Cultural Interactions in the Mediterranean – serie

Imagining Emperors in the Later Roman Empire offers new analysis of the textual depictions of a series of emperors in the fourth century within overlapping historical, religious, and literary contexts. Drawing on the recent Representational Turn in the study of imperial power, these essays examine how literary authors working in various genres, both Latin and Greek, and of differing religious affiliations construct and manipulate the depiction of a series of emperors from the late third to the late fourth centuries CE. In a move away from traditional source criticism, this volume opens up new methodological approaches to chart intellectual and literary history during a critical century for the ancient Mediterranean world.

Round Trip to Hades in the Eastern Mediterranean Tradition explores how the theme of visiting the Underworld and returning alive has been treated, transmitted and transformed in the ancient Greek and Byzantine traditions. The journey was usually a descent (katabasis) into a dark and dull place, where forgetfulness and punishment reigned, but since ‘everyone’ was there, it was also a place that offered opportunities to meet people and socialize. Famous Classical round trips to Hades include those undertaken by Odysseus and Aeneas, but this pagan topic also caught the interest of Christian writers. The contributions of the present volume allow the reader to follow the passage from pagan to Christian representations of Hades–a passage that may seem surprisingly effortless.

Roman Turdetania makes use of the literary and archeological sources to provide an updated state of knowledge from a postcolonial approach about the socio-cultural interaction processes and the subsequent romanisation of the populations in the southern Iberian Peninsula from the 4th to the 1st centuries BCE. The resulting communities shaped a new identity, hybrid and converging, resulting from the previous Phoenician–Punic substrate vigorously coexisting with the new Hellenistic-Roman imprint.

Empires of the Sea brings together studies of maritime empires from the Bronze Age to the Eighteenth Century. The volume aims to establish maritime empires as a category for the (comparative) study of premodern empires, and from a partly ‘non-western’ perspective. The book includes contributions on Mycenaean sea power, Classical Athens, the ancient Thebans, Ptolemaic Egypt, The Genoese Empire, power networks of the Vikings, the medieval Danish Empire, the Baltic empire of Ancien Régime Sweden, the early modern Indian Ocean, the Melaka Empire, the (non-European aspects of the) Portuguese Empire and Dutch East India Company, and the Pirates of Caribbean.

Late Antique Responses to the Arab Conquests is a showcase of new discoveries in an exciting and rapidly developing field: the study of the transition from Late Antiquity to Early Islam. The contributors to this volume engage with previously neglected sources, such as Arabic rock inscriptions, papyri and Byzantine archaeological remains. They also apply new interpretative methods to the literary tradition, reading the Qur’an as a late antique text, using Arabic poetry as a source to study the gestation of an Arab identity, and extracting settlement patterns of the Arabian colonizers in order to explain regional processes of Arabicization and Islamization. This volume shows how the Arab conquests changed both the Arabian conquerors and the conquered.

Honores inauditi bietet erstmals eine systematische Untersuchung der Ehrenstatuen Siziliens. Vor dem Hintergrund der wechselvollen Geschichte der Insel werden die Ehrenstatuen von den ersten archäologischen Zeugnissen für Könige in der Mitte des 3. Jhs. v. Chr. über die Kaiserzeit bis zum Ende der Praxis in der Spätantike in den Blick genommen. Das archäologische und epigraphische Material weist auf eine deutliche Kontinuität hin, zeigt aber auch Veränderungen der Monumente, der Beteiligten, bei der Sprache der Inschriften und bei ihrer räumlichen Anordnung. Dieser Wandel wird in einen Kontext mit übergreifenden Entwicklungen, aber auch mit lokalen Faktoren wie Stadtgeschichte und überregionalen Handelsrouten gestellt.Honores inauditi offers the first comprehensive study of honorary statues and their spatial and social context in Sicily. Based on a catalogue of mostly unpublished material, the book traces honorary statues throughout their historical development, starting from the first archaeologically known honorary statues erected for kings in the mid-3rd c. BC until the practice’s decline in Late antiquity. Although continuously used, various changes are detected throughout time: the monuments’ material and size, their display, the language of the inscriptions and the actors involved. These changes are contextualized by overarching developments such as trade routes, as well as local urban factors.

Reconsidering the Mediterranean, appreciating and demarginalizing the peoples and cultures of this vast region, while considering the affinities and differences, is a valuable part of the process of unframing and reframing the concept of the Mediterranean. The authors of this volume follow Franco Cassanos refusal of a sort of prt--porter reality of cohabitation of cultures, introducing instead unalternativa mediterranea, a world of multiple cultures that entails an ongoing learning and experiencing. The volumes contributors use an interdisciplinary approach that mirrors the hybridity of the area and of the discipline, that is much more introspective and humanistic, more contemporary and inclusive.