International Workshop!

AMORIUM 

A PROVINCIAL CAPITAL IN THE SETTING OF THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE

Workshop, November 25-26, 2016, Athens

Organized by Nikos Tsivikis, Amorium Urban Archaeology Project, IMS/FORTH

Venue: Greek Archaeologists Union building, 134 Ermou str. Athens

PROGRAM

The city of Amorium, located in Phrygia in the Asia Minor highlands, has been under excavation and systematic research for almost three decades. A large number of scientific publications, articles in peer-reviewed journals, and a special series dedicated to Amorium, the Amorium Reports that number already five volumes, have seen the light as the main research products of this archaeological activity along with considerable amount of popularizing guide books. The impact of Amorium excavation has affected considerably the contemporary archaeological approach to Byzantine Early Medieval and Middle Byzantine cities.

Amorium has also been the stage of international cooperation for many years, and in this way it continues to bring together scholars from Turkey with colleagues from across the world. Many of our historical questions though are in an early stage, seeking for answers that the continuation of the excavation and new research will provide. At the same time innovative archaeological methods (e.g. geophysical survey, satellite imagery, LIDAR modelling) and modern approaches are being applied at Amorium, making the project one of the pioneers in the field of Byzantine archaeology.

Aim of this workshop is to bring together the members of Amorium Excavations team to confer on the most recent field work and state of research. Additionally we hope to further establish a dialogue on Amorium with other scholars of Byzantium that face similar historical and archaeological questions. In the center of such a discourse stand the challenges of Byzantine historical archaeology and our understanding of the period between the 7th and 11th c. AD, and the evolution of Byzantine urbanism with the formation of “new” or renewed urban centers as provincial capitals, this largely being the essence of the new thematic system. This process is evident in the field, but also is elucidated in the historical sources. In result our two-day thematic workshop will address all kind of questions on material culture, architecture, landscape archaeology, textual history and many more concerning the Middle Byzantine cities. 

All presentations and discussion will be in English.

Forthcoming Conference!

Monastic Journeys from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages 

Religious Aspirations, Political Goals and Economic Concerns

17-19 November 2016

VENUE: “Elise-Richter-Saal”, University of Vienna (Universitätsring 1, 1010 Vienna)

Program & Abstracts

New Book!

Carolina Cupane & Bettina Krönung (eds.), Fictional Storytelling in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond, Leiden: Brill 2016

Contents

This volume offers an overview of the rich narrative material circulating in the medieval Mediterranean. As a multilingual and multicultural zone, the Eastern Mediterranean offered a broad market for tales in both oral and written form and longer works of fiction, which were translated and reworked in order to meet the tastes and cultural expectations of new audiences, thus becoming common intellectual property of all the peoples around the Mediterranean shores. Among others, the volume examines for the first time popular eastern tales, such as Kalila and Dimna, Sindbad, Barlaam and Joasaph, and Arabic epics together with their Byzantine adaptations. Original Byzantine love romances, both learned and vernacular, are discussed together with their Persian counterparts and with later adaptations of western stories. This combination of such disparate narrative material aims to highlight both the wealth of medieval storytelling and the fundamental unity of the medieval Mediterranean world.

Contributors are Carolina Cupane, Faustina Doufikar-Aerts, Massimo Fusillo, Corinne Jouanno, Grammatiki A. Karla, Bettina Krönung, Renata Lavagnini, Ulrich Moennig, Ingela Nilsson, Claudia Ott, Oliver Overwien, Panagiotis Roilos, Julia Rubanovich, Ida Toth, Robert Volk, and Kostas Yiavis.    

Public Lecture!

2016 Public Lecture in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks

An Uneasy Relation: Byzantium and the Nomads

Florin Curta

Professor of history at the University of Florida

Exactly who were the "nomads" mentioned in the writings of the Byzantine historians for nearly a millennium? Drawing on a wide range of archaeological and literary evidence, Florin Curta scrutinizes the identity and culture of the nomads in the 2016 Public Lecture in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks

New Book!

Peter Crooks & Timothy H. Parsons (eds.), Empires and Bureaucracy in World History. From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press 2016

CONTENTS

How did empires rule different peoples across vast expanses of space and time? And how did small numbers of imperial bureaucrats govern large numbers of subordinated peoples? Empires and Bureaucracy in World History seeks answers to these fundamental problems in imperial studies by exploring the power and limits of bureaucracy. The book is pioneering in bringing together historians of antiquity and the Middle Ages with scholars of post-medieval European empires, while a genuinely world-historical perspective is provided by chapters on China, the Incas and the Ottomans. The editors identify a paradox in how bureaucracy operated on the scale of empires and so help explain why some empires endured for centuries while, in the contemporary world, empires fail almost before they begin. By adopting a cross-chronological and world-historical approach, the book challenges the abiding association of bureaucratic rationality with 'modernity' and the so-called 'Rise of the West'.