Every day Roman urbanites took to the street for myriad tasks, from hawking vegetables and worshipping local deities to simply loitering and socializing. Hartnett takes readers into this thicket of ...activity as he repopulates Roman streets with their full range of sensations, participants, and events that stretched far beyond simple movement. As everyone from slave to senator met in this communal space, city dwellers found unparalleled opportunities for self-aggrandizing display and the negotiation of social and political tensions. Hartnett charts how Romans preened and paraded in the street, and how they exploited the street's collective space to lob insults and respond to personal rebukes. Combining textual evidence, comparative historical material, and contemporary urban theory with architectural and art historical analysis, The Roman Street offers a social and cultural history of urban spaces that restores them to their rightful place as primary venues for social performance in the ancient world.
This book offers a study of the calendars of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, Gaul, and all other parts of the Mediterranean and the Near East, from the origins up to and including ...Jewish and Christian calendars in late Antiquity. Particular attention is given to the structure of calendars and their political context. Most ancient calendars were set and controlled by political rulers; they served as expressions of political power, as mechanisms of social control, and sometimes, on the contrary, as assertions of political independence and dissidence. Ancient calendars were very diverse, but they all shared a common history, evolving on the whole from flexible, lunar calendars to fixed, solar schemes. The Egyptian calendar played an important role in this process, most notably inspiring the institution of the Julian calendar in Rome, the forerunner of our modern Gregorian calendar. In this book it is argued that the rise of fixed calendars was not the result of scientific or technical progress, but of major political and social changes that transformed the ancient world under the great Near Eastern, Hellenistic, and Roman Empires. The institution of standard, fixed calendars served the administrative needs of these extensive empires, but also contributed to their cultural and political cohesion. This ultimately led, conversely, to late antique perceptions of calendar diversity as an expression of heresy and cause of social schism.
This book examines the appetite for Egyptian and Egyptian-looking artwork in Italy during the century following Rome's annexation of Aegyptus as a province. In the early imperial period, Roman ...interest in Egyptian culture was widespread, as evidenced by works ranging from the monumental obelisks, brought to the capital over the Mediterranean Sea by the emperors, to locally made emulations of Egyptian artifacts found in private homes and in temples to Egyptian gods. Although the foreign appearance of these artworks was central to their appeal, this book situates them within their social, political, and artistic contexts in Roman Italy. Swetnam-Burland focuses on what these works meant to their owners and their viewers in their new settings, by exploring evidence for the artists who produced them and by examining their relationship to the contemporary literature that informed Roman perceptions of Egyptian history, customs, and myths.
This book focuses on urbanization and state formation in middle Tyrrhenian Italy during the first millennium BC by analyzing settlement organization and territorial patterns in Rome and Latium vetus ...from the Bronze Age to the Archaic Era. In contrast with the traditional diffusionist view, which holds that the idea of the city was introduced to the West via Greek and Phoenician colonists from the more developed Near East, this book demonstrates important local developments towards higher complexity, dating to at least the beginning of the Early Iron Age, if not earlier. By adopting a multidisciplinary and multi-theoretical framework, this book overcomes the old debate between exogenous and endogenous by suggesting a network approach that sees Mediterranean urbanization as the product of reciprocal catalyzing actions.
The Hellenistic West Prag, Jonathan R. W; Quinn, Josephine Crawley
10/2013
eBook
Although the Hellenistic period has become increasingly popular in research and teaching in recent years, the western Mediterranean is rarely considered part of the 'Hellenistic world'; instead the ...cities, peoples and kingdoms of the West are usually only discussed insofar as they relate to Rome. This book contends that the rift between the 'Greek East' and the 'Roman West' is more a product of the traditional separation of Roman and Greek history than a reflection of the Hellenistic-period Mediterranean, which was a strongly interconnected cultural and economic zone, with the rising Roman republic just one among many powers in the region, east and west. The contributors argue for a dynamic reading of the economy, politics and history of the central and western Mediterranean beyond Rome, and in doing so problematise the concepts of 'East', 'West' and 'Hellenistic' itself.
Economic Theory and the Ancient Mediterranean presents a comprehensive introduction to the application of contemporary economic theory to the ancient societies of the Mediterranean Sea from the ...period of 5000 BCE to 400 CE.
The Mediterranean basin was a multicultural region with a great diversity of linguistic, religious, social and ethnic groups. This dynamic social and cultural landscape encouraged extensive contact ...and exchange among different communities. This book seeks to explain what happened when different ethnic, social, linguistic and religious groups, among others, came into contact with each other, especially in multiethnic commercial settlements located throughout the region. What means did they employ to mediate their interactions? How did each group construct distinct identities while interacting with others? What new identities came into existence because of these contacts? Professor Demetriou brings together several strands of scholarship that have emerged recently, especially ethnic, religious and Mediterranean studies. She reveals new aspects of identity construction in the region, examining the Mediterranean as a whole, and focuses not only on ethnic identity but also on other types of collective identities, such as civic, linguistic, religious and social.
To date, Rome's intervention to the West from the mid-second century BC has not really been looked at with any sense of overview. Instead, there has been an unconnected series of micro-regional ...studies looking at particular areas, from the river Ebro in Spain round to Italy on the land front, and from the Balearic Islands to Corsica, Sardinia and even Sicily as regards the seaborne aspect. In contrast, the aim of this volume is to push the historical and archaeological debates about Rome's expansion beyond these traditional geographical boundaries and the discipline-based previous research. The entire north-western Mediterranean is treated as a micro-region and is addressed using various interdisciplinary approaches. The result is to provide an innovative and comprehensive overview of the north-western Mediterranean in a period of historical crossroads, aided particularly by focusing on the connectivity and integration within this region as two interrelated issues. While Republican Rome enforced itself as an expansive power towards the West, all sorts of polities, military operations and individuals also played a significant role in creating interconnectivity and integration of the north-western Mediterranean into a new hybrid reality. In order to uncover such processes of hybridisation, contributors to this volume were encouraged to focus on the historical, archaeological and numismatic material from several areas within the region, and to incorporate aspects of interdisciplinary methodologies in order to address the region's military, political, social and economic interconnections with Italy, Rome and each other within the overall period.
In the present-day world order, political disintegration, the faltering of economic systems, the controversial yet dramatic consequences of global warming and pollution, and the spread of poverty and ...social disruption in Western countries have rendered ‘collapse’ one of the hottest topics in the humanities and social sciences. In the frenetic run for identifying the global causes and large-scale consequences of collapse, however, instances of crisis taking place at the micro-scale are not always explored by scholars addressing these issues in present and past societies, while the ‘voices’ of the marginal/non-élite subjects that might be the main victims of collapse are often silenced in ancient history and archaeology. Within this framework Collapse or Survival explores localized phenomena of crisis, unrest, and survival in the ancient Mediterranean with a focus on the first millennium BC. In a time span characterized by unprecedented high levels of dynamism, mobility, and social change throughout that region, the area selected for analysis represents a unique convergence point where states rise and fall, long-distance trade networks develop and disintegrate, and patterns of human mobility catalyze cultural change at different rates. The central Mediterranean also comprises a wealth of recently excavated and highly contextualized material evidence, casting new light on the agency of individuals and groups who endeavored to cope with crisis situations in different geographical and temporal settings. Contributors provide novel definitions of ‘collapse’ and reconsider notions of crisis and social change by taking a broader perspective that is not necessarily centred on élites. Individual chapters analyze how both high-status and non-élite social agents responded to socio-political rupture, unrest, depopulation, economic crisis, the disintegration of kinship systems, interruption in long-term trade networks, and destruction in war.
Fifty Early Medieval Thingsintroduces readers to the material culture of late antique and early medieval Europe, north Africa, and western Asia. Ranging from Iran to Ireland and from Sweden to ...Tunisia, Deborah Deliyannis, Hendrik Dey, and Paolo Squatriti present fifty objects-artifacts, structures, and archaeological features-created between the fourth and eleventh centuries, an ostensibly "Dark Age" whose cultural richness and complexity is often underappreciated. Each thing introduces important themes in the social, political, cultural, religious, and economic history of the postclassical era.
Some of the things, like a simple ard (plow) unearthed in Germany, illustrate changing cultural and technological horizons in the immediate aftermath of Rome's collapse; others, like the Arabic coin found in a Viking burial mound, indicate the interconnectedness of cultures in this period. Objects such as the Book of Kells and the palace-city of Anjar in present-day Jordan represent significant artistic and cultural achievements; more quotidian items (a bone comb, an oil lamp, a handful of chestnuts) belong to the material culture of everyday life. In their thing-by-thing descriptions, the authors connect each object to both specific local conditions and to the broader influences that shaped the first millennium AD, and also explore their use in modern scholarly interpretations, with suggestions for further reading. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written,Fifty Early Medieval Thingsdemonstrates how to read objects in ways that make the distant past understandable and approachable.
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