Tønnes Bekker Nielsen Livres

The shores of the Mediterranean-Black Sea basin were home to some of the earliest urban communities and some of the earliest literate cultures. Their complex history and rich archaeological heritage have been studied by generations of scholars, to a degree of detail comparable to no other macro-region of our planet. Its waters, too, have been the object of intense and systematic investigation, motivated not only by scientific curiosity but also by increasing concern for the well-being of their marine life. Yet until recently, there have been few attempts at integrating the results of different scientific approaches in order to write the ecohistory of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In this volume, eighteen scholars from eleven different countries and representing a wide range of scientific disciplines address the question of how humans have interacted with the Mediterranean-Black Sea ecosystem from the dawn of prehistory until the twentieth century; how they have exploited its resources; what consequences this has had for life in the sea – and what, based on past experience, the future may hold in store.

Until now, most studies of Roman Anatolia have been focused on the strongly Hellenised and urbanised regions of western and southern Asia Minor. In this volume, the first on its subject, thirteen contributors from nine different countries address the question of how local identities were created and maintained in northern Anatolia from the fall of Mithradates VI to the middle Byzantine period. In a region that did not possess a Hellenistic polis-tradition, the fledgling inland cities founded by Pompey the Great struggled to develop an urban identity of their own, while the old-established Greek colonies on the Black Sea coast had to come to terms with the reality of Roman domination without abandoning their Hellenic identity. Drawing on the evidence of archaeology, art, epigraphy and numismatics, the authors trace the diverse ways in which provincial cities – that is to say, provincial urban élites – attempted to construct local identities for themselves, and how mythology, religion, language and tradition were all employed to define and project a specific identity for each city and its territory – transforming geographical „space“ into mentally and culturally defined „place“.