Zeitschrift für archäologische Aufklärung

The Zeitschrift für archäologische Aufklärung aims to demonstrate the relevance of ancient artifacts. It clarifies concepts of ancient material worlds, their mechanisms, and their systems of rules, and searches through the ruins of Greco-Roman antiquity for solutions to the aporias of the present.
Numbers encode and unlock reality. They connect the visual and material world with the realm of ideas. Numerical frameworks shape mythology, theology, and demonology, as well as cosmological and astrological concepts, rituals, magic, and mantic practices, geometric and arithmetic figures, and the design of objects and spaces. Across these domains, numbers operate as ordering principles mediating between perception, knowledge, and value. Focusing exemplarily on the number 7, this first English issue aims to shed light on the age-old impulse to translate the world into numbers and uncover meaning in numerical codes – a notion that continues to reappear in successive metamorphoses from antiquity to the digital media cultures of the present.