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An ancient Egyptian mummy has been kept at Lübeck since the late seventeenth century. It was stored in a pharmacy to 1811, when it was handed over to the library. From c. 1850 to c. 1990, it was moved among several museums and has now found shelter in the ethnological collection. In the pharmacy, it served as raw material for mumia powder, then used for a wide range of therapies, its potential for use being defined in practical terms related to the present. On its way into the library holdings, its status changed into that of a mute witness of the remote past, alienated from its present and valued as a museums object. The change of status links up with the transformation of the European perception of the past, moving from "cold" to "hot" in Lévi-Strauss's terms around 1800. At the same time, the musealisation of the mummy shows that Marx's sharp and effective analytical categories of alienation and objectification existed at the conceptual level half a century earlier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the archaeological find from Hammerwich near Lichfield, Staffs., unearthed in 2009. The find represents the largest assemblage of gold items on record from early medieval Britain. While the identification of most items in the assemblage as fragments of weapons poses few difficulties, the purpose of the deposit is far from obvious. The find neither displays unequivocal features of a hoard nor does it connect with practices of sacrifice in religious contexts. The article focuses on the uncial inscription of a verse from Psalm 67, incised into one item. The inscription connects with the early eighth-century Life of St Guthlac, which features the same verse. Both references belong to the earliest quotes of this otherwise rarely used verse. The article argues that the deposit should be placed into the context of the crisis of the Kingdom of Mercia around 700AD. This crisis appears to have been a consequence of attempts to change the structure of the Mercian stirps regia from a descent group of rulers into a group of rulers over various collectives of residents. The article suggests that structural transformations of this kind, occurring not only in Mercia but simultaneously also in Wessex and Kent, were indicative of processes of state formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For about 200 years, legal positivism has featured natural law and international law as opposite, if not mutually irreconcilable concepts, with natural law being categorized as a purely speculative authoritarian construct seemingly ranking government-provided 'happiness' above the freedom of the individual, and international law being positioned as a human-made, 'scientifically' constructed and democratically legitimized legal order. This perception, however, sharply contrasts with the previous coordination of both concepts into the formula ius naturae et gentis. The juxtaposition of natural against international law is, therefore, far from obvious. The article examines the processes of conceptual change that produced this juxtaposition and reviews the genesis of the problem of deriving the 'basic norm' pacta sunt servanda without recourse to natural law and argues that legal positivism fails to provide a satisfactory theory of the bindingness of international legal norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]