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This book addresses the history of interaction in the Aegean world during the third century BC. The main focus is the island of Delos and its important regional sanctuary. Through a thorough investigation of the Delian epigraphic and material evidence, it explores how and to which degree the islands of the southern Aegean formed active networks of political, religious, and cultural interaction. The book aims to show that this kind of regional interaction in the southern Aegean resulted in the creation of a regional identity, which was expressed, among other things, in the existence of a federal union of the islands, the so-called Islanders’ League. It is structured along the lines of four case studies which explore different types of networks around Delos: the federal organization of islands (Islanders’ League), the participation of Delian and other agents in the processes of monumentalization of the Delian landscape, the network of honours, and the social dynamics of dedication through the record of dedicants in the Delian inventories.

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.

To all those who witnessed his extraordinary conquests, from Albania to India, Alexander the Great appeared invincible. How Alexander himself promoted this appearance—how he abetted the belief that he enjoyed divine favor and commanded even the forces of nature against his enemies—is the subject of this book. Solid evidence for the “supernaturalized” Alexander lies in a rare series of medallions that depict the triumphant young king at war against the elephants, archers, and chariots of Rajah Porus of India at the Battle of the Hydaspes River. Recovered from Afghanistan and Iraq in sensational and sometimes perilous circumstances, these ancient artifacts have long animated the modern historical debate about Alexander. The book considers the history of their discovery and interpretation, the knowable facts of their manufacture and meaning, and, ultimately, the king's own psyche and his frightening theology of war. The result is an analysis of Alexander history and myth, a vivid account of numismatics, and a fascinating look into the age-old mechanics of megalomania.

The princeps Augustus (63 BCE–14 CE), recognized as the first of the Roman emperors, looms large in the teaching and writing of Roman history. Major political, literary, and artistic developments alike are attributed to him. This book deliberately and provocatively shifts the focus off Augustus while still looking at events of his time. Contributors uncover the perspectives and contributions of a range of individuals other than the princeps. Not all thought they were living in the “Augustan Age.” Not all took their cues from Augustus. In their self-display or ideas for reform, some anticipated Augustus. Others found ways to oppose him that also helped to shape the future of their community. The volume challenges the very idea of an “Augustan Age” by breaking down traditional turning points and showing the continuous experimentation and development of these years to be in continuity with earlier Roman culture. In showcasing absences of Augustus and giving other figures their due, the chapters of this volume make a seemingly familiar period startlingly new.

Ancient economies, outside the Persian, and later, Roman empires, were unlike the economies of modern nation states. Transactions were conducted bilaterally, just like a face to face contract, so exchanges led to the development of a dense network of agreements. This book explores the economic networks within a region framed by the Pindhos and Balkan mountain chains on the west and north, the Black Sea and the Bosporus to east and south, in the second half of the first millennium bc. The Greco-Persian wars, at the start of this period, triggered a process of political integration, as two dynastic powers, Macedon and Odrysian Thrace, expanded across this land mass, and whose progressive demise brought about by Roman military and political interventions culminated in economic integration with the Roman state, as represented in the implementation of the tax law of Asia, during the course of the first century bc. The chapters focus at least as much on preoccupations with workmanship, as they do on the lifestyles of leading fashionable circles, and the economic agents of the intervening centuries, such as merchants from Thasos, leather workers of civic centres of the interior, and metal smiths from various mountainous zones. Exchange is unthinkable without markets playing a key role, while animals must also be factored into the debate about travel and the intensity of traffic.

The endogenous rise of primary states constituted a major organizational revolution, for through emulation or coercion these states served as prototypes for all subsequent large-scale, politically organized societies that have replaced and encompassed all small-scale societies. Primary states emerged before sophisticated writing systems in six generally recognized regions: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, China, Mesoamerica, and Andean South America. This book identifies Polynesia as the seventh such region by tracing the emergence of primary states in Hawai`i that, along with the Tongan state, were the only ones described by fully literate eyewitnesses. The Hawaiian state emergence model, constructed here from archaeological and historical evidence, employs comparisons with Tonga and five Polynesian nonstate societies to propose that the Hawaiian state emergence entailed a profound sociopolitical transformation in which leadership of each large Hawaiian island shifted from a relatively powerless symbolic chief to a warrior-king who exercised legitimate political power as head of a centralized government. The key management innovation was the ruler’s ability to assert control indirectly by delegating power among multiple tiers of a hierarchical bureaucracy. Modeled modifications of the old order also included the funding of government operations with taxes diverted from the goods once collected for distribution among commoners, the invention of conquest warfare, and the shift from dual ownership to chiefs’ assertion of property rights superior to those of commoners. According to the hard times hypothesis, a major impetus for the escalation of power politics may have been unrest among chiefs and commoners triggered by faltering agricultural productivity.

Although long considered to be a barren region on the periphery of ancient Chinese civilization, the southwest massif was once the political heartland of numerous Bronze Age kingdoms during the first millennium BC. Their distinctive material tradition—intricately cast bronze kettledrums and cowrie shell containers—have given archaeologists and historians a glimpse of the extraordinary wealth, artistry, and power exercised by highland leaders in prehistory. After a millennium of rule, however, imperial conquest under the Han state in 109 BC reduced local power, leading to the disappearance of Bronze Age traditions and a fraught process of assimilation. Instead of a clash between center and periphery or barbarism and civilization, this book examines the classic study of imperial conquest as a confrontation of different political times. The author grounds an archaeological account of the region where landscape histories and funerary traditions associated the Dian and Mimo polities bring to light a history of competing elite lineages, warrior cultures, and chiefly genealogies. In particular, the book illustrates how precious funerary offerings—drums, ornate weaponry, and cowries—distinguished personal biographies and memories that were central to the transmission of status across generations. Imperial incorporation therefore emerges as a problem that entangled Han bureaucratic time and historical production with the generational time of highland leadership and its political cycles. The book extends conventional approaches to empires to show how the political time of prehistory can complicate imperial governance and recast rupture less as a fateful consequence than a contentious process involving local actors and generating new stakes.

This book explores the region of Samnium in central Italy, where a rich blend of historical, literary, epigraphic, numismatic, and archaeological evidence supports a fresh perspective on the complexity and dynamism of a part of the ancient Mediterranean that is normally regarded as marginal. This volume presents new ways of looking at ancient Italian communities that did not leave written accounts about themselves but played a key role in the development of early Rome, first as staunch opponents and later as key allies. It combines texts and archaeology to form a new understanding of the ancient inhabitants of Samnium during the last six centuries BC, how they constructed their identity, how they developed unique forms of social and political organization, and how they became entangled with Rome’s expanding power and the impact that this had on their daily lives.

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.

The “science of old things,” archaeology is marked by its care, obligation, and loyalty to things, from ancient cities in the Mexican heartland and megalithic monuments in Britain to the perfume jars of the ancient Greek city-state and Leica cameras. This book seeks to understand the diverse practices that arise through this disciplinary commitment to things.

Classical archaeology has changed beyond recognition in the past generation, in its aims, its choice of subject-matter and the methods it uses. This book contains twenty-five chapters, some of them previously published only in rather inaccessible places, which have contributed to this change. The chapters cover four decades of work on pre-classical and classical Greece and some adjacent fields of scholarship, beginning in the 1960s when classical archaeology was not widely seen as a free-standing subject. They chart the progress of a movement for the intellectual independence of Greek archaeology and art, from history and textual studies and for recognition among other branches of archaeology. The key theme of the chapters is the importance of the Iron Age as the formative period in the making of classical Greece and the text varies this with comment on literature, history, anthropology, Aegean and European prehistory and Roman provincial archaeology. This collection represents innovative work in classical archaeology; challenges accepted boundaries and inhibitions; and is wide in scope, covering history, prehistory, art, literary interpretation, and field archaeology.

Anatolia was the only major part of the Roman Empire that did not fall in late antiquity, but remained continuously under Roman rule through the eleventh century. Anatolia can, therefore, show the difference Roman administration continued to make, once pan-Mediterranean rule had collapsed. Urban decline did not set in before the fifth century, after Anatolia had already been thoroughly Christianized in the course of the fourth century. The urban decline, when it occurred from the fifth century onwards, was paired with rural prosperity, an increase in the number, size, and quality of rural settlements and in rural population. The ruralization was interrupted during the seventh to ninth centuries, when Anatolia was invaded first by the Persians and then by the Arabs and the population appears to have sought shelter behind new urban fortifications and in large cathedrals. Once the Arab threat was over in the ninth century, ruralization set in again and most cities seem to have been abandoned or reduced to villages during the ensuing peacetime, while the countryside experienced renewed prosperity and a resurgence of small rural church buildings. This trend was reversed once more, when the Seljuk Turks appeared on the scene in the eleventh century, devastated the countryside, and led to a revival and refortification of the former cities.

The Romans developed sophisticated methods for managing hygiene, including aqueducts for moving water from one place to another, sewers for removing used water from baths and runoff from walkways and roads, and public and private latrines. Through the archaeological record, graffiti, sanitation-related paintings, and literature, this book explores this little-known world of bathrooms and sewers, offering unique insights into Roman sanitation, engineering, urban planning and development, hygiene, and public health. Focusing on the cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Ostia, and Rome, this work challenges common perceptions of Romans’ social customs, beliefs about health, tolerance for filth in their cities, and attitudes toward privacy. In charting the complex history of sanitary customs from the late republic to the early empire, the book reveals the origins of waste removal technologies and their implications for urban health, past and present.

Ancient Greek migrants in Sicily produced societies and economies that both paralleled and differed from their homeland. Since the nineteenth century, explanations for these similarities and differences have been debated, with attention focusing on the roles played by locals and immigrants in Greek Sicily’s remarkable cultural efflorescence. Some scholars have viewed the ancient Greeks as one of a long line of incomers whom Sicily and its inhabitants shape; others have seen them in a hierarchical manner, with the Greeks acting as the source of innovation and achievement in shaping their Sicily, while being lesser to homeland Greece. What is lacking is a basic work on social and economic history that gathers the historical and archaeological evidence and deploys it to test the various historical models. This book represents the first such endeavor. It adopts a broadly based interdisciplinary approach that combines classical and prehistoric studies, texts and material culture, and a variety of methods and theories to put the history of Greek Sicily on a new footing. While Sicily and Greece had conjoined histories from the start, their relationship was neither one of center and periphery nor “colonial,” but an interdependent and mutually enriching diaspora. Simultaneously, local conditions and peoples, including Phoenician migrants, also shaped the evolution of Sicilian Greek societies and economies. This book explains the similarities and differences with developments in Greece and brings greater clarity to the parts played by locals and immigrants in ancient Sicily’s impressive achievements.

The Late Assyrian Empire (c.900–612 BCE) was the first state to rule the major centres of the Middle East. The Assyrian court inhabited some of the most monumental palaces of its time. The Architecture of Late Assyrian Royal Palaces is the first book to provide an in-depth analysis of Late Assyrian palatial architecture; it offers a general introduction to all major royal palaces in the major centres of the empire: Assur, Kalḫu, Dur-Sharruken, and Nineveh. The book gives a comprehensive overview of all the relevant excavated materials, bringing together the architecture as currently understood within the broader framework of textual and art-historical sources, and providing new plans for all palaces. Research has often focused on a duality between public and private realms. This book redefines the architectural principles governing these palaces and proposes a new historical framework; it analyses the organization of access and movement, the spatial organization of the palace community, and the role of the king within the palaces. The book argues that architectural changes were guided by a need to accommodate ever-larger groups as the empire grew in size. The main reception suites became more monumental over time, but the general principles of Late Assyrian architecture remained. This included an architecture that focused on the interior of spaces, placed the king front and centre, and was primarily geared to state activity even in the more residential areas of the palaces.

In the opening decades of the twentieth century, Germany was the acknowledged leader in arts and humanities scholarship. Following the rise of the Nazi regime, many of the key thinkers in Germany—leaders in their fields in classics, philosophy, archaeology, art history, and oriental studies, for example—fled to Britain, and many came to Oxford. From the mid-1930s onwards, Oxford could accurately be described as an ark of knowledge of Western civilization. A conjunction of libraries, publishing houses, and the university meant that Oxford’s refugee scholars had a profound and lasting impact on the development of British culture. Oxford’s history as a place of refuge for scientists who were victims of Nazi oppression is relatively well known, but the important story of Oxford’s role as a sanctuary for Western cultural history has received much less attention. In this volume, we address the impact of Oxford as a shelter, a meeting point, and a centre in arts and humanities, by looking both at those who came to Oxford and stayed, and those whose lives intersected with Oxford at crucial moments before and during the war. This study will illustrate the unique conjunction of place, people, and time which had an impact on Western intellectual history. This volume is an introduction to the huge impact of academic refugees in arts and humanities on Britain’s cultural heritage, and Oxford’s pivotal role as a place where ideas about art, culture, and the history of civilization could be rescued, shared, developed, and disseminated.

Elite Romans periodically chose to limit or destroy the memory of a leading citizen who was deemed an unworthy member of the community. Sanctions against memory could lead to the removal or mutilation of portraits and public inscriptions. The author of this book provides the first chronological overview of the development of this Roman practice—an instruction to forget—from archaic times into the second century a.d. She explores Roman memory sanctions against the background of Greek and Hellenistic cultural influence and in the context of the wider Mediterranean world. Combining literary texts, inscriptions, coins, and material evidence, this richly illustrated study contributes to a deeper understanding of Roman political culture.

Little of the historiography of third-century Athens survives, and much of what is known—or might be known—about the period has come down in inscriptions carved by Attic stonemasons of the time. This book provides new insight into an unsettled and obscure moment in antiquity.

This book is dedicated to the political economy of one of the major states of the Hellenistic world, the Attalid kingdom of Pergamon in north-western Asia Minor. In the third century bc, the Attalid dynasts of Pergamon were relatively minor players in Hellenistic great-power politics. In 188 bc, after Rome's victory over the Seleukid king Antiochos III, the Attalids were granted the lion's share of the former Seleukid territories in western and inner Anatolia; at a stroke, the Attalids were elevated to the status of one of the major powers of the eastern Mediterranean. But this new-found prominence came at a price. Since the vast expanse of Attalid Asia Minor had been won not by conquest, but by gift of the Roman senate, the ideological and bureaucratic structures through which the second-century Attalid rulers administered their kingdom differed sharply from those of the other major Hellenistic dynasties. The late Attalid monarchs were forced to develop a new non-charismatic royal style and ideology. A full reassessment of the character of Attalid Asia Minor is long overdue. This book is chiefly concerned with the political economy of the second-century Attalid kingdom, and in particular the three major themes of money, international relations, and the functioning of the state.

The auxilia provided more than half the manpower in Rome’s provincial armies. This book demonstrates how, both on the battlefield and off, the Roman state addressed a crucial and enduring challenge, retaining control of the miscellaneous auxiliaries upon whom its very existence depended. Crucially, this was not simply achieved by pay and punishment, but also by a very particular set of cultural attributes that characterized provincial society under the Roman Empire. To understand better these attributes, this book opens with a broad chronological survey which examines the development of the auxilia against the evolving structures of imperial power. Beginning with the origins of the imperial auxilia under the late Republic, the survey culminates in the mid third century AD, by which time most key distinctions between auxiliary soldiers and legionary troops had been substantially eroded. The volume continues with an analysis of archaeological and historical sources for the recruitment, cults, routines, patterns of speech and written communication, tactics and dress of auxiliaries, and the broader military communities of which they were a part. In each instance, local variation and grassroots developments are set alongside broader imperial patterns.