Byzantine Malagina and the Lower Sangarius

1990 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 161-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clive Foss
Keyword(s):  
Seventh Century ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
Specific Information ◽  
Precise Location ◽  
Military Base ◽  
The Third ◽  
Ottoman History ◽  
Dark Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Byzantine Period

Malagina was a place of considerable strategic importance in the Byzantine period, from the Dark Ages until the final collapse of imperial rule in Asia Minor. Frequent mentions in the sources indicate that it was a major base, a station on the route of imperial armies to the East, and the seat of the stables from which the expeditions were supplied. It had an administration of its own, and grew in importance as the Empire shrank. Although its general location, on the Sangarius river, has never been in doubt, the site has so far failed to be convincingly identified, in spite of serious attempts. Thanks to investigations in the field, it is now possible to provide Malagina with a precise location, and to identify and describe its fortress, whose remains add considerably to our knowledge of the site and its history. For the sake of completeness, these remains will be discussed in the context of what is known of the Byzantine and Ottoman history of the site.The first appearance of Malagina is in a curious text, an apocalyptic prophecy attributed to St. Methodius, but actually dating from the late seventh century. Its chronology can be determined from its forecast that the Arabs would break into Constantinople. Although that never happened, the prophecy has reasonably been associated with the great siege of 674–8. In preparation for that attack, the Arabs would, it announces, divide their forces into three parts, of which one would winter in Ephesus, another in Pergamum, and the third in Malagina. Although this provides no specific information about the site, it shows that Malagina was then considered an important military base, a likely goal for an Arab attack. It may also indicate that the place was actually taken and occupied by the Arabs on that occasion. In any case, Malagina was in existence by the seventh century.

Ephesus in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Period: Changes in its Urban Character from the Third to the Seventh Century ad

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. LADSTÄTTER ◽  
A. PÜLZ
Keyword(s):  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Conclusive Evidence ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
The Third ◽  
Public Areas ◽  
History Of ◽  
Byzantine Period ◽  
Urban Character ◽  
The City

The third century marked a profound change in the urban landscape of Ephesus and proved to exert a profound influence on the city's later development. There is conclusive evidence for catastrophic disasters when the city was afflicted by a series of earthquakes which led to a temporary downturn in its economic circumstances. These destructive earthquakes not only had long-term consequences for the city's appearance, but also affected the very foundations of urbanism. This chapter traces the history of Metropolis Asiae after the earthquakes of the third and fourth centuries. The archaeological evidence proves that rebuilding took place and within public areas, such as agorae or buildings along the roads and included fountains and baths. The work was not limited only to the reconstruction of buildings but efforts were made to restore the splendid appearance of the city, reflecting the restoration of its high urban status and commercial importance. This chapter also describes the city's numerous churches that graphically attest to the growing importance of Christianity as the state religion.

Strobilos and Related Sites

1988 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 147-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clive Foss
Keyword(s):  
Ninth Century ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
New Towns ◽  
Dark Ages ◽  
Byzantine Period

In the Byzantine period, urban life in Anatolia underwent a decay in which ancient cities shrank behind reduced circuits of walls or withdrew to the fortified hilltops whence they had descended in the Hellenistic age. Even the greatest city of the empire, Constantinople, saw a drastic diminution of population and resources, abandonment of its ancient public works and services, and consequent transformation from a classical to a medieval city. These changes began with the devastating invasions of Persians and Arabs in the seventh century. Sources reveal little about Anatolia between the early seventh and mid-ninth century, a true dark age, but the evidence of archaeology often makes it possible to visualize conditions at the time.The Byzantines, whose empire long survived these troubles, generally occupied existing sites in Asia Minor where their ruins are superimposed on those of the Romans or earlier cultures. In only a few instances, usually occasioned by the needs of defence or of a militarized administration, were new sites founded. Although the Dark Ages were not a propitious time for urban development, some new towns did come into existence or prominence. Few of them have been studied. Strobilos on the Carian coast, therefore, is of some potential interest as an example of a Byzantine town which first appears in the historical record in the eighth century, and whose remains have been preserved.

The Empires of Western Asia and the Assyrian World Empire

2021 ◽  
pp. 73-110
Author(s):  
Gojko Barjamovic
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Fragmentation ◽  
The Third ◽  
Western Asia ◽  
Third Millennium Bce ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Empire

The history of empire begins in Western Asia. This chapter tracks developments in the second and first millennia BCE as imperial control in the region became increasingly common and progressively more pervasive. Oscillations between political fragmentation and imperial unification swung gradually toward the latter, from just a few documented examples in the third millennium BCE to the more-or-less permanent partition of Western Asia into successive imperial states from the seventh century BCE until the end of World War I. The chapter covers about a dozen empires and empire-like states, tracing developments of territoriality and notions of imperial universality using Assyria ca. 2004–605 BCE as a case study for how large and loose hegemonies became the normative political formation in the region.

scholarly journals Mogontiacum: czynniki rozwoju

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Leszek Mrozewicz
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Military Base ◽  
The Third ◽  
Political Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City ◽  
Real City

The history of Mogontiacum spans the period from 17/16 BCE to the end of the fourth century CE. It was a strong military base (with two legions stationed there in the first century) and a major settlement centre, though without municipal rights. However, the demographic and economic development, as well as the superior administrative and political status enabled Mogontiacum to transform – in socio-economic and urbanistic terms – into a real city. This process was crowned in the latter half of the third century with the construction of the city walls.

Rome's Holy Mountain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Moralee
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Roman History ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Hill ◽  
The Temple ◽  
Remote Past

Rome’s Capitoline Hill was the smallest of the Seven Hills of Rome. Yet in the long history of the Roman state it was the empire’s holy mountain. The hill was the setting of many of Rome’s most beloved stories, involving Aeneas, Romulus, Tarpeia, and Manlius. It also held significant monuments, including the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, a location that marked the spot where Jupiter made the hill his earthly home in the age before humanity. This book follows the history of the Capitoline Hill into late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, asking what happened to a holy mountain as the empire that deemed it thus became a Christian republic. This is not a history of the hill’s tonnage of marble- and gold-bedecked monuments but, rather, an investigation into how the hill was used, imagined, and known from the third to the seventh century CE. During this time, the triumph and other processions to the top of the hill were no longer enacted. But the hill persisted as a densely populated urban zone and continued to supply a bridge to fragmented memories of an increasingly remote past through its toponyms. This book is also about a series of Christian engagements with the Capitoline Hill’s different registers of memory, the transmission and dissection of anecdotes, and the invention of alternate understandings of the hill’s role in Roman history. What lingered long after the state’s disintegration in the fifth century were the hill’s associations with the raw power of Rome’s empire.

Becoming Messenian

2002 ◽  
Vol 122 ◽  
pp. 45-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nino Luraghi
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Significant Extent ◽  
Archaeological Evidence ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Dark Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Will

AbstractThe article is an enquiry into the identity of two groups who called themselves Messenians: the Helots and perioikoi who revolted against Sparta after the earthquake in the 460s; and the citizens of the independent polity founded by Epameinondas in 370/69 bc in the Spartan territory west of the Taygetos. Based on the history of the Messenians in Pausanias Book 4, some scholars have thought that those two groups were simply the descendants of the free inhabitants of the region, subdued by the Spartans in the Archaic period and reduced to the condition of Helots. According to these scholars, the Helotized Messenians preserved a sense of their identity and a religious tradition of their own, which re-emerged when they regained freedom. One objection to this thesis is that there is no clear archaeological evidence of regional cohesiveness in the area in the late Dark Ages, while the very concept of Messenia as a unified region extending from the river Neda to the Taygetos does not seem to exist prior to the Spartan conquest. Furthermore, evidence from sanctuaries dating to the Archaic and Early Classical periods shows that Messenia was to a significant extent populated by perioikoi whose material culture, cults and language were thoroughly indistinguishable from those documented in Lakonia. Even the site where Epameinondas later founded the central settlement of the new Messenian polity was apparently occupied since the late seventh century at the latest by a perioikic settlement. Some of these perioikoi participated with the Helots in the revolt after the earthquake, and the suggestion is advanced, based on research on processes of ethnogenesis, that they played a key role in the emergence of the Messenian identity of the rebels. For them, identifying themselves as Messenians was an implicit claim to the land west of the Taygetos; therefore the Spartans consistently refused to consider the rebels Messenians, just as they refused to consider Messenians – that is, descendants of the ‘old Messenians’ – the citizens of Epameinondas' polity. Interestingly, the Spartan and the Theban-Messenian views on the identity of these people agreed in denying that the ‘old Messenians’ had remained in Messenia as Helots. Messenian ethnicity is explained as the manifestation of the will of perioikoi and Helots living west of the Taygetos to be independent from Sparta. The fact that most Messenian cults attested from the fourth century onwards were typical Spartan cults does not encourage the assumption that there was any continuity in a Messenian tradition going back to the period before the Spartan westward expansion.

Die Kirche des hl. Romanos in Konstantinopel und ihr Umfeld

Millennium ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-226
Author(s):  
Arne Effenberger
Keyword(s):  
Correct Identification ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Third ◽  
Current State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Byzantine Period ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The City ◽  
The Church ◽  
Written Sources

Abstract The church of St. Romanus in the neighborhood of the Gate of St. Romanus of the Theodosian Land Walls was erected during the Theodosian era and existed until the late Byzantine period. Because of its crypt,which included a famous collection of relics (prophets and saints) the church was an important destination of the Christian pilgrimage. In the first part of this article I consider the written sources, liturgical data and the topographical situation regarding the church and the neighboring structures. The second part examines the location and the current state of the Gate of St. Romanus. Herein the unjustifiable assertions of M. Philippides and W. K. Hanak against the correct identification of the gate by N. Asutay-Effenberger are refuted. The third part deals with the crypts of the Byzantine churches and suggests that the crypt of the Church of St. Romanus was a substructure, which supported the building. The fourth part focuses on the cult of the two saints Elizabeth the Wonderworker and Thomaïs of Lesbos and considers the history of the women’s convent τὰ Mικρὰ Ῥωμαίου. This monastery near the cistern of Mokios was restored by the empress Theodora Palaiologina between 1282 and 1303 and consecrated to the Saints Cosmas and Damianus. The last section discusses some other churches and private properties in the vicinity of the Church of St. Romanus,which are mentioned in the late Byzantine written sources. They are all situated on the road leading from the gate of St. Romanus into the city. Today, only the Manastır Mescidi stands on this route, but it cannot be identified with any of these churches, which appear in the written sources.

Nicopolis ad Istrum: Backward and Balkan?

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. WHITTOW
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of

The story of Nicopolis ad Istrum and its citizens exemplifies much that is common to the urban history of the whole Roman Empire. This chapter reviews the history of Nicopolis and its transition into the small fortified site of the fifth to seventh centuries and compares it with the evidence from the Near East and Asia Minor. It argues that Nicopolis may not have experienced a cataclysm as has been suggested, and that, as in the fifth and sixth century west, where landowning elites showed a striking ability to adapt and survive, there was an important element of continuity on the lower Danube, which in turn may account for the distinctive ‘Roman’ element in the early medieval Bulgar state. It also suggests that the term ‘transition to Late Antiquity’ should be applied to what happened at Nicopolis in the third century: what happened there in the fifth was the transition to the middle ages. This chapter also describes late antique urbanism in the Balkans by focusing on the Justiniana Prima site.

Samaritan

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid Hjelm
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Jewish Population ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Biblical Literature ◽  
The Third ◽  
Shared Beliefs ◽  
History Of ◽  
Christian Literature

This chapter offers an introduction to the history of the Samaritans from their origin until the seventh century CE and gives detailed information on the Samaritan Literature in the Roman Period. The Samaritans formed the backbone of central and northern Palestine’s population and shared beliefs and traditions with southern Palestine’s Jewish population. However, their traditions developed differently in Samaritanism’s strong emphasis on a purely Mosaic Yahwism (as in the Five Books of Moses), which did not adopt the teachings of the larger Jewish canon (i.e. the Old Testament). Compared with Jewish and Christian literature, Samaritan literature is quite limited. It consists of the Samaritan Pentateuch, the SamaritanTargum of the Pentateuch in Aramaic, a midrashic compilation called Tibat or Memar Marqe, and the earliest prayer book called the Defter, which contains hymns from the third to fourth century CE. An additional paragraph deals with Samaritan use of biblical literature in inscriptions and artefacts.

HERODAS' MIMIAMB 7: DANCING DOGS AND BARKING WOMEN

2015 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-166
Author(s):  
Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The Third ◽  
Eastern Aegean ◽  
Eastern Cultures ◽  
History Of ◽  
Amount Of Knowledge

Herodas' Mimiamb 7 has often attracted scholarly attention on account of its thematic preoccupation with the sexuality of ordinary people, thus offering a realistic and exciting glimpse of everyday life in the eastern Mediterranean of the third century b.c.e. In addition, his obscure reference in lines 62–3 to the obsession of women and dogs with dildos has been the focus of long-standing scholarly debate: while most scholars agree that the verses employ a metaphor, possibly of obscene nature, their exact meaning is still to be clarified. In response, this article offers an additional paradigm which stresses the cultural osmosis between the Greeks and their eastern neighbours in the Hellenistic period; in my view, Herodas' peculiar choice of expression could be explained more aptly through this hitherto unnoticed perspective. Despite having frustratingly little information about the poet and his life, his familiarity with the Hellenistic East is often implied in his poetic settings: for example, Cos in Mimiamb 2 and probably locations in Asia Minor in Mimiambs 6 and 7 are considered likely to reflect the places where he lived. Hence, it is reasonable to assume that Herodas spent periods of his life in areas of the eastern Aegean where cultural interaction was practically unavoidable. Moreover, his first poem exhibits a certain amount of knowledge and admiration for Ptolemaic Egypt and, although this does not necessarily mean that he lived there, he must have been very familiar with Alexandria and its erudite circles. After all, Herodas, a contemporary of Theocritus who subscribed to his preference for short, elegant poetic forms, shared the latter's interest in the lowly mime, which both of them invested with learned language. Thus, specific motifs, such as the visit of an abandoned mistress to the witches in a desperate attempt to coax back a cruel lover, are treated by both poets and ultimately derive from the literary corpus of mimes by the influential Sophron. Theocritus was also familiar with locations in Cos, an island that appears to have been culturally diverse. One of the foreign communities that increasingly made its presence felt in third-century b.c.e. Asia Minor and the nearby islands of the eastern Aegean was that of the Jews, although the history of particular communities is often difficult to recover. Nevertheless, we do know that as early as the third century b.c.e. ‘various Jewish authors writing in Greek had adopted the prevailing patterns of Greek literature in its many forms, filling them with Jewish content’. The Jews had a prominent and well-documented presence at Alexandria, where their interaction with the Greeks was promoted by the Ptolemies. There, already by the middle of the third century b.c.e., the Pentateuch (the Hebrew Torah) had been translated into Koine Greek by royal request, which probably indicates a sizeable community able to participate dynamically in the cultural interface of Ptolemaic Alexandria. In the following pages, I shall revisit the past interpretations of the aforementioned verses in Mimiamb 7 before arguing that the key to their understanding lies in the interaction of the Greeks with near eastern cultures, particularly the Jews, who seemed to have employed a distinctive metaphor about ‘dogs’ and their perceived sexual habits.

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