. Publication in PLOS One.

The main purpose of DNAmarkerpoint is to better understand the ecology, evolution and biodiversity through the study of ancient- and modern DNA.

On the 12th of May, Rita Barrera Virhuez-Eloranta successfully defended a doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Rita Barrera Virhuez-Eloranta on this achievement.

In ancient times, the desert in the Udhruh region in Jordan was transformed into a green oasis. An intricate network of underground water channels was part of an ancient system of water management, storing water and preventing loss through evaporation. Archaeologist Mark Driessen found a new way to…

About 15 km to the south of the ancient city of Petra, archaeologists from the University of Leiden have discovered an impressive network of ancient water conservation measures and irrigated field systems.

This book offers readers an alternative history of the origins of the discipline of International Relations.

To what end and how does Plautus constantly underline the Helleni(sti)c provenance of his art? How does this aspect relate the author’s originality?

The circular economy is typically seen as the progressive alternative to our wasteful linear economy, where raw materials are used to make the products that feed today’s rampant consumerist hunger, which are then thrown away. In a fascinating article, archaeologist Maikel Kuijpers reflects on the recycling…

On Thursday 11 January 2018, Xiang Li defended her doctoral thesis: “Collective Labour Rights and Collective Labour Relations of China”. The supervisors are Professor Guus Heerma van Voss and Professor Barend Barentsen.

The first objective is to create a catalogue raisonée, i.e. a structured database that will store the main attributes of each town in a standardized format database, which will be freely accessible when completed; the second objective is to exploit theories and methods that can help us to understand…

This historical study argues that the Mandaean religion originated under Sasanid rule in the fifth century, not earlier as has been widely accepted. It analyzes primary sources in Syriac, Mandaic, and Arabic to clarify the early history of Mandaeism.

While ecosystems have concrete benefits for human society, these benefits are typically overlooked in decision-making.

Migration and Mobility in the Early Roman Empire by Luuk de Ligt and Laurens E. Tacoma (Eds.)

In 2011, the Udhruh Archaeological Project was launched, bringing together teams of Jordanian and Dutch archaeologists to investigate the region and reconstruct ancient water harvesting techniques in the extremely arid landscape of Udhruh. Access to fresh water remains one of the most pressing global…

Lecture

The Chair Democratic Representation in the Kingdom focuses on the political relations between the ‘European’ Netherlands and the six Caribbean islands in the Kingdom; so-called Kingdom Relations. Professor Wouter Veenendaal investigates the quality of democratic representation in the Kingdom, both within…

This thesis introduces a relational interaction model and a practical tool for describing, visualising and generating interactive dialogues.