The Grant Agency of Masaryk University presented the MUNI Scientist Awards of 2023. Tomáš Glomb received the award for the publication of the book Connecting the Isiac Cults in Bloomsbury Academic, which is the culmination of his long-term research on the spread of the Egyptian cults in the Hellenistic period. Using methods of established historiography combined with quantitative results from formalized modeling using the transportation network of the ancient Mediterranean, the book reveals that the political activities of the Ptolemaic dynasty outside Egypt contributed substantially to the spread of the Egyptian cults. An important message of the book is that the methods of complexity science can greatly enrich the study of ancient cultural transmissions - not, however, as an exclusive universal toolkit, but only in a very careful synthesis with traditional historiography.
You can see the list of awardees here.
Article Jewish Networks in the Spread of Early Christianity: A Mathematical Model of Marcionite and Lukan Christianities authored by Dalibor Papoušek and Zdeněk Pospíšil has been published in Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution
Tereza Menšíková contributed to the Journal of Global Buddhism with the study Negotiating Boundaries Between "Religious" and "Secular": A Struggle for the Sense of Collectivity Among Ambedkarite Buddhists in Maharashtra.
