Archaeology: Classical

Thanks to Olympias, a full-scale working model of an Athenian trieres (trireme or “three”) built by the Hellenic Navy during the 1980s, we better understand the physical properties of the trireme navies that defeated Xerxes at Salamis and helped build the Athenian Empire of the High Classical Age. The Age of Titans picks up the story of naval warfare and naval power after the Peloponnesian War, following it through the 4th and 3rd centuries BC when Alexander’s successors built huge oared galleys in what has been described as an ancient naval arms race. This book represents the fruits of more than thirty years of research into warships “of larger form” (as Livy calls them) that weighed hundreds of tons and were crewed by 600 to 1000 men and more. The book argues that concrete strategic objectives, more than simple displays of power, explain the naval arms race that developed among Alexander’s successors and drove the development of a new model of naval power we might call “Macedonian.” The model’s immense price tag was unsustainable, however, and during the third century the big ship phenomenon faded in importance, only to be revived unsuccessfully by Antony and Cleopatra in the 1st century BC.

This book explores a phenomenon known as aniconism — the absence of figural images of gods in Greek practiced religion and the adoption of aniconic monuments, namely objects such as pillars and poles, to designate the presence of the divine. Shifting our attention from the well-known territories of Greek anthropomorphism and naturalism, it casts new light on the realm of non-figural objects in Greek religious art. Drawing upon a variety of material and textual evidence dating from the rise of the Greek polis in the eighth century bc to the rise of Christianity in the first centuries ad, this book shows that aniconism was more significant than has often been assumed. Coexisting with the fully figural forms for representing the divine throughout Greek antiquity, aniconic monuments marked an undefined yet fixedly located divine presence. Cults centred on rocks were encountered at crossroads and on the edges of the Greek city. Despite aniconism's liminality, non-figural markers of divine presence became a subject of interest in their own right during a time when mimesis occupied the centre of Greek visual culture. The ancient Greeks saw the worship of stones and poles without images as characteristic of the beginning of their own civilization. Similarly, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the existence of aniconism was seen as physical evidence for the continuity of ancient Greek traditions from time immemorial.

This volume illustrates the multiple ways in which epigraphy enables historical analysis of the postclassical polis (city-state) across a world of geographically dispersed poleis: from the Black Sea and Asia Minor to Sicily via the Aegean and mainland Greece. The book looks at themes such as the modes of interaction between polis and ruling powers, the construction of ethnic and social identity, interstate and civil conflict and its resolution, social economics, institutional processes and privileges, polis representations, ethics, and, not least, religious phenomena. The chapters range from ‘hard epigraphy’ to sophisticated conceptual studies of aspects of the postclassical polis, and approach the inscriptions both as textual objects and as artefacts. The aim of this volume is to identify the postclassical polis both as a reality and as a constructed concept, not only a monolithic block, but a result of tension in the exercise of different kinds of powers. The chapters in this collective volume show that the postclassical polis, both as a reality and as a representation, is the result of negotiations, ancient and modern; and they also illustrate how much of our understanding of the polis is built on patient, painstaking work on the inscriptions.

Festivals were the heartbeat of Greek and Roman society, its social and political organization, and its institutions. They set the rhythm of the year, as laid down in a calendar, and through them divine protection of the public and private spheres was ensured and the populace was joined together in common acts centred on common symbols. The present book contains twelve chapters on Greek and Roman festivals from an interdisciplinary field of Classical scholarship: archaeology, history, history of religions, and philology. The book addresses the key question of what a Greco-Roman festival was, and show that the answer is many-faceted and complex. The very concept of ‘festival’ is examined; the origin, content, practice of different festivals, with their implicit features and historical significance, are discussed. The social, political, and ritual function of ancient festivals is illuminated by examples and theoretical reflections. The book accordingly contributes to a more nuanced and finely delineated picture of the close connections between festivals as religious and social phenomena and processes, and the historical dynamics that shaped them in the times of the Greeks and Romans.

This book addresses the post-Roman history of this world-famous ancient monument. Constructed on the orders of the emperor Hadrian during the 120s ad, the Wall was maintained for almost three centuries before ceasing to operate as a Roman frontier during the fifth century. The scale and complexity of Hadrian's Wall makes it one of the most important ancient monuments in the British Isles. It is the most well-preserved of the frontier works that once defined the Roman Empire. While the Wall is famous as a Roman construct, its monumental physical structure did not suddenly cease to exist in the fifth century. This volume explores the after-life of Hadrian's Wall and considers the ways it has been imagined, represented, and researched from the sixth century to the era of the internet. The sixteen chapters, illustrated with over 100 images, show the changing manner in which the Wall has been conceived and the significant role it has played in imagining the identity of the English, including its appropriation as symbolic boundary between England and Scotland. This book discusses the transforming political, cultural, and religious significance of the Wall during this entire period and addresses the ways in which scholars and artists have been inspired by the monument over the years.

This book provides a new island archaeology and island history of Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Cyprus, set in its eastern Mediterranean context. By drawing out tensions between different ways of thinking about theoretical issues such as insularity and connectivity, ethnicity, migration, and hybridization, it addresses a dynamic new field of archaeological enquiry — the social identity of prehistoric and early historic Mediterranean islanders. The archaeological record of Cyprus during the centuries between about 2700–1000 BC — including architecture, the mortuary record, pottery, figurines, seals and sealings, ivories, metalwork, and the broader Cypriot landscape — is presented. Using this material evidence, the book re‐evaluates from the postcolonial perspective of hybridization long‐standing notions about ethnicity, migration, and colonization on the island at the beginning and end of the Bronze Age, and concludes that the Cypriotes themselves provided the main impetus for social development and change on the island. By addressing directly the theoretical underpinnings of various interpretations of the material record, and by comparing and contrasting that record with all relevant documentary evidence, this book considers how a more contextualized, nuanced treatment of the motivations and practices involved in demographic movement, individual or group identification, cultural entanglement, and social change can help us to re‐present several complex aspects of the Cypriot past, and in turn bring them to bear upon Mediterranean archaeologies.

Landed wealth was crucial for the economies of all Greek city-states, and despite its peculiarities Athens was no exception in that respect. This monograph is the first exhaustive treatment of sacred and public —i.e., non-private— real property in Athens. Following a survey of modern scholarship on the topic, Papazarkadas scrutinizes literary, epigraphic and archaeological evidence, in order to examine lands and other types of realty administered by the polis of Athens and its constitutional and semi-official subdivisions (tribes, demes, religious associations etc). Contrary to earlier anachronistic models that saw sacred realty as a thinly disguised form of state property, the author perceives the sanctity of temene (sacred landholdings) as meaningful, both conceptually and economically. In particular, he detects a seamless link between sacred rentals and cultic activity. This link is markedly visible in two distinctive cases: the border area known as Sacred Orgas, a constant source of contention between Athens and Megara; and the moriai, Athena’s sacred olive-trees, whose crop was the coveted prize of the Panathenaic games. Both topics are treated in separate appendices as do several other problems, not least the socio-economic profile of those involved in the leasing of sacred property, as emerges from a detailed prosopographical analysis. However, certain non-private landholdings were secular and alienable, and their exploitation was often based on financial schemes different from those applied in the case of temene. This gives the author the opportunity to analyze and elucidate ancient notions of public and sacred ownership.

This volume is a collection of studies focusing on population and settlement patterns in the Roman empire in the perspective of the economic development of the Mediterranean world c. 100 BC to AD 350. The analyses offered here highlight the issues of regional and temporal variation: Italy, Spain, Britain, Egypt, Crete, Asia Minor from the Roman republic to the early Byzantine period. Although they are by no means exhaustive, the contributions to this volume sketch out the varied landscapes in which the many general issues raised need to be further analysed. The relationship between urban settlements and their environs and the economy of rural settlements in or beyond those environs is crucial, and the authors suggest particular aspects that might repay analysis: the physical size of settlements and the relationship between size, location, and distribution. The chapters fall into two main groups, the first dealing with the evidence for rural settlement as revealed by archaeological field surveys, and the attendant methodological problems of extrapolating from that evidence to a view of population; and the second with city populations and the phenomenon of urbanization. They proceed to consider hierarchies of settlement in the characteristic classical pattern of city plus territory, the way in which those entities are defined, from the highest to the lowest level: the empire as ‘city of Rome plus territory‘, then regional and local hierarchies, and, more precisely, the identity and the nature of the ‘instruments‘ that enable them to function in economic cohesion.

Given the remarkable concentration of consumers in ancient Rome, the vast majority of whom were entirely reliant on the market for survival, a functioning retail trade was vital to the survival of the city in the late Republic and the Principate. Through an analysis of the literary, legal, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence, together with wide-ranging comparative studies of the distributive trades, this book provides a systematic account of the retail network of Rome — an area of commerce that has been largely neglected in previous studies. The diverse means by which goods were sold to consumers in the city are investigated, from shops and workshops to permanent and periodic markets, fairs, auctions, street traders, and ambulant vendors. The critical relationship between retail and broader environmental factors, including the structure and organisation of production, the wholesale trade, transport systems, social structure, cultural conventions, income levels, and patterns of consumption are all considered, placing the retail trade within the wider context of the urban economy. In exploring the retail trade of Rome in its totality, the book sheds new light on the experience of living in the ancient city.

One of only a few women who ruled ancient Egypt as a king during its thousands of years of history, Tausret was the last pharaoh of the 19th dynasty (c.1200 bce), the last ruling descendent of Ramesses the Great, and one of only two female monarchs buried in Egypt's renowned Valley of the Kings. Though mentioned even in Homer as the pharaoh of Egypt who interacted with Helen at the time of the Trojan War, she has long remained a figure shrouded in mystery, hardly known even by many Egyptologists. Nevertheless, recent archaeological discoveries have illuminated Tausret's importance, her accomplishments, and the extent of her influence. This book combines distinguished scholars whose research and excavations have increased our understanding of the life and reign of this great woman. This book utilizes recent discoveries to correctly position Tausret alongside famous ruling queens such as Hatshepsut and Cleopatra, figures who have long dominated our view of the female monarchs of ancient Egypt. The book brings together archaeological, historical, women's studies, and other approaches to provide a text that will be an important contribution to the literature of Egyptology.