Search Results

This chapter provides an island history of Bronze Age and early Iron Age Cyprus, discussing at length all published documentary evidence related to Alashiya, Ku‐pi‐ri‐jo, and Iadnana (Neo‐Assyrian cuneiform texts). Whilst specific focus falls on issues of identity, the more general intention is to situate Cyprus in its eastern Mediterranean context. Each section — on economy, society, and polity — provides commentary on the material dimensions of the textual evidence; a general historical overview concludes the chapter. Given converging streams of evidence, it is argued that Late Bronze Age Cyprus was centrally organized — politically and economically — under a ruling class that had adopted a coherent ideological and symbolic repertoire of material paraphernalia to signal their identity, within and beyond the island. The documentary evidence related to Alashiya demonstrates a role so pervasive and influential in the international world of the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East at this time that it is difficult to see how its king would not have controlled the entire island.

In the Dichin (north central Bulgaria) store-buildings destroyed in about the 480s, the large quantities of imported Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea amphorae typify late Roman military supply (annona) to the forts of the lower Danube limes. A dearth of amphorae at Dichin for most of the sixth century is linked ultimately to alterations in trading patterns in the Mediterranean as a whole. A slight increase in amphorae shortly before the final destruction of c.580 reflects a significant recasting of supply sources. The few imported red-slipped wares are mostly late fifth century and of Pontic origin. During the sixth century, modifications in the local coarse pottery reflect cultural changes in the region — the decline of Romanized eating practices and the impact of the barbarian social traditions. The wider significance of ‘foederati ware’ for the Germanic settlement of the region and its influence on the technology of indigenous ceramics production are also explored.

The late medieval eastern Mediterranean was a region typified by political, religious, social, economic, and cultural complexity. This volume aims to uncover some important unifying themes which can help to make sense of the region's highly fragmented and fluid polities, economies, and societies, and which may allow us to speak with confidence about the late medieval eastern Mediterranean as a coherent field of historical inquiry. This introductory chapter provides some background to the region's complexities and fluidities, especially at the level of political authority. It considers the preoccupations of the lively but rather diffuse recent historiography of the region. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter considers whether the late medieval eastern Mediterranean can usefully be seen as ‘an island world’. It presents a survey of political, economic, and demographic developments in the eastern Mediterranean in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, which reveal that the conjunction of these developments led to the fragmentation of the region and in a large extent of political, religious, and cultural diversity, especially in the Aegean space. Some important structural changes occurred in the patterns of production, in the networks of trade and transportation, in the course of shipping routes, and in the economic functions and relative importance of ports in the region. It remains to establish whether the concept of ‘island world’ may be postulated in these changed circumstances, and whether it has any validity at all.

A wide variety of radical leftist ideas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began circulating among segments of the populations of Eastern Mediterranean cities. These ideas, which are best defined as selective adaptations of socialist and anarchic principles, included specific calls for social justice, workers' rights, mass secular education, and anticlericalism, and more broadly a general challenge to the existing social and political order at home and abroad. The ideas of social justice that constituted central themes in leftist thought rarely had a reformist agenda. Radicals in Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria forged a culture of contestation in which they challenged existing and emerging class boundaries, redefined notions of foreignness and belonging, and promoted alternative visions of the social and world order.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore the rich legal tradition of the Eastern Mediterranean. It assesses the tension between law and religion as two cultural (sub)systems within society that compete for absolute power. It addresses the question of how these two systems exist next to each other in either harmony or conflict, and what strategies are employed in ancient societies to fuse both concepts in a meaningful unity that would govern society. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter demonstrates that colonial development during the mandate period was the culmination of a longer running process that stretched back well into the Ottoman period. Contrary to British colonial rhetoric, the districts of the Ottoman Empire that later formed the Palestine Mandate were undergoing rapid change in the decades before the First World War as they were increasingly incorporated into global networks of trade and political reform, all under the umbrella of a centralizing Ottoman state. The chapter begins by taking a general look at the establishment of new routes of infrastructure in the coastal areas of Ottoman Syria, with Palestine appearing as a frontier zone at the southern end of this region. The Ottoman-era interest in developing Haifa and the Dead Sea is then documented, introducing some of the individuals, both locals and outsiders, who aspired to play a role in their development.

This chapter examines the significance of religious identity in the late medieval eastern Mediterranean, in particular the role that it played in broader social and political change. It engages with some thought-provoking recent analyses of late medieval identity-making among Greeks and Latins as well as with a conspicuous strand of current thinking in the historiography of the Crusades, which argues for the central importance of distinct, and usually hostile, religious identities in medieval contexts. It suggests that before we make assumptions about religion as a unifying factor which provided long-term immutable boundaries between different communities, we should pay close attention to the social and political contexts within which the evidence for clearly defined religious identities was produced. Among the most important of those contexts was intense religious competition, itself a product of the fluid and flexible political structures that so often typified the region.

This chapter examines crusading in the eastern Mediterranean in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It argues that relatively few crusades actually happened in this period, and that many of the initiatives found in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century literary sources were either entirely unrealistic or not really about concrete plans to campaign in the eastern Mediterranean at all. Instead those who constructed such paper-crusades were principally concerned with entirely western European political and spiritual contexts. Crusade in this sense became a useful discourse for discussing other purely western issues rather than a clarion call for action in the east.

A discussion of antecedents, growth, and nature of eastern Mediterranean exchange relations with the coasts of the Indian subcontinent is the theme of this chapter. An overview of the land and sea routes of the pre-Roman times, the circumstances that had led to the establishment of Roman Egypt and expansion of Graeco-Roman overseas trade constitute the core. In this connection the beginnings of cross-oceanic voyages to the coasts of the Indian subcontinent and the development of the necessary shipping technology in the Mediterranean have been reviewed. An analysis of the nature of the Graeco-Roman exchange relations and their characterization as an ensemble of different modes of transactions from reciprocity and barter besides actual trade is another component.

The collapse of Bronze Age civilizations in the Aegean, southwest Asia, and the eastern Mediterranean 3200 years ago remains a persistent riddle in Eastern Mediterranean archaeology, as both archaeologists and historians believe the event was violent, sudden, and culturally disruptive. In the first phase of this period, many cities between Pylos and Gaza were destroyed violently and often left unoccupied thereafter. The palace economy of the Aegean Region and Anatolia that characterized the Late Bronze Age was replaced by the isolated village cultures of the Dark Ages. Earthquakes, attacks of the Sea Peoples, and socio-political unrest are among the most frequently suggested causes for this phenomenon. However, while climate change has long been considered a potential prime factor in this crisis, only recent studies have pinpointed the megadrought behind the collapse. An abrupt climate shift seems to have caused, or hastened, the fall of the Late Bronze Age world by sparking political and economic turmoil, migrations, and famines. The entirety of the megadrought’s effects terminated the Late Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean.

After announcing the principal aims of the book and situating its findings within recent scholarship, the Introduction gives an overview of the political, economic, and intellectual climate in which colonial development was practised in Palestine. It is argued that the Eastern Mediterranean became a crucial testing ground for notions of progress and modernity from the late 19th century onwards as both Ottomans and Europeans formulated a working definition of colonial development. In Palestine this process became particularly marked after 1905—the year in which the exploitation of the Dead Sea and the expansion of Haifa as an industrial port city can first be detected. In terms of British policymaking, Palestine's attraction as the coastal hub of a newly available resource-rich region was greatly enhanced by the changes wrought by the First World War. As Ottoman power crumbled during the war, the advocates of colonial development rose to positions of influence in British government, urging that a more effective use of empire resources could help rebuild the post-war economy.

This chapter analyzes patterns of numismatic continuity and change in an area stretching from Ayyubid Egypt and Syria to Byzantine Trebizond, and against a backdrop of porous territorial and cultural borders, contemporary literary discourse, and market logistics. The story of Alexander the Great and paradigms of Roman and Byzantine rulership inspired some of the most intriguing numismatic imagery and inscriptions ever endorsed by Muslim rulers. On the other side of the spectrum, borrowings of Islamic and Byzantine numismatic practices, vestimentary tradition, and ceremonial by Latins, Georgians, and Cilician Armenians resulted in unexpected adaptations of old and established motifs, metallic values, and weight standards. With their numismatic prototypes distorted, deconstructed, and translated into new and ambiguous imagery, the currencies struck in the late medieval eastern Mediterranean were used for the dissemination of political agendas and cultural messages to diverse audiences.

This chapter examines the failure of colonial administrators in French West Africa to enforce legislative checks upon Lebanese migration in the years before the Second World War. This lack of success stands out amidst the global proliferation of migration controls in the first half of the twentieth century. For it is not simply that these functionaries were unable to implement effectively the measures they had drafted; more than that, they remained stymied in their very efforts to introduce such controls. That this was so was largely due to the commitments of the French imperial state in the Eastern Mediterranean, which drove administrators in Paris to adopt a benign attitude towards the movements of Lebanese migrants, and to override the efforts of their counterparts in West Africa. To the diplomats at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lebanon — whether as part of the Ottoman empire or as a French Mandate — was far more important than West Africa. And the Quai d’Orsay, in turn, carried greater weight than the Ministry of Colonies. This tale, then, enhances our understanding of the workings of an imperial polity which was a congeries of conflicting agents, interests, and institutions.

This chapter examines western attitudes towards Turkish expansion in the eastern Mediterranean during the fifteenth century using a very different type of source material. The aim is to investigate how far it is possible to utilize a romantic novel written in Catalan in mid-fifteenth-century Valencia in order to identify attitudes to grand strategy against the Turks. The text in question is Tirant lo Blanc, about three-quarters of which appears to have been written by the Valencian knight Joanot Martorell in the years around 1460. The chapter shows that, although the heroes and villains examined are not closely based on real contemporary figures, the concerns and aspirations of the text reflect wider aims among those who competed with the Turks for control of the eastern Mediterranean. The success of the text itself as a publishing phenomenon of the late fifteenth century also suggests that the diffusion of its ideas about the war against the Turks was very wide, at least within the Iberian peninsula.

The most striking aspect of the transformations following the onset of Phoenician trade in Tartessos is the indigenous peoples' apparent adoption of religious iconography and funerary rituals with markedly Eastern characteristics. The cemetery of La Joya and the urban center of the city of Huelva have clearly shown how interested both Phoenicians and Greeks were in this Tartessian settlement. Their interest can be easily explained if we keep in mind not only Huelva's proximity to mining centers and its location along the route to the Portuguese Atlantic but also the experience the indigenous peoples had in long-distance trade. This chapter provides an updated overview of ongoing archaeological research in the Guadalquivir area (Huelva, Seville, etc.), deploying a wealth of new data to challenge traditional interpretations of important sites such as El Carambolo (Seville) while stressing the deep level of interaction and cohabitation between local populations and colonists from the Eastern Mediterranean in this region. It explores the possibility of agricultural colonization and the integration of Semitic and indigenous cultic practices in a commercially active environment.