TECHNOLOGY AND IDEAS: ARCHITECTS AND MASTER-BUILDERS IN THE EARLY BYZANTINE WORLD

2008 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 379-405
Author(s):  
Enrico Zanini
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Technical Expertise ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
Written Sources ◽  
Master Builders

Eastern literary and epigraphic sources from the 5th and 6th centuries A.D. mention several architects/engineers in the service of the imperial court at Constantinople. They give us an idea of the scientific knowledge, technical expertise and social status of these men. A larger group of architects and master-builders are also attested. They operated mainly in a lower-key, local context, but they also moved abroad to answer the requests of patrons. A comparison between the written sources and archaeology allows us to reconstruct some examples of the mobility of people and ideas, and to advance some hypotheses about the development of building material culture in the late antique eastern Mediterranean world.

The Holy Island

2019 ◽  
pp. 471-494
Author(s):  
Jody Michael Gordon ◽  
William R. Caraher
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Unique Form ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Gradual Development ◽  
Significant Case ◽  
Christian Society

The archaeology of early Christian Cyprus represents one of the most significant case studies of how early Christianity developed because of the island’s unique geohistorical background and the diverse nature of its material remains. When combined with local hagiographical resources, Cyprus’s material culture illustrates the gradual development of a unique form of early Christian society between the fourth and seventh centuries that drew on both local and imperial influences. This chapter contributes to such perspectives by offering an introduction to early Christian Cyprus’s archaeological corpus vis-à-vis the island’s unique Late Antique eastern Mediterranean context. It examines basilicas, baptisteries, mosaics and church decor, funerary structures, coins and seals, metalwork, epigraphy, and ceramics to reveal the discipline’s main research foci and suggest topics for future investigation.

scholarly journals The Justinianic Plague: An inconsequential pandemic?

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (51) ◽  
pp. 25546-25554 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Mordechai ◽  
Merle Eisenberg ◽  
Timothy P. Newfield ◽  
Adam Izdebski ◽  
Janet E. Kay ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Ancient Dna ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Causal Factor ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Mortuary Archaeology ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
Economic Trends ◽  
Mortality Estimates ◽  
Written Sources

Existing mortality estimates assert that the Justinianic Plague (circa 541 to 750 CE) caused tens of millions of deaths throughout the Mediterranean world and Europe, helping to end antiquity and start the Middle Ages. In this article, we argue that this paradigm does not fit the evidence. We examine a series of independent quantitative and qualitative datasets that are directly or indirectly linked to demographic and economic trends during this two-century period: Written sources, legislation, coinage, papyri, inscriptions, pollen, ancient DNA, and mortuary archaeology. Individually or together, they fail to support the maximalist paradigm: None has a clear independent link to plague outbreaks and none supports maximalist reconstructions of late antique plague. Instead of large-scale, disruptive mortality, when contextualized and examined together, the datasets suggest continuity across the plague period. Although demographic, economic, and political changes continued between the 6th and 8th centuries, the evidence does not support the now commonplace claim that the Justinianic Plague was a primary causal factor of them.

Diachronic trends in the evolution of civilizations in the Nile valley

2018 ◽  
pp. 37-49
Author(s):  
Элеонора Кормышева ◽  
Eleonora Kormysheva
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Social History ◽  
Contact Zone ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Nile Valley ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
The Mediterranean

The diachronic trends in socio-economic and cultural development of the societies in the Nile valley are revealed based on the materials from Giza necropolis (the 3rd millennium BC) and the settlement of Abu Erteila (1st century AD). The research made it possible to trace the typological similarities in the evolution of the studied societies in cultural and historical contexts. The main fields of the research were epigraphy, iconography, social history, and material culture. Many previously unknown monuments discovered by Russian archaeologists in Egypt and Sudan were introduced into scientific discourse. The basis was created for studying the Nile valley as a contact zone between the Mediterranean world and Africa.

Greek Slave Systems in their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Demographic Variables ◽  
Archaic Period ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Early Archaic ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
Orthodox View

The orthodox view of ancient Mediterranean slavery holds that Greece and Rome were the only ‘genuine slave societies’ of the ancient world, that is, societies in which slave labour contributed significantly to the economy and underpinned the wealth of elites. Other societies, labelled as ‘societies with slaves’, apparently made little use of slave labour, and have therefore been largely ignored in recent work. Greek Slave Systems in their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800–146 BC presents a radically different view. Slavery was indeed particularly highly developed in Greece and Rome; but it was also highly developed in Carthage and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean, and played a not insignificant role in the affairs of elites in Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia. This new study portrays the Eastern Mediterranean world as a patchwork of regional slave systems. In Greece, diversity was the rule: from the early archaic period onwards, differing historical trajectories in various regions shaped the institution of slavery in manifold ways, producing very different slave systems in regions such as Sparta, Crete, and Attica. In the wider Eastern Mediterranean world, we find a similar level of diversity. Slavery was exploited to different degrees across all of these regions, and was the outcome of a complex interplay between cultural, economic, political, geographic, and demographic variables.

scholarly journals Sicily Before the Greeks. The Interaction with Aegean and the Levant in the Pre-colonial Era

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 172-205
Author(s):  
Davide Tanasi
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Local Material ◽  
Gradual Process ◽  
Multiple Variables ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThe relationship between Sicily and the eastern Mediterranean – namely Aegean, Cyprus and the Levant – represents one of the most intriguing facets of the prehistory of the island. The frequent and periodical contact with foreign cultures were a trigger for a gradual process of socio-political evolution of the indigenous community. Such relationship, already in inception during the Neolithic and the Copper Age, grew into a cultural phenomenon ruled by complex dynamics and multiple variables that ranged from the Mid-3rd to the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. In over 1,500 years, a very large quantity of Aegean and Levantine type materials have been identified in Sicily alongside with example of unusual local material culture traditionally interpreted as resulting from external influence. To summarize all the evidence during such long period and critically address it in order to attempt historical reconstructions is a Herculean labor.Twenty years after Sebastiano Tusa embraced this challenge for the first time, this paper takes stock on two decades of new discoveries and research reassessing a vast amount of literature, mostly published in Italian and in regional journals, while also address the outcomes of new archaeometric studies. The in-depth survey offers a new perspective of general trends in this East-West relationship which conditioned the subsequent events of the Greek and Phoenician colonization of Sicily.

scholarly journals New Book Chronicle

Antiquity ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 91 (359) ◽  
pp. 1401-1411
Author(s):  
Robert Witcher
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Trade Agreements ◽  
Technology Change ◽  
Belt And Road Initiative ◽  
The Past ◽  
Transfer Of Technology ◽  
Belt And Road ◽  
New Phase

Is the era of globalisation on the wane or on the cusp of a new phase of extraordinary expansion? US president Trump's abandonment of trade agreements and the rise of protectionism coincide with China's ‘Belt and Road Initiative’, an unprecedented investment in infrastructure across Asia, Europe and North Africa to improve the connectivity of China with its markets by both land and sea. The future is therefore anyone's guess, but what about the past? There has been much discussion by archaeologists about ancient globalisations (most recently, Hodos 2017), but archaeological studies have often typically been set within the looser framework of ‘connectivity’—the interconnectedness of people and places and the movement of material culture and ideas. The books reviewed here are concerned with various aspects of connectivity, focusing on the Eastern Mediterranean and its European hinterland. All of the volumes are edited collections, each adopting a different unifying theme—the influence of Braudel, a single country as microcosm, the transfer of technology, changevstradition, and the effects of boundaries and frontiers. Do any wider insights into connectivity in the past emerge? And where might archaeological studies of connectivity go next?

From Texts and Iconography to Use-Wear Analysis of Ceramic Vessels

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-210
Author(s):  
Bartłomiej Lis ◽  
Trevor Van Damme
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Wear Analysis ◽  
Use Wear ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Ceramic Vessels ◽  
Repeated Use ◽  
Funerary Rites

While handwashing is attested in the Bronze Age cultures of the eastern Mediterranean and appears in both Linear B records and Homeric epics, the custom has not been discussed with regard to the material culture of Mycenaean Greece. On analogy with Egyptian handwashing equipment, we explore the possibility that a conical bowl made of bronze and copied in clay was introduced in Greece early in the Late Bronze Age for this specific use. We integrate epigraphic, iconographic and formal analyses to support this claim, but in order to interrogate the quotidian function of ceramic lekanes, we present the results of use-wear analysis performed on 130 examples. As use-wear develops from repeated use over a long time, it is a good indicator of normative behaviour, particularly when large datasets are amassed and contrasted with other shapes. While not conclusive, our results allow us to rule out a function as tableware for food consumption, and in combination with all other analyses support the interpretation of lekanes as handwashing basins. We then trace the development of this custom from its initial adoption by elite groups to its spread among new social classes and venues after the collapse of the palace system: at home, as part of communal feasting and sacrifice or as an element of funerary rites. The widespread distribution of handwashing equipment after 1200 bc closely mirrors the situation in our earliest surviving Greek Iron Age texts and joins a growing body of evidence pointing to strong continuity in social practices between the Postpalatial period and the early Iron Age in Greece.

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