scholarly journals The Origins of Money in the Iron Age Mediterranean World

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elon D. Heymans
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Precious Metal ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Early History ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Critical Weight ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
History Of

Color versions of select print images available on the Resources tab (or here: www.cambridge.org/heymans). This book shows how money emerged and spread in the eastern Mediterranean, centuries before the invention of coinage. While the invention of coinage in Ancient Lydia around 630 BCE is widely regarded as one of the defining innovations of the ancient world, money itself was never invented. It gained critical weight in the Iron Age (ca. 1200 – 600 BCE) as a social and economic tool, most dominantly in the form of precious metal bullion. This book is the first study to comprehensively engage with the early history of money in the Iron Age Mediterranean, tracing its development in the Levant and the Aegean. Building on a detailed study of precious metal hoards, Elon D. Heymans deploys a wide range of sources, both textual and material, to rethink money's role and origins in the history of the eastern Mediterranean.

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 The genomic history of the Iberian Peninsula over the past 8000 years

Science ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 363 (6432) ◽  
pp. 1230-1234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iñigo Olalde ◽  
Swapan Mallick ◽  
Nick Patterson ◽  
Nadin Rohland ◽  
Vanessa Villalba-Mouco ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Hunter Gatherers ◽  
Y Chromosomes ◽  
Genome Wide ◽  
Genome Wide Data ◽  
History Of ◽  
Genetic Substructure

We assembled genome-wide data from 271 ancient Iberians, of whom 176 are from the largely unsampled period after 2000 BCE, thereby providing a high-resolution time transect of the Iberian Peninsula. We document high genetic substructure between northwestern and southeastern hunter-gatherers before the spread of farming. We reveal sporadic contacts between Iberia and North Africa by ~2500 BCE and, by ~2000 BCE, the replacement of 40% of Iberia’s ancestry and nearly 100% of its Y-chromosomes by people with Steppe ancestry. We show that, in the Iron Age, Steppe ancestry had spread not only into Indo-European–speaking regions but also into non-Indo-European–speaking ones, and we reveal that present-day Basques are best described as a typical Iron Age population without the admixture events that later affected the rest of Iberia. Additionally, we document how, beginning at least in the Roman period, the ancestry of the peninsula was transformed by gene flow from North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.

building techniques and materials, Roman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger B. Ulrich
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Architectural Design ◽  
Building Materials ◽  
Practical Knowledge ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Central Italy ◽  
Roman Architecture ◽  
The North ◽  
Mediterranean World

The inherent strengths, weaknesses, and availability of diverse Roman building materials governed the techniques used in construction and greatly influenced the final appearance of Roman architecture. Trace archaeological evidence exists of buildings and burials in Rome from the Italian Bronze Age (second millennium bce) or earlier, and substantial physical remains, in the form of Iron-Age huts and grave goods, roughly correspond to the Romans’ own belief of the foundation date of their city (traditionally 753 bce). Rome’s earliest builders sourced materials obtainable from the immediate environment and transformed them using practical knowledge. Within the span of a couple centuries, architectural design, implementation, and decoration reflect a broad interaction between Roman builders and their counterparts in the regions around central Italy (particularly Etruria to the north and Campania to the south) and also the wider Mediterranean world, particularly those areas where Greeks traditionally lived or had placed colonies. While southern Italy and Sicily represent the closest areas for the transmission of Greek ideas, Greek building practices on the Greek mainland and in Asia Minor also influenced Roman projects from the Archaic period onwards. As Rome grew wealthier and expanded abroad, patrons and builders imported marble to the capital from the Aegean, well before the discovery of more local, Italian sources. The importation of exotic stones grew exponentially over the period of the late Republic and the first two centuries of empire. The coloured marbles that embellished the buildings of Rome served as physical testimony to Rome’s control over the eastern Mediterranean. Nothing, however, was as transformative as the adoption of concrete in the late 3rd century bce, the mass production of fired brick, and the ensuing experimentation that resulted in the vaulted structures that have become the hallmark of Roman architecture.

Space

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Garth Fowden
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Early History ◽  
Iranian Plateau ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
The Mediterranean

This chapter contextualizes Islam's early history by proposing an eastward shift of emphasis. It revises the geographical framework; the Mediterranean world of the Greeks and Romans is replaced by the “Eurasian Hinge,” a triptych of regions with the Iranian plateau and the Eastern Mediterranean as its wings, and the “Mountain Arena” as its centerpiece. This geographical framework adopts the Eurasian perspective in its widest sense, from Japan or at least China to Britain, and makes Rome's eastern peripheries the center of one's world. The chapter argues that the “Eurasian Hinge” nourished two world empires no other could challenge and which, along with Christian Rome, spawned political and cultural “commonwealths” within the same frame: the Achaemenids with their continuator Alexander, and a millennium later the Islamic Caliphate of the Umayyads and Abbasids.

Ribosomal RNA Sequences and the Early History of the Metazoa

1988 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 63-74
Author(s):  
Rudolf A. Raff
Keyword(s):  
Ribosomal Rna ◽  
Fossil Record ◽  
Comparative Anatomy ◽  
Early History ◽  
Rna Sequences ◽  
Ribosomal Rna Sequences ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Animal Phyla ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fossil Records

The problems of resolving phylogenetic relationships change with increasing evolutionary distance: very widely separated organisms, which share few phylogenetically helpful morphological features pose the greatest difficulties. Thus, the resolution of relationships between animal phyla and classes present some of the most challenging problems in systematic zoology and paleontology. Traditionally, relationships have been inferred on the basis of comparative anatomy, embryology, and the paleontological record. However, phyla are established on the basis of the unique features of their body plans, and have few shared derived characters to unite them. Even when similar features are available, homology can still be uncertain. The fossil record has been largely unavailable to provide the needed continuity of structure to establish such homologies between phyla and most classes. Generally, the best data for connecting major groups have come from detailed embryological data. But, even there, many ambiguous situations and conflicts of interpretation remain, and these problems are pervasive over a wide range of animal groups, both with and without extensive fossil records.

scholarly journals African genomes illuminate the early history and transition to selfing in Arabidopsis thaliana

2017 ◽  
Vol 114 (20) ◽  
pp. 5213-5218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arun Durvasula ◽  
Andrea Fulgione ◽  
Rafal M. Gutaker ◽  
Selen Irez Alacakaptan ◽  
Pádraic J. Flood ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Arabidopsis Thaliana ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Molecular Model ◽  
Genomic Analysis ◽  
Geographic Region ◽  
Early History ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Last Interglacial ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of

Over the past 20 y, many studies have examined the history of the plant ecological and molecular model, Arabidopsis thaliana, in Europe and North America. Although these studies informed us about the recent history of the species, the early history has remained elusive. In a large-scale genomic analysis of African A. thaliana, we sequenced the genomes of 78 modern and herbarium samples from Africa and analyzed these together with over 1,000 previously sequenced Eurasian samples. In striking contrast to expectations, we find that all African individuals sampled are native to this continent, including those from sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, we show that Africa harbors the greatest variation and represents the deepest history in the A. thaliana lineage. Our results also reveal evidence that selfing, a major defining characteristic of the species, evolved in a single geographic region, best represented today within Africa. Demographic inference supports a model in which the ancestral A. thaliana population began to split by 120–90 kya, during the last interglacial and Abbassia pluvial, and Eurasian populations subsequently separated from one another at around 40 kya. This bears striking similarities to the patterns observed for diverse species, including humans, implying a key role for climatic events during interglacial and pluvial periods in shaping the histories and current distributions of a wide range of species.

The saving of Navan

Antiquity ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 61 (231) ◽  
pp. 64-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Mallory
Keyword(s):  
Bronze Age ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Early History ◽  
Limestone Quarry ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Bronze Age ◽  
Archaeological Landscape

Navan, Co. Armagh, is one of the major ritual sites of Irish and of European prehistory. Its 2.5 square km encompass the bronze- and iron-age Navan ‘fort’, the bronze-age ritual pond of the King's Stables, the bronze-/iron-age Haughey's fort, and the iron-age ritual lake of Loughnashade – and, surely, other sites not yet detected. It figures largely in the early history of Ireland as the ancient capital of Ulster. For years, a limestone quarry has been eating into the archaeological landscape; its erosion was finally halted last year, thanks to the vigour with which the Friends of Navan fought the archaeological case. Here, one of the founder Friends sets out the issues, and what kind of victory was won.

scholarly journals From the history of research into the Slavic lands and peoples in Polish archaeology to the early 1940's

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 301-324
Author(s):  
Jacek Lech ◽  
Danuta Piotrowska
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Early History ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
History Of Research ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Northwestern Poland ◽  
The University

The article presents the interest of Polish archaeology before 1945 in the prehistory and early history of the Slavs. The pioneers were Count Jan Potocki towards the end of the 18th century a representative of the Enlightenment period, and then Zorian Dołęga Chodakowski. Chodakowski’s work from 1818 about the Slavs before Christianity opened the Romantic period in Polish antiquarianism. At this time the greatest Polish poets were writing important works relating to the pre-Christian past of Poland, and a statue of the pagan god Światowid (Światowit) was found in the river Zbrucz. Studies of the earliest Slavs were continued by the positivists. At the beginning of the 20th century, one of them was E.Majewski from Warsaw, a promotor of the works of L. Niederle devoted to Slavic antiquities. In the period when the cultural-historical school dominated, prehistoric archaeology was becoming ever more closely associated with nationalism and politics (G. Kossinna). Majewski was one of the first critics of Kossinna’s method and works. In the years 1919–1944 Majewski’s pupil, L. Kozłowski, and J. Czekanowski studied the origin of the Slavs. Both were professors of the University in Lviv. Together with J. Kostrzewski, a prehistorian from Poznań, they regarded the Lusatian culture from the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age as ancient Slavic. This view was important as propaganda in the political and scholarly dispute with prehistorians of the Third Reich. Its significance increased after the discovery and start of excavations of a fortified settlement of the Lusatian culture in Biskupin, in northwestern Poland. During the Second World War, Biskupin was excavated by H. Schleif from the SS-Ahnenerbe. The intention was to refute Kostrzewski’s views. At the same time, Kostrzewski and Kozłowski were writing works intended to confirm the ancient Slavic character of the Lusatian culture. Today their views constitute an interesting chapter in the history of science. Key words: early history of the Slavs, Światowid, Biskupin, Romantic period, Lusatian culture.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document