A comprehensive study of the nexus between democratization and security in the Mediterranean, which are seen as essentially complementary yet threatened by political trends witnessed since the ...September 2001 attacks. Contributors from a variety of European and Mediterranean countries address the impact of a restructured security system, Europe's effort to establish an autonomous security and defence policy, and attempts among the Mediterranean Partner Countries (MPCs) to build regional security regimes.
Some of the highest and widest vault constructions produced in the Middle Ages are located in the Mediterranean area. Outstanding buildings with remarkable vaults and buttressing, such as the ...Cathedral of Majorca, are evidence of a lively technology transfer and contemporary developments. International experts trace the complex processes of Medieval design and construction. They research structural patterns in the processes involved, analyze building methods, and relate their findings to historic documents. The approach of combining field research with the study of literary sources provides a fresh look at the impressive monuments and shines new light on technological advances and construction technology of the time.
This book is an indispensable resource for readers who want to know the whole, comprehensive story of ancient naval warfare. The Blood-Drenched Sea describes all the naval battles and wars fought in ...the ancient Mediterranean. In one volume are the ships, crews, and leaders who determined the course of ancient history, along with the wars and battles, told through artifacts, extant literary and visual sources, and modern reconstructions—the Egyptian mortuary temple, the Minoan domain, the legendary sack of Troy, the expansion of Greeks throughout the Mediterranean, the Athenian victory over the Persians at Salamis, and the Athenian empire, ruined by one moment of superstition. Then the Romans learned how to build ships, man them, row in tiers, and command fleets, and the volume recounts their contributions to history as well. They fought three wars with Carthage that cost them hundreds of thousands of casualties and expenditures of vast wealth, and they conquered the whole of the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, Julius Caesar expanded the empire with the conquest of Gaul and the invasion of Britain, and his adoptive son, Octavian settled the question of who would rule the new empire by winning the naval battle at Actium.
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.
Planktonic foraminifera are widely used for biostratigraphy and correlation of Mediterranean Neogene marine sediments, and are a fundamental component in the astronomical tuning of the Neogene Time ...Scale.
Recent developments in high-resolution studies, focused on the astronomical calibration of cyclically marine sediments cropping out in land-based sections and recovered from deep-sea successions, increased the accuracy of stratigraphic ranges of planktonic foraminiferal species improving the biostratigraphic resolution and biochronology.
The large amount of data on planktonic foraminifera obtained through quantitative/semiquantitative analyses, published in the recent years, allowed the revision of many biohorizons and their calibrations. We incorporate these developments and emendments into the existing Mediterranean planktonic foraminiferal biozonation. Therefore, in this paper, we present an emended Standard Mediterranean planktonic foraminiferal biozonation with a detailed description of zones and subzones within the framework of the Astronomical Tuned Neogene Time Scale 2004 and 2012 (ATNTS2004, ATNTS2012) and we provide the range chart of the most common planktonic foraminiferal taxa and the quantitative distribution pattern of selected marker species.
Twenty-two biozones and thirty-one subzones that span the past 23 million years have been identified. We distinguished them using the following code system: MMi1 to MMi13, and NDZ (for the time interval related to the Messinian Salinity Crisis): Mediterranean Miocene biozones, MPl1 to MPl6: Mediterranean Pliocene biozones (according to the Gelasian as the uppermost stage of the Pliocene Series/Epoch), and MPle1 to MPle2: Mediterranean Pleistocene biozones (according to the Calabrian as the lowermost stage of the Pleistocene Series/Epoch).
We assembled 118 Neogene planktonic foraminiferal biohorizons from multiple datasets, and incorporated the calibration of these bioevents into a revised Neogene planktonic foraminiferal biochronology. The revised and recalibrated data provide a major progress in biostratigraphic and biochronologic resolution and a template for future progress of the Neogene time scale.
Unfortunately, two main gaps of planktonic foraminiferal quantitative data occur in the late Burdigalian, between 16.12 Ma and 17.23 Ma, and at Aquitanian/Burdigalian boundary, between 19.74 Ma and 20.66 Ma, due to the absence of high-resolution studies of these time intervals in the Mediterranean.
Diplomacy and Intelligence in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean World examines the activities of diplomats in the expansion of their home country‘s informal imperial ambitions. Taking a ...comparative approach, the book combines a focus on the extension of the informal British Empire with an exploration of the imperial ambitions of other states, such as France, Austro-Hungary and Japan. The authors combine approaches from diplomatic history, intelligence history and microhistory in order to give new insights into the Mediterranean as a ‘contested space’ between competing informal empires. This study will be of great interest to anyone interested in the history of the Mediterranean region during the 19th century.
Caring for the Living Soul identifies the fundamental role played by emotions in the development of learned medicine and in the formation of the social role of the "physicians of the body" in the ...western Mediterranean between 1200 and 1500.
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.