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You can search for books and e-books simultaneously through the Library catalogue, Explore, which is the principal tool for finding books, journals and other materials held in UCL libraries (whether in print or electronic format).
The print collection is located on the 1st floor of the UCL Main Library and is arranged by subject in accordance with Garside, UCL's own classification scheme. Each book has a shelfmark on the spine which consists of the name of the collection, followed by a letter and number indicating the subject, and the first three letters of the author's surname.
The sequence begins with books on ancient history generally (ANC. HIST. A) and the ancient Near East generally (ANC. HIST. B), arranged by topic. These sections are followed by books on the history of specific geographical regions, for example Mesopotamia (ANC. HIST. D), Persia & Iran (ANC. HIST. F), Greece (ANC. HIST. P) and Rome (ANC. HIST. R).
E-books are catalogued individually and may be accessed directly through Explore. There's further information about finding, using and citing e-books in our e-books guide.
This interdisciplinary volume provides the first comprehensive study of Rome's relationship with the kingdom and city of Pergamon. It surveys the rich and diverse interactions between these two cities from the late third century BCE to the fourth century CE, ranging across multiple cultural spheres (including art and architecture, history and politics, literature and poetry, philosophy and thought, scholarship and rhetoric). The book reassesses the nature, scope, and extent of Pergamon and Rome's so-called 'special relationship', shedding light on much-discussed problems, offering new evidence for their cultural interactions, and questioning long-established assumptions. One recurrent theme concerns the limitations of our knowledge: extant evidence is limited and often skewed by later Roman sources, and it is frequently very difficult to identify and define cultural features that are distinctively 'Pergamene'. Nevertheless, there was certainly an important relationship between these two cities, which this volume seeks to map out with greater nuance, precision, and breadth, setting it within a wider interconnected Hellenistic context. As a whole, the volume reflects on the scholarly reception of Pergamon, uncovering how and when a certain view of a cohesive 'Pergamene culture' took shape among modern scholarship and what factors, prejudices, and assumptions undergirded its creation. It also challenges and rethinks the frameworks that shape our view of cultural activity in the Hellenistic world, emphasizing the porousness of cultural movements across political boundaries. This book will be of interest not only to scholars of Roman culture, but also to those interested in the impact of Hellenistic culture on Rome more generally and to scholars engaged with theories and models of cultural influence.
By adopting a theoretical approach rooted in the anthropological study of agrarian communities, this book investigates the reach and impact of Roman civilisation while considering the limitations of pre-industrial communication and social organisation. For half a millennium, the Roman state unified the Mediterranean world in an empire without parallel in European history. Yet, to what extent did this vast domain truly integrate the diverse cultures under its rule? This question forms the foundation for a novel cultural history that captures both sides of ancient imperialism: the connectivity fostered between local cultures and the hierarchical structures imposed upon them. This framework is tested through a series of case studies, drawing on diverse sources from across the empire, including Rhineland portraiture, Egyptian votive dedications, British ceramic assemblages, the letters of Saint Augustine, Pannonian burial mounds, Anatolian maledictions against grave robbers, Gaulish pottery firing lists, and more. These studies reveal that Roman rule generated significant cultural interaction, with the practices of the imperial elite deeply influencing local communities, sometimes even transforming them. However, full participation in elite culture remained accessible only to a small segment of the provincial population. As a result, even after centuries of Roman dominion, local cultures persisted.
This volume assembles twenty-two scholars from the fields of classics and early Christian studies to interrogate the intersections between writing and enslavement around the Roman Mediterranean. Drawing upon methods developed in scholarship on book history and Atlantic slavery, the authors demonstrate the myriad ways in which the material and intellectual contributions of enslaved literary workers were vital to the composition, editing, copying, circulation, reading, and preservation of Roman texts. This thematically organized volume exposes the ways that power dynamics denigrate and erase enslaved contributors, as well as how language barriers, gender difference, and disability created dependence on enslaved workers. The central role of enslaved workers in practical work like bookkeeping, education, and divination is explored, in addition to the unseen labor of enslaved collators, note-keepers, editors, and curators. Enslaved workers were a constitutive part of the Roman knowledge economy; their roles in allowing others to read and write, in producing ancient literature, and in staffing the bureaucratic structures of the Roman empire were profound. Roman literature, technology, and knowledge depended on the labor and expertise of enslaved literate workers, and these chapters argue that they influenced just about every aspect of Roman life.
Scholarly study of ancient Greek sanctuaries has tended to focus on religion and ritual, monuments, deities, sacrifice, and topography. Logistics in Greek Sanctuaries takes a completely novel perspective by shifting the focus away from the religious sphere and monumental aspects of sanctuaries to practical activity and the experience of the human visitor. Close examination of the more mundane and everyday life and activity in Greek cult places, e.g., sanitation, water and food supply, accommodation, markets, managing crowds and behavior, workers, and finances, reveals relatively unexplored facets of ancient Greek sanctuaries and offers new paths of investigation for the future.
Money in Imperial Rome offers an in-depth examination of the institutional framework within which money operated as an economic agent in the Roman empire, emphasising its systemic complexity. Analyses focus on classical Roman law as reflected in the writings of Roman jurists from the second and early-third centuries AD. The legal sources are augmented with documentary materials, which give independent evidence of actual practice, and with Jewish legal sources, which give evidence of a separate contemporary legal tradition. The work promotes Keynesian claims for the endogenous nature of money and adopts approaches advanced by new institutional economics (NIE), while its innovative contribution is in suggesting a complexity-oriented approach to understanding the conceptual framework that dictated the use of money in private transactions. Money is a complex phenomenon in the sense that it allows for new patterns of activity to be created by individuals, who adjust their use of it to the continuously evolving system in which they operate.
Creation myths in the ancient Middle East served, among other things, as works of political economy, justifying and naturalizing materially intensive ritual practices and their entanglements with broader economic processes and institutions. These rituals were organized according to a common ideology of divine service, which portrayed the gods as an aristocratic leisure class whose material needs were provided by human beings. Resources for divine service were extracted from the productive sectors of society and channeled inward to the temple and palace institutions, where they served to satiate the gods and support their human servants. This Element examines various forms of the economics of divine service, and how they were supported in a selection of myths – Atraḫasis, Enki and Ninmaḫ, and Enūma Eliš from Mesopotamia and the story of the Garden of Eden from the southern Levant (Israel).
In The Art of Queenship in the Hellenistic World, Patricia Eunji Kim examines the visual and material cultures of Hellenistic queens, the royal and dynastic women who served as subjects and patrons of art. Exploring evidence in the interconnected eastern Mediterranean and western Asia from the fourth to second centuries BCE, Kim argues that the arts of queenship were central to expressions of dynastic (and sometimes even imperial) consolidation, continuity, and legitimacy. From gems, coins, and vessels to monuments and sculpture, the visual and material cultures of queenship appeared in a range of sacred settings, public spaces, royal courts, and domestic domains. Encompassing several dynasties, including the Hecatomnids, Argeads, Ptolemies, Seleucids, and Attalids, Kim inaugurates new methods for comparing and interpreting visual articulations of queenship and ideal femininity from distinct yet culturally entangled contexts, thus illuminating the ways that women had an impact art and politics in the ancient world.
Explores Rome's extensive trade and diplomatic relations with distant lands, revealing a two-way exchange of goods, ideas, and cultures. Much has been written about the great extent encompassed by the Roman Empire's borders, their armies' attempts to expand and defend them, and about the extent to which 'Romanization' imposed a uniform culture within them. But far less attention has been lavished on Rome's relations with the wider world that lay beyond these porous borders. A citizen shopping in the jostling market of a Roman city could buy amber or fur from Scandinavia, ivory from sub-Saharan Africa, spice from India or Chinese silk, among a host of other exotic foods and luxuries. These goods did not just show up at the nearest port; they were the result of centuries of trade missions, trade deals and a general compulsion to explore the outside and largely unknown world. Paul Chrystal examines Rome's relations with the world it never conquered, describing what the Romans knew of it, how trade relations were established and commerce conducted. He explores the major trade routes such as the fabled Silk Road to China and the sea routes to India, as well as many more. He details embassies and exploratory missions conducted across thousands of miles to open trade and diplomatic links, such as that of Chinese general Bao Chao sent to contact the Romans. Importantly he discusses trade in both directions and emphasizes that along with goods went a two-way exchange of people, ideas, knowledge, and culture. Along the way, topical themes such as immigration, inclusion and xenophobia are raised.From Finland to Lake Chad, and from Ireland to India and China, the Romans left their mark upon the wider world, a world that in turn left its indelible mark upon their Empire.
Welcome to the first publication that has sought to understand Early Iron Age warfare from the perspectives of the cultures that lived in northwestern Syria and southeastern Anatolia, including places such as Carchemish and Sam'al. Traditionally conflict studies of the era have been pursued through the lenses of these polities' contemporaries, especially Neo-Assyrian kings. The goal of this publication is to use the available archaeological evidence to establish insights into their own conflicts, which can be used to move toward creating a history of war for the era that encompasses the viewpoints from as many cultures as possible.
Discover what "belief" and "unbelief" meant in the ancient world Popular portrayals of the ancient world often give the impression that the ancients held uniform views of the gods. Recent scholarship, however, has started to challenge such a reductive characterization. To that end, this volume brings together top scholars from a variety of disciplines to create a more nuanced picture of the diverse spectrum of belief and unbelief in the ancient world. The contributors to this volume examine belief as it existed throughout the Mediterranean over the span of approximately a thousand years--a broader scope than most comparable studies, which tend to focus on a single period. The book's breadth is evident not only in its chronology but also in its subject matter. The authors examine religious belief and unbelief in biblical and classical sources, material culture, and iconography, all within the contexts of ancient Jewish, Christian, and Greco-Roman religious culture. Readers will come away with a better understanding of how diverse ancient belief was, how ancient communities expressed their faith through texts and translation, and how people in antiquity connected art and religion. Expansive and interdisciplinary, this book will be of interest to students and scholars working in classics, biblical studies, ancient Near Eastern studies, and Greek and Roman iconography.
Why is Roman law so boring? In this book, Zachary Herz argues that the bureaucratic, positivistic world of Roman law is not a distraction from the violent autocracy of the Roman empire, but an imagined escape. Lawyers, bureaucrats, and even emperors used legal writing to think about worlds that were safer or fairer than the one in which they lived. This archive of political imagination slowly became a law-code, and now guides readers through a legal system about which its authors could only dream. From Augustus to Justinian, this book shows how law symbolized order in chaotic times, and how that symbol eventually took on a life of its own. From the enlightened judgements of Hadrian to the great jurists and child rulers of Severan Rome, Herz reveals what Romans were really talking about when they talked about law.
Victory and Celebration traces how athletic success was transformed into broader social and political capital in ancient Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE--how being a good boxer or wrestler, or having a fast son or superior horses was made into something of significance beyond the stadium or hippodrome. Athletic success did not speak for itself. Its meanings had to be produced and defended, and this was the work of the victory memorials--the poems, statues, and other dedications produced to commemorate the athletic victories.Through readings of these victory memorials, Victory and Celebration explores, first, how Greek athletics was intertwined with general ideas of excellence, beauty, and a closeness to gods and heroes, and second, how the memorials communicated more directly political visions of leadership, inherited ability, and the victor's place in their city and the wider world. Finally, the book examines how specific events, such as boxing, contests for youths, and chariot and horse races were shaped and made valuable, or kept valuable, by the memorials. The significance of athletic victory was not a given; by addressing what meanings were attributed to athletic success, and the often-innovative ways in which these meanings were made to seem true, Victory and Celebration emphasizes how much work had to be done to make that success count.
Dismantling the simplistic equation of wealth, political power and social rank in the Roman empire, this study presents a new reconstruction of the distribution of elite wealth in Roman Italy based on an innovative combination of economic modelling and archaeological and epigraphic evidence. Bart Danon follows a quantitative approach to show that the Roman economic elite was in fact much larger than the political and social elites. The many wealthy households outside the socio-political orders fuelled intense competition for junior political offices, while paradoxically strengthening the resilience of the Roman political system. By challenging long-held assumptions, this book offers fresh perspectives on the complexities of wealth and power in ancient Rome.
Like many famous figures from antiquity, we must work through layers of fantasy in order to uncover the life of Poppaea Sabina (c. 30-65 CE). As the ancient sources tell it, Poppaea pushed the young emperor Nero to murder his mother, execute his wife Octavia, marry her and make her his empress--and then, a few years later, kick her to death in a drunken rage. Poppaea's genuine motives and actions, however, cannot be easily recovered from the extant sources. Her narrative comes to us already fictionalized by ancient authors employing her story to induce moral panic. In this book, Neil Bernstein critically examines these sources to produce the first modern biography of Poppaea Sabina. Her brief marriage to the emperor Nero occasioned political, religious, and social innovation. Nero was the first emperor to represent his wife as a near-equal on his official coinage, and the couple was also celebrated by a group of claquers called "Neropoppaeans." Their daughter Claudia would be the first child to receive posthumous divine honors. Poppaea also received a unique form of posthumous commemoration. Nero castrated Sporus, one of his male slaves, and addressed them thereafter as "Poppaea". For many scholars and creative artists, however, Poppaea's brief life also epitomizes the scandal of Nero's reign. Gossip about her began from the moment she appeared in the emperor's court. Her scandalous parentage, affair with the emperor, and implication in a murder plot presented an unforgettable narrative template, and is principally why we continue to see Poppaea, Nero, and Octavia recur throughout plays, operas, novels, and movies.
Social Psychology and the Ancient World: Methods and Applications fosters an interdisciplinary dialogue between classics and social psychology. Classicists use modern social-psychological insights to interpret ancient texts, while social psychologists engage with classical case studies to refine their own conceptual frameworks. This dialogue unfolds through an innovative structure: thematic sections introduced by social psychologists are paired with wide-ranging case studies by classicists, covering topics such as the psychology of tragic characters, comedic group dynamics, and the cognitive processes at play in oracles and deification. The volume offers methodological guidance for reconstructing the social psychology of past societies, addressing questions like: How did ancient Greeks understand character? How did laughter shape social cohesion? What role did emotional contagion play in narratives? How did ancient societies accommodate religious innovation? And above all: how do we know, and how can we properly investigate such questions?
During the 1st millennium BCE, Pre-Classical Anatolia acted as a melting pot and crossroads of languages, cultures and peoples. The political map of the world changed after the collapse of the Bronze Age, the horizon of sea routes was expanded to new interregional networks, new writing systems emerged including the alphabets. The Mediterranean world changed dramatically, and Indo-European languages - Luwic, Lydian, but also Phrygian and Greek - interacted with increasing intensity with each other and with the neighbouring idioms and cultures of the Syro-Mesopotamian, Iranian and Aegean worlds. With an innovative combination of linguistic, historical and philological work, this book will provide a state-of-the-art description of the contacts at the linguistic and cultural boundary between the East and the West.
This book analyzes examples of objects, qualities, and attributes treated as deities in ancient Near Eastern texts spanning the second and first millennia BCE. Specifically, this cross-cultural study examines attestations of this phenomenon in texts from Mesopotamia, Ebla, Alalakh, Emar, and Ugarit, as well as first millennium inscriptions, Aramaic texts from Egypt, and the Hebrew Bible. Through the application of recent research in cognitive science of religion and prototype theory, the book concludes that these types of deities are natural products of the human mind.
The Pioneer Kingdoms of Macedon and Qin critically compares the cultures of Ancient Greece and Early China in the first millennium BC through following the histories of two of its peripheral cases: Argead Macedon and Qin. Emerging from being fringe states to producing Alexander the Great and the First Emperor of China, then rapidly collapsing, these polities had a unique parallel historical experience, though vastly separated by the political developments brought on by the unique features of Greek and Zhou culture within which they operated. Jordan Thomas Christopher undertakes a holistic comparison of these states from their earliest origins through to the reigns of Alexander the Great and the First Emperor, which receive an extended and multi-layered analysis. He thereby highlights the particularities of Greek and Zhou cultures that often go underappreciated as causal factors in history.
In Aristotle's Gynecology, Mariska Leunissen examines Aristotle's methods for the establishment of gynecological facts within his natural science, arguing that many of the gynecological phenomena at stake, such as menstruation and the nature of menstrual blood, the role of female pleasure during sex and women's experiences of erotic dreams, and their knowledge of conception and their experiences of (false) pregnancy and childbirth, were-mostly for socio-cultural reasons-not at all or not immediately accessible for a male natural scientific observer such as Aristotle. Given this lack of immediate empirical evidence, Aristotle employed alternative methods for the establishment of facts-such as relying on signs and circumstantial empirical evidence or using analogical and probabilistic reasoning-and relied heavily on existing expert reports, such as mainly early medical sources but also sometimes verbal reports from women themselves. Moreover, Aristotle used a "secondary standard" for testing the results of this inquiry, namely one which he originally developed for investigations into physically remote meteorological and cosmological phenomena that are "not apparent to observation," and according to which statements of facts are credible if they are ontologically possible. Leunissen thus reconstructs "Aristotle's gynecology" in the context of his commitments to empiricism and his scientific methods for the fact-establishing phase of natural science, and elucidates the role his concepts of evidence, credibility, and signs play in his natural scientific research. However, through its focus on Aristotle's use of gendered knowledge and his reconstruction of natural phenomena believed to be characteristic of women, Leunissen's book also offers a glimpse of the lived experiences and reproductive beliefs of women in Ancient Greece.
A comprehensive edition of Akkadian chronographic texts from the fourth to the first centuries BCEBabylonian Chronographic Texts from the Hellenistic Period gathers in a single volume previously unpublished tablets together with those that have appeared before, including the Babylonian chronicles, the historical sections of the Astronomical Diaries, the Babylonian and Uruk King Lists, and the Antiochus Cylinder from Borsippa. The volume offers new descriptions, transliterations, and translations of each tablet, together with full linguistic and historical commentary. This comprehensive collection brings these important historiographic tools to a broader audience of scholars of history, biblical studies, and the ancient world. An appendix with entries on political institutions, temples, important persons, and Babylonian and Greek words makes this an indispensable tool for students.
The consulship was the highest office in the Roman Republic. At the end of their term ex-consuls automatically attained the status of consulares, remained members of the Senate for life, gained prestige and influence in Rome and were therefore expected to play a prominent role in Roman politics and society. Holding the consulship by no means marked the end of a consular's political activities. But what did ex-consuls do from the time they completed their consulship until their death? What was their political career? What was their political role in the Senate? What kinds of public tasks and duties did they perform for the res publica? What function did consulares play in Roman society, and how strong was their leadership capacity? This is the first book in any language on the political role of ex-consuls, who formed the top level of the aristocracy during the Roman Republic.
This book provides a holistic and diachronic approach to investigating the lives and social identities of children throughout the ninth to fourth centuries bce in Athens and Attica. It presents detailed analyses of mentions of children in ancient sources, scenes showing children on Geometric, black-figure, red-figure, and white-ground painted pottery, and carved marble grave markers, as well as child burials. The analyses conducted identify material cultures of children and childhood—objects used by children themselves, and objects used when caring for children—that can be used to investigate children’s identities in houses and in society across the extended life course. They provide a much-needed tool for identifying the presence of children in the archaeological record. The research presented compares the range of objects associated with children at different times and in different contexts. The evidence considered suggests childhood became an increasingly distinct stage in the ancient Greek life course throughout the period 900 to 323 bce, but it also demonstrates that children did not necessarily became more prominent in Attic society as a consequence. It suggests that children’s identities in many ways remained constant, with children always prized for the stability and continuity they represented, but appreciated for their role in perpetuating society with increasing frequency over time, and more when society was under threat. Ultimately, the volume suggests major socio-political change impacted children’s experiences of childhood and what it meant to be a child in ancient Athens primarily because of how it affected the agency of their family members, especially the women responsible for caring for children.
Religion is a modern invention, a category used to describe and study certain kinds of human behaviour. Yet when it comes to the ancient world and its texts - including those that comprise the Jewish and Christian Bibles - it can be easy to forget that they did not fall from the sky as simple expressions of dogma. Rather, the ancient writings of early Judaism and Christianity are firmly rooted in the world and are the product of an astonishing array of human experience and agency: acts of self-fashioning; of imaginative speculation; of mourning and memorializing; of forming, dissolving, or refashioning group identities; and more. Religious Inventions asks how modern conceptions of religion can shed light on the relics, textual and otherwise, of ancient Mediterranean Jews and Christians. What insights from the contemporary study of religious behaviours and practices challenge what we think we know about the ancient world? Conversely, how can thinking about the ancient world challenge what we think we know about religion today? This volume responds to these questions through explorations of the material and social circumstances behind the production of written artifacts. It examines how religious practices relate to conceptions of identity and critiques the utility of the comparative method for approaching ancient writings. Textual authority is used and abused by many of today's public figures. Religious Inventions offers an alternative approach to understanding how authority is constructed: from the ground up, by the creative actions and choices of real people who lived long ago.
This volume presents the first comprehensive study in English of the Roman History by Appian of Alexandria. Appian was an Egyptian Greek and Roman citizen, who wrote his history of Rome in twenty-four books, covering the period from the foundation of the city to Trajan's wars, in the middle of the second century CE. Luke Pitcher explains and analyses what it is known about Appian's life, the structure of his work (which has not survived completely intact), and his use of sources. He then examines how Appian organizes and structures his material, and the considerations which inform his treatment of spaces, peoples, polities, and individuals within history. A full appreciation of Appian's achievement requires an awareness of the deeper structures of the Roman History as a whole: in particular, how the first half of the work (which, unusually, covers Roman conquests area by area, rather than in one long chronological sweep) lays the ground for the second, where towering personalities such as Julius Caesar bring an end to the Roman Republic in the five books of the Civil Wars. The closing chapters build on these arguments to create a picture of what Appian tries to achieve in his history, and what this says about him as a historian.
Tuspa (Tushpa), the capital of the Urartians who established their state on the Eastern Anatolian High Plateau in the 9th century BC, provides invaluable material remains--monuments and inscriptions--that help us understand this ancient civilization. This book presents the results of new research conducted between 2010 and 2019, building on nearly 170 years of ongoing studies in this ancient city. Tushpa, the earliest example of a new settlement model developed by Assyria's perennial enemy, occupies a strategic position on the high plateau north of the Taurus Mountains. Through this book, you will gain insight into the settlement policies of the Urartians, who built their cities in plains surrounded by impassable mountains. These policies are reflected in their inscriptions, architectural styles, and the intricate weaving of stone walls.
Alexander the Great in Jerusalem: Myth and History discusses four different stories told in antiquity about the meeting between Alexander the Great and the Judeans of Jerusalem. In history, this meeting passed without noticeable events. Into the historical void stepped various Judean storytellers, who wrote not what was, but what could (or even should) have been. The tradition as a whole deals with an issue that resurfaced time and again in ancient Judean history: conquest and regime installment by new foreign rulers. It does so by using Alexander as a cipher for a current Hellenistic and Roman foreign rule. The earliest version can be traced to the context of the Seleukid monarch Antiochos III "the Great", and postulates a Judean text from that time that has been hitherto unknown, and which survived in a Byzantine recension (epsilon) of the Alexander Romance. The second and third chapters turn to rabbinic sources, and deal with the Judean approaches and attitudes towards Roman occupation and rule, first at the advent of Pompey and then at the institution of Provincia ludaea at the expense of the Herodian dynasty. The final story is the most famous, previously considered the earliest, rather than the latest; that of Josephus. Alexander the Great in Jerusalem demonstrates how the historical tradition consistently maintained the moral and sacral superiority of the Jerusalem temple and of Judaism, making Alexander either embrace monotheism or prostrate himself before the Judean high priest. This not only bolstered Judean self-confidence under conditions of military and political inferiority, but also brought the changing foreign rulers into the fold of Judean sacred history.
This volume presents part of the author's research on the Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions recovered in the ruins of the Achaemenid palaces in Susa, conducted within the framework of the DARIOSH-Louvre Project. It offers a new study of several fragmentary inscriptions in Old Persian, Achaemenid Elamite, and Achaemenid Babylonian, currently designated as DSe, DSt, DSb, DSl, DSa, DSk, DSi, DSp, D Sb, DSj, A Se, DSs, 'Inc. Sb', and others. The book provides a new edition of each inscription based on both published and unpublished fragments. Additionally, it introduces some new lexicons and cuneiform signs in the Old Persian language and script.
In the period from about 200 B.C. to the early Roman imperial period, all regions of the Mediterranean underwent a profound process of political, economic, and cultural transformation. This book seeks to provide a balanced and multi-faceted account of this process. Drawing from diverse fields of material evidence, such as art, architecture, inscriptions, and objects of consumption, the individual chapters contrast the positive qualities and effects of cultural exchange with disruptive factors such as violence, dominance, and subjugation.
Identities in Antiquity is a multi-disciplinary platform for the synthetic study of ancient identities, set in a more rounded and inclusive notion of antiquity. The volume showcases methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of ancient identities by scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds and career stages. In doing so, it promotes a more holistic approach to the study of ancient identities, facilitating comparisons between different periods and disciplines and generating new knowledge in the process. Chapters illustrating the intersecting, multifaceted, and mutable (or else highly immutable) nature of ancient identities address themes such as ethnicity, race, gender, mobility, religion, and elite and sub-elite identities - most notably that of the enslaved - in case studies spanning the ancient Mediterranean world and beyond, from the third millennium BCE until the early Middle Ages. The volume is suitable for students and scholars working on the Ancient Near East, the Graeco-Roman Worlds, Late Antiquity, and Byzantium, offering a valuable contribution to the study of past identities and the internal workings of ancient societies.
The Near East during the Hellenistic and Roman periods has been studied for centuries. This Handbook includes fifty chapters written by experts from a variety of disciplines: archaeology (including classical, near eastern, and Islamic), ancient history, anthropology, art history, data and network science, epigraphy, and historiography. Together, these chapters shed a fresh light on the vast regions that made up Hellenistic and later Roman Syria and the Near East. The material and written evidence from the region is considered side-by-side with historical sources as well as scientific data coming out of archaeological science and network science, and shows how new knowledge about the region can be brought to the forefront of current literature on the subject. The dynamic, volatile, diverse, and culturally rich regions that this volume focuses on have left an abundant cultural heritage--and in many places these regions are under constant threat. In this Handbook, knowledge about the newest research on a myriad of these regions, sites, and locations is highlighted together with overviews of the centuries-long history of research. The Handbook is essential for students, scholars, and the archaeologically-inclined reader, and constitutes the definitive collection of current research in the field.
Explore the detailed and personal stories of real people living throughout the Hellenistic world In A Social and Cultural History of the Hellenistic World, author Gillian Ramsey Neugebauer paints a vivid picture of the men and women of the Hellenistic period, their communities, and their experiences of life. Assuming only minimal knowledge of classical antiquity, this clear and engaging textbook brings to life the real people who lived in the Mediterranean region, the Balkans, around the Black Sea, across North Africa, and the Near East. Rather than focusing on the elites, royals, and other significant figures of the period, the author draws from a wide range of ancient evidence to explore everyday Hellenistic people in their own context. Reader-friendly chapters offer fresh perspectives on well-studied areas of ancient Greek culture while providing new insights into rarely discussed aspects of day-to-day life in the Hellenistic world. Topics include daily technology, food, clothing, housing, travel, working life, slavery, education, temple economies, and more. Containing numerous references, further readings, photographs, and figures, A Social and Cultural History of the Hellenistic World is an excellent textbook for undergraduate and graduate courses in Ancient History or Classical Studies programs, particularly those dedicated to Hellenistic history.
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