Sitta von Reden | Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (original) (raw)
Papers by Sitta von Reden
Vom Weihegefäß zur Drohne, 2016
Klio, 2019
It is with great enthusiasm that ancient historians welcome this translation of Alain B(resson)'s... more It is with great enthusiasm that ancient historians welcome this translation of Alain B(resson)'s two-volume "L'économie de la Grèce des cites" published ten years ago. The original was a synthesis of 30 years of research based on the author's unrivalled expertise in the economic history of the Classical and Hellenistic periods. The present volume is an updated, expanded, and revised version of this original. While the French volumes have had already significant impact on scholarship-adopting contemporaneously with the "Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World" a decisively neo-institutional approach to the ancient economy-one hopes that the translation will expand this impact further. Grasping the nuances of 450 pages of densely argued text in French can be challenging for anyone below C2 French reading proficiency. The excellent translation, now enhanced by chapter summaries and a more reader-friendly apparatus, will not only open the book to a new range of readers (including advanced undergraduates) but also encourage others to read the book in full. Parts of chapter
ACTA VIA SERICA Vol. 8.2 , 2023
Over the past 30 years, intense archaeological research has revealed a great increase in regional... more Over the past 30 years, intense archaeological research has revealed a great increase in regional and transregional object mobility across the South China Sea during the Iron Age (500 BCE to 500 CE). Some objects had moved from far away in the Mediterranean, while others were connected to places in central East Asia. Such evidence has given rise to grand explanations for this movement, among which the most prominent has been the growth of Silk Road trade. Scholars are divided as to whether the Silk Road is still a suitable explanatory concept, with some emphasizing its orientalist overtones and colonial baggage and others seeing it as a useful metaphor for global connectivity before globalization. This paper explores how productive the Silk Road concept really is for understanding transregional connections and social change in Iron Age Southeast Asia.
Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies Vol. 2, 2021
Handbook Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies Vol. 3, 2023
Handbook Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies Vol. 3, 2023
Schoff's map is based on the Parthian Stations 1.3-4: "Then the village of Asich, 4 schoeni; beyo... more Schoff's map is based on the Parthian Stations 1.3-4: "Then the village of Asich, 4 schoeni; beyond which is the city of Dura Nicanoris, founded by the Macedonians, also called by the Greeks Europos, 6 schoeni. Then Merrha, a fortified place, a walled village, 5 schoeni." 11 E.g., http://sebastianheath.com/roman-amphitheaters/; Dura is beyond the frame of the map on Collar's plotting of relationships between Jewish communities of the Roman world: see Collar 2013. 12 E.g., Palermo 2019, figure 4.1 for major centers in Roman-period Mesopotamia.
Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies Vol. 3, 2023
Since the Chinese government presented the Belt-and-Road Initiative or 'New Silk Road' to the wor... more Since the Chinese government presented the Belt-and-Road Initiative or 'New Silk Road' to the world in 2013, museums and exhibitions dedicated to the ancient Silk Road have proliferated. 1 One example is the Lanzhou Planning Exhibition Hall in Gansu Province, which houses a walk-around Silk Road experience as part of the Lanzhou urban development plan. 2 Another is the Silk Road Museum in Jiuquan, also Gansu Province, a city founded-as the homepage proudly states-on the Silk Road in 111 . 3 Connected to the museum is a grand Expo Park devoted to "the essence of the life and culture along the Silk Road as it existed in old times." 4 Anyone wishing to know more can read that from the first dynasties of China during the Bronze Age, the Xia and the Shang, the Chinese carried trade to the ancient civilizations such as Egypt, Babylon, Hindus, Rome and Greece. Following dynasties Zhou, Qin and Han continued in the footsteps of the Xia and Shang and spread trade throughout Eurasia, and Western Civilizations stretched their trade routes deeper into China. Multinational competition and wars between leading empires determined who controlled the Silk Route and its rich treasures that traversed the lands. 5 This is an exciting glimpse into a global past, but little distinguishes it from a myth. Like a myth, its empirical foundation is no longer questioned. Chronology is suspended. It seamlessly links a very ancient past to the modern present and tells a story of age-old connectivity. Myths gain power through images in our minds: age-old trade routes through forbidding territories, caravans loaded with carpets and pearls, and pioneering merchants moving oriental luxuries from east to west. Several recent commentators have emphasized the profoundly modern agendas lying behind the invocation of the ancient Silk Road. 6 This should put us on alert. As the Egyptologist Jan Assmann puts it, history becomes myth not simply as fiction but as a narrative foun-1 Winter 2022, appendix A on Silk Road exhibitions around the world since 2002, lists seven in 2019 alone, with a significant increase and novel concentration in the People's Republic of China, which hosted six of them in that year; see also Winter 2022, 114-135 for contextualization of this development.
Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies Vol. 3, 2023
for the transformation of the environment into an imperial landscape. I owe special thanks to Eli... more for the transformation of the environment into an imperial landscape. I owe special thanks to Eli Weaverdyck for valuable comments and discussion during the writing of this chapter. 2 Periplus Maris Erythraei (PME) 65 with Casson 1989 ad loc. Young 2001, 27-89, provides a good chapter-length introduction; Cobb 2018 and Sidebotham 2011 provide excellent surveys of Eastern Desert trade from the Ptolemaic to the Roman period. 3 Casson 1989.
Handbook Ancient Afro Eurasian Economies, Vol. 2, 2019
In 137 , the council of the city of Palmyra in the Syrian Desert decided to revise and publish ... more In 137 , the council of the city of Palmyra in the Syrian Desert decided to revise and publish a tariff of maximum charges that tax farmers were allowed to collect from merchants, animal drivers, and pastoralists in the market. 1 New regulations had become necessary, so the prescript states, because many disputes had arisen about the amount of fees that could be raised legitimately according to law and custom. The tariff gives a long list of taxes imposed for the import and export of goods and provision of services, such as grazing animals, importing/exporting salt, travel provisions, dried produce, salt fish, olive oil, animal fat, slaves, prostitutes, beasts of burden, cloth, myrrh (myron), died fleeces, bronze statues, and a few more. An older law had responded to an edict of a Roman governor some 60 years previously, which itself renewed regulations from the time of Emperor Tiberius (14-37 ) when Palmyra had become part of the Roman province of Syria. 2 Scholars mistakenly take the tax law as a reflection of just the local economy of Palmyra. 3 According to this view, it regulated the fees imposed on local imports and grazing rights in a typical provincial town that enjoyed municipal tax autonomy in the Roman Empire. There was, so it is argued, another economy in and around Palmyra. Large volumes of exotic luxuries-spices, pearls, gems, fine garments, and silk-passed through the city, from where they went on to Antiocheia to be taxed at the 25 percent import tax rate that the Roman government claimed at its imperial borders. 4 Once cleared, some goods stayed in Antiocheia, while others were distributed further to Rome and other cities in the Mediterranean. This economy was in the hands of powerful caravan merchants and financiers who had become enormously wealthy through this trade. The great monumental remains of the city and the richly adorned funerary reliefs discovered in the late eighteenth century were the results of this other economy. The drivers were not just Palmyrenes, but The most valuable analysis of the tax law and its context can still be found in Matthews 1984;
Handbook Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies Vol. 2, 2021
Sitta von Reden reliable social and financial relationships in the urban economy. The Greek polei... more Sitta von Reden reliable social and financial relationships in the urban economy. The Greek poleis of the Mediterranean in particular brought about a powerful connection between urban and rural culture. This political and social structure proved very successful in the Hellenistic period, precisely because it linked urban and rural development. And third, the analogy that Rostovtzeff suggests between rulers and ruled, haves and have-nots, is not borne out fully by ancient evidence: tributary extraction was most successful where local and imperial elites combined their interests. Where this collaboration failed, social instability and unrest were the near-predictable consequence. Scholars of the post-Rostovtzeff age have turned instead to more regional perspectives. This was partly due to the antimodernizing turn following Moses Finley's influential Sather lectures. 6 Yet it evolved also, and probably more importantly, from the greater disciplinary specialization that marked postwar scholarship. Given the different expertise that is required for understanding Hellenistic Asia Minor, Judaea, Babylonia, and Egypt, as well as other economic regions of the Hellenistic economy, the Hellenistic economy is now an interdisciplinary field of study. The local impact of fiscal administration, monetization, and royal agrarian politics is noted in all regional perspectives, as is the new culture of political communication and urban organization. 7 Yet the greater specialization of the field has made scholars shy away from attempts to characterize the Hellenistic economy as a totality. 8 Overall economic outcomes, the behavior of different actors, and the different roles of tools that contributed to such outcomes have become more difficult to fathom than ever before. This chapter thus proceeds by proposing a number of hypotheses rather than a model for the political economy of the Hellenistic imperial space as a whole. It will start by suggesting indications of economic growth (III), followed by an outline of the temporal and geographical variation of economic development (IV). I will then discuss various factors of change, from a social (V), institutional (VI), and technological (VII) perspective. Finally, I will look at changing circuits of exchange that emerged from the multipolarity of the Hellenistic Empires, on the one hand, and their maritime orientation, on the other (VIII).
Handbook Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies Vol. 2, 2021
Handbook Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies Vol. 1, 2019
Although the last few years have seen a surge of publications on Indo-Roman trade and Silk Road e... more Although the last few years have seen a surge of publications on Indo-Roman trade and Silk Road exchange, 1 the trans-imperial trade connections of the Hellenistic and Roman Empires have never been central to the field of Graeco-Roman history. The Greeks and Romans were Mediterranean societies. Their involvement in Asia beyond Asia Minor was the result of colonization, annexation, and conquest, but not central to their cultural formation, empire building, and economy. 2 The Mediterranean perspective of studies on Greek and Roman culture, that explains itself by the origin of Graeco-Roman history in Greek and Latin philology, gained further momentum by a new interest in Mediterranean connectivity that developed in the wake of the English translation of Fernand Braudel's La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II (1949) in 1972. Since then, Graeco-Roman culture and economy could be even more convincingly, and more comprehensively, located in the Mediterranean Basin. 3 The subject of ancient history was no longer defined just by the languages, but instead by geographical, cultural, and economic cohesion of the ancient Mediterranean. In 2000, Horden and Purcell published a volume full of knowledge and insight about ecologies, microclimates, nutrition, settlement patterns, and systems of travel and exchange that gave life to the Mediterranean as a connected human landscape. In an often-quoted phrase, they summarized the Mediterranean's most important characteristics as fragmentation and connectivity: "We have identified extreme topographical fragmentation as one of two environment ingredients-along with the connectivity provided by the sea itself-in a distinctly Mediterranean history." 4 The unity of the Mediterranean is a construct, but it has some natural basis: The region was the home of particular vines, the European olive, and certain types of wheat typically consumed by Greeks and Romans; it was a unified climatic zone and it was relatively easily navigable. The very uneven distribution of natural re
Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies Vol. 1, 2019
Sitta von Reden 10.B Graeco-Roman Indography I Introduction India entered the intellectual horizo... more Sitta von Reden 10.B Graeco-Roman Indography I Introduction India entered the intellectual horizon of the Greeks in the course of the Persian period. 1 As early as the late sixth century, Skylax from Karyanda in Asia Minor was called into service by the Persian king Darius who wished to gather information about the country he intended to conquer. 2 Circumnavigation (periplous) and 'leading around' (periegesis) were the means by which such knowledge was gathered, generating numerous treatises under these titles, though only a fraction of them is transmitted. Their origin in circumnavigation and travel explains why these treatises were not just ethnographies, but paid attention to geography, distances, and conditions of travel. Ethno-geographical writing developed certain patterns that over centuries remained relatively unchanged, despite the fact that the relationship of the Mediterranean to distant worlds changed through conquest and trade. 3 One typical feature was concerned with contact zones. Although many ethnographers had never traveled to the countries they described, the regions that they explored were adjacent to familiar political spaces. Second, despite the very different nature of the contact zones, and the contacts Greeks and Romans had with them, ethno-geographical writing shared a canon of common themes. Regardless of whether the people and countries observed were befriended or inimical, praised or abhorred, there were expectations regarding a catalog of features to be treated. These included descriptions of the land, rivers, climate, plants, and animals, together with the land's agrarian and mineral wealth, the origins of people, their appearance, size and political institutions (including the political rule of women). We also find comments on the nature and size of cities, housing styles, dress, sexual habits, marriage customs, funerary rites, religion, education, weapons, and methods of warfare. The repetition of themes becomes apparent when one considers what was not described unless it was exception, paradoxical, or noteworthy: public architecture, administration, agricultural and crafts, urban development, and other observations that economic historians would like to have. Third, not only were similar themes covered, but similar observations made: certain tribes built no temples or made no images of their gods, fought particularly fiercely, had strange but functional physiologies that fitted their strange lives, or did
Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies Vol. 1, 2019
Sitta von Reden 8.C Documentary Sources I Introduction The use of documentary sources (papyri, co... more Sitta von Reden 8.C Documentary Sources I Introduction The use of documentary sources (papyri, coins, and inscriptions) for economic history has a long pedigree. The great German philologist and epigraphist August Boeckh (1785-1875) not only initiated the first corpus of Greek inscriptions (now Inscriptiones Graecae [IG]), but also applied his epigraphical knowledge to writing the first history of Athenian public finance. 1 Boeckh pioneered ancient economic history as a quantifying discipline. He also reoriented the academic interest from ancient household management to what he regarded as the national economy of Athens. The Russian-born archaeologist Michael Ivanovich Rostovtzeff (1870-1952) likewise used documentary sources to refocus the subject of ancient economic history. More than Boeckh, he demonstrated the potential of this evidence for research on economies beyond Athens and Rome. 2 Integrating local art, papyri, coins, and inscriptions from the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East into his research on the Hellenistic and Roman economies, he turned historians' attention away from the centers to places like Egypt, Syria, and the Black Sea. Although his model of the ancient economies is largely obsolete, his evidence is still valuable for the economic history of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. The material of the magisterial five-volume Economic Survey of Ancient Rome (1933-1940), edited by Tenney Frank, had an equally important impact. Moreover, these works did not only focus strongly on documentary evidence, but also argued for the so-called modernist, that is market-oriented, perspective on the Greek and Roman economies. 3 This perspective fell into disregard with the anti-modernist model of A. H. M. Jones and Moses Finley. 4 Finley not only emphasized fundamental differences between ancient and modern economies, but also derived his position largely from literary evidence. Unfortunately, Greek and Roman literature overwhelmingly expressed the ideas of Roman and Athenian elites privileging the view from the imperial centers and the rationalities of wealthy landlords. It was only with the return of modernist positions that the use of documentary sources came back in a great way. 5 Moreover, quantifying trends in archaeological research, a greater integration
Handbook Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies vol. 1, 2019
Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies vol.1, 2019
The three-volume handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies aims to provide a tool for interdis... more The three-volume handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies aims to provide a tool for interdisciplinary research on ancient economies during the imperial period of the third century BCE to the third century CE. In particularl, it aims to suggest ways of approaching the connectivity of the Afro-Eurasian region from an economic perspective that is more complex than the common model of the Silk Road. This short paper gives an introduction to the arguments of the handbook as a whole.
Vom Weihegefäß zur Drohne, 2016
Klio, 2019
It is with great enthusiasm that ancient historians welcome this translation of Alain B(resson)'s... more It is with great enthusiasm that ancient historians welcome this translation of Alain B(resson)'s two-volume "L'économie de la Grèce des cites" published ten years ago. The original was a synthesis of 30 years of research based on the author's unrivalled expertise in the economic history of the Classical and Hellenistic periods. The present volume is an updated, expanded, and revised version of this original. While the French volumes have had already significant impact on scholarship-adopting contemporaneously with the "Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World" a decisively neo-institutional approach to the ancient economy-one hopes that the translation will expand this impact further. Grasping the nuances of 450 pages of densely argued text in French can be challenging for anyone below C2 French reading proficiency. The excellent translation, now enhanced by chapter summaries and a more reader-friendly apparatus, will not only open the book to a new range of readers (including advanced undergraduates) but also encourage others to read the book in full. Parts of chapter
ACTA VIA SERICA Vol. 8.2 , 2023
Over the past 30 years, intense archaeological research has revealed a great increase in regional... more Over the past 30 years, intense archaeological research has revealed a great increase in regional and transregional object mobility across the South China Sea during the Iron Age (500 BCE to 500 CE). Some objects had moved from far away in the Mediterranean, while others were connected to places in central East Asia. Such evidence has given rise to grand explanations for this movement, among which the most prominent has been the growth of Silk Road trade. Scholars are divided as to whether the Silk Road is still a suitable explanatory concept, with some emphasizing its orientalist overtones and colonial baggage and others seeing it as a useful metaphor for global connectivity before globalization. This paper explores how productive the Silk Road concept really is for understanding transregional connections and social change in Iron Age Southeast Asia.
Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies Vol. 2, 2021
Handbook Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies Vol. 3, 2023
Handbook Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies Vol. 3, 2023
Schoff's map is based on the Parthian Stations 1.3-4: "Then the village of Asich, 4 schoeni; beyo... more Schoff's map is based on the Parthian Stations 1.3-4: "Then the village of Asich, 4 schoeni; beyond which is the city of Dura Nicanoris, founded by the Macedonians, also called by the Greeks Europos, 6 schoeni. Then Merrha, a fortified place, a walled village, 5 schoeni." 11 E.g., http://sebastianheath.com/roman-amphitheaters/; Dura is beyond the frame of the map on Collar's plotting of relationships between Jewish communities of the Roman world: see Collar 2013. 12 E.g., Palermo 2019, figure 4.1 for major centers in Roman-period Mesopotamia.
Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies Vol. 3, 2023
Since the Chinese government presented the Belt-and-Road Initiative or 'New Silk Road' to the wor... more Since the Chinese government presented the Belt-and-Road Initiative or 'New Silk Road' to the world in 2013, museums and exhibitions dedicated to the ancient Silk Road have proliferated. 1 One example is the Lanzhou Planning Exhibition Hall in Gansu Province, which houses a walk-around Silk Road experience as part of the Lanzhou urban development plan. 2 Another is the Silk Road Museum in Jiuquan, also Gansu Province, a city founded-as the homepage proudly states-on the Silk Road in 111 . 3 Connected to the museum is a grand Expo Park devoted to "the essence of the life and culture along the Silk Road as it existed in old times." 4 Anyone wishing to know more can read that from the first dynasties of China during the Bronze Age, the Xia and the Shang, the Chinese carried trade to the ancient civilizations such as Egypt, Babylon, Hindus, Rome and Greece. Following dynasties Zhou, Qin and Han continued in the footsteps of the Xia and Shang and spread trade throughout Eurasia, and Western Civilizations stretched their trade routes deeper into China. Multinational competition and wars between leading empires determined who controlled the Silk Route and its rich treasures that traversed the lands. 5 This is an exciting glimpse into a global past, but little distinguishes it from a myth. Like a myth, its empirical foundation is no longer questioned. Chronology is suspended. It seamlessly links a very ancient past to the modern present and tells a story of age-old connectivity. Myths gain power through images in our minds: age-old trade routes through forbidding territories, caravans loaded with carpets and pearls, and pioneering merchants moving oriental luxuries from east to west. Several recent commentators have emphasized the profoundly modern agendas lying behind the invocation of the ancient Silk Road. 6 This should put us on alert. As the Egyptologist Jan Assmann puts it, history becomes myth not simply as fiction but as a narrative foun-1 Winter 2022, appendix A on Silk Road exhibitions around the world since 2002, lists seven in 2019 alone, with a significant increase and novel concentration in the People's Republic of China, which hosted six of them in that year; see also Winter 2022, 114-135 for contextualization of this development.
Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies Vol. 3, 2023
for the transformation of the environment into an imperial landscape. I owe special thanks to Eli... more for the transformation of the environment into an imperial landscape. I owe special thanks to Eli Weaverdyck for valuable comments and discussion during the writing of this chapter. 2 Periplus Maris Erythraei (PME) 65 with Casson 1989 ad loc. Young 2001, 27-89, provides a good chapter-length introduction; Cobb 2018 and Sidebotham 2011 provide excellent surveys of Eastern Desert trade from the Ptolemaic to the Roman period. 3 Casson 1989.
Handbook Ancient Afro Eurasian Economies, Vol. 2, 2019
In 137 , the council of the city of Palmyra in the Syrian Desert decided to revise and publish ... more In 137 , the council of the city of Palmyra in the Syrian Desert decided to revise and publish a tariff of maximum charges that tax farmers were allowed to collect from merchants, animal drivers, and pastoralists in the market. 1 New regulations had become necessary, so the prescript states, because many disputes had arisen about the amount of fees that could be raised legitimately according to law and custom. The tariff gives a long list of taxes imposed for the import and export of goods and provision of services, such as grazing animals, importing/exporting salt, travel provisions, dried produce, salt fish, olive oil, animal fat, slaves, prostitutes, beasts of burden, cloth, myrrh (myron), died fleeces, bronze statues, and a few more. An older law had responded to an edict of a Roman governor some 60 years previously, which itself renewed regulations from the time of Emperor Tiberius (14-37 ) when Palmyra had become part of the Roman province of Syria. 2 Scholars mistakenly take the tax law as a reflection of just the local economy of Palmyra. 3 According to this view, it regulated the fees imposed on local imports and grazing rights in a typical provincial town that enjoyed municipal tax autonomy in the Roman Empire. There was, so it is argued, another economy in and around Palmyra. Large volumes of exotic luxuries-spices, pearls, gems, fine garments, and silk-passed through the city, from where they went on to Antiocheia to be taxed at the 25 percent import tax rate that the Roman government claimed at its imperial borders. 4 Once cleared, some goods stayed in Antiocheia, while others were distributed further to Rome and other cities in the Mediterranean. This economy was in the hands of powerful caravan merchants and financiers who had become enormously wealthy through this trade. The great monumental remains of the city and the richly adorned funerary reliefs discovered in the late eighteenth century were the results of this other economy. The drivers were not just Palmyrenes, but The most valuable analysis of the tax law and its context can still be found in Matthews 1984;
Handbook Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies Vol. 2, 2021
Sitta von Reden reliable social and financial relationships in the urban economy. The Greek polei... more Sitta von Reden reliable social and financial relationships in the urban economy. The Greek poleis of the Mediterranean in particular brought about a powerful connection between urban and rural culture. This political and social structure proved very successful in the Hellenistic period, precisely because it linked urban and rural development. And third, the analogy that Rostovtzeff suggests between rulers and ruled, haves and have-nots, is not borne out fully by ancient evidence: tributary extraction was most successful where local and imperial elites combined their interests. Where this collaboration failed, social instability and unrest were the near-predictable consequence. Scholars of the post-Rostovtzeff age have turned instead to more regional perspectives. This was partly due to the antimodernizing turn following Moses Finley's influential Sather lectures. 6 Yet it evolved also, and probably more importantly, from the greater disciplinary specialization that marked postwar scholarship. Given the different expertise that is required for understanding Hellenistic Asia Minor, Judaea, Babylonia, and Egypt, as well as other economic regions of the Hellenistic economy, the Hellenistic economy is now an interdisciplinary field of study. The local impact of fiscal administration, monetization, and royal agrarian politics is noted in all regional perspectives, as is the new culture of political communication and urban organization. 7 Yet the greater specialization of the field has made scholars shy away from attempts to characterize the Hellenistic economy as a totality. 8 Overall economic outcomes, the behavior of different actors, and the different roles of tools that contributed to such outcomes have become more difficult to fathom than ever before. This chapter thus proceeds by proposing a number of hypotheses rather than a model for the political economy of the Hellenistic imperial space as a whole. It will start by suggesting indications of economic growth (III), followed by an outline of the temporal and geographical variation of economic development (IV). I will then discuss various factors of change, from a social (V), institutional (VI), and technological (VII) perspective. Finally, I will look at changing circuits of exchange that emerged from the multipolarity of the Hellenistic Empires, on the one hand, and their maritime orientation, on the other (VIII).
Handbook Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies Vol. 2, 2021
Handbook Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies Vol. 1, 2019
Although the last few years have seen a surge of publications on Indo-Roman trade and Silk Road e... more Although the last few years have seen a surge of publications on Indo-Roman trade and Silk Road exchange, 1 the trans-imperial trade connections of the Hellenistic and Roman Empires have never been central to the field of Graeco-Roman history. The Greeks and Romans were Mediterranean societies. Their involvement in Asia beyond Asia Minor was the result of colonization, annexation, and conquest, but not central to their cultural formation, empire building, and economy. 2 The Mediterranean perspective of studies on Greek and Roman culture, that explains itself by the origin of Graeco-Roman history in Greek and Latin philology, gained further momentum by a new interest in Mediterranean connectivity that developed in the wake of the English translation of Fernand Braudel's La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II (1949) in 1972. Since then, Graeco-Roman culture and economy could be even more convincingly, and more comprehensively, located in the Mediterranean Basin. 3 The subject of ancient history was no longer defined just by the languages, but instead by geographical, cultural, and economic cohesion of the ancient Mediterranean. In 2000, Horden and Purcell published a volume full of knowledge and insight about ecologies, microclimates, nutrition, settlement patterns, and systems of travel and exchange that gave life to the Mediterranean as a connected human landscape. In an often-quoted phrase, they summarized the Mediterranean's most important characteristics as fragmentation and connectivity: "We have identified extreme topographical fragmentation as one of two environment ingredients-along with the connectivity provided by the sea itself-in a distinctly Mediterranean history." 4 The unity of the Mediterranean is a construct, but it has some natural basis: The region was the home of particular vines, the European olive, and certain types of wheat typically consumed by Greeks and Romans; it was a unified climatic zone and it was relatively easily navigable. The very uneven distribution of natural re
Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies Vol. 1, 2019
Sitta von Reden 10.B Graeco-Roman Indography I Introduction India entered the intellectual horizo... more Sitta von Reden 10.B Graeco-Roman Indography I Introduction India entered the intellectual horizon of the Greeks in the course of the Persian period. 1 As early as the late sixth century, Skylax from Karyanda in Asia Minor was called into service by the Persian king Darius who wished to gather information about the country he intended to conquer. 2 Circumnavigation (periplous) and 'leading around' (periegesis) were the means by which such knowledge was gathered, generating numerous treatises under these titles, though only a fraction of them is transmitted. Their origin in circumnavigation and travel explains why these treatises were not just ethnographies, but paid attention to geography, distances, and conditions of travel. Ethno-geographical writing developed certain patterns that over centuries remained relatively unchanged, despite the fact that the relationship of the Mediterranean to distant worlds changed through conquest and trade. 3 One typical feature was concerned with contact zones. Although many ethnographers had never traveled to the countries they described, the regions that they explored were adjacent to familiar political spaces. Second, despite the very different nature of the contact zones, and the contacts Greeks and Romans had with them, ethno-geographical writing shared a canon of common themes. Regardless of whether the people and countries observed were befriended or inimical, praised or abhorred, there were expectations regarding a catalog of features to be treated. These included descriptions of the land, rivers, climate, plants, and animals, together with the land's agrarian and mineral wealth, the origins of people, their appearance, size and political institutions (including the political rule of women). We also find comments on the nature and size of cities, housing styles, dress, sexual habits, marriage customs, funerary rites, religion, education, weapons, and methods of warfare. The repetition of themes becomes apparent when one considers what was not described unless it was exception, paradoxical, or noteworthy: public architecture, administration, agricultural and crafts, urban development, and other observations that economic historians would like to have. Third, not only were similar themes covered, but similar observations made: certain tribes built no temples or made no images of their gods, fought particularly fiercely, had strange but functional physiologies that fitted their strange lives, or did
Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies Vol. 1, 2019
Sitta von Reden 8.C Documentary Sources I Introduction The use of documentary sources (papyri, co... more Sitta von Reden 8.C Documentary Sources I Introduction The use of documentary sources (papyri, coins, and inscriptions) for economic history has a long pedigree. The great German philologist and epigraphist August Boeckh (1785-1875) not only initiated the first corpus of Greek inscriptions (now Inscriptiones Graecae [IG]), but also applied his epigraphical knowledge to writing the first history of Athenian public finance. 1 Boeckh pioneered ancient economic history as a quantifying discipline. He also reoriented the academic interest from ancient household management to what he regarded as the national economy of Athens. The Russian-born archaeologist Michael Ivanovich Rostovtzeff (1870-1952) likewise used documentary sources to refocus the subject of ancient economic history. More than Boeckh, he demonstrated the potential of this evidence for research on economies beyond Athens and Rome. 2 Integrating local art, papyri, coins, and inscriptions from the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East into his research on the Hellenistic and Roman economies, he turned historians' attention away from the centers to places like Egypt, Syria, and the Black Sea. Although his model of the ancient economies is largely obsolete, his evidence is still valuable for the economic history of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. The material of the magisterial five-volume Economic Survey of Ancient Rome (1933-1940), edited by Tenney Frank, had an equally important impact. Moreover, these works did not only focus strongly on documentary evidence, but also argued for the so-called modernist, that is market-oriented, perspective on the Greek and Roman economies. 3 This perspective fell into disregard with the anti-modernist model of A. H. M. Jones and Moses Finley. 4 Finley not only emphasized fundamental differences between ancient and modern economies, but also derived his position largely from literary evidence. Unfortunately, Greek and Roman literature overwhelmingly expressed the ideas of Roman and Athenian elites privileging the view from the imperial centers and the rationalities of wealthy landlords. It was only with the return of modernist positions that the use of documentary sources came back in a great way. 5 Moreover, quantifying trends in archaeological research, a greater integration
Handbook Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies vol. 1, 2019
Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies vol.1, 2019
The three-volume handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies aims to provide a tool for interdis... more The three-volume handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies aims to provide a tool for interdisciplinary research on ancient economies during the imperial period of the third century BCE to the third century CE. In particularl, it aims to suggest ways of approaching the connectivity of the Afro-Eurasian region from an economic perspective that is more complex than the common model of the Silk Road. This short paper gives an introduction to the arguments of the handbook as a whole.
The conference will explore economic processes in frontier zones of ancient empires and their wid... more The conference will explore economic processes in frontier zones of ancient empires and their wider impact on inter-imperial exchanges in the Afro-Eurasian world region. It is part of the broader project of rethinking "Silk-Road" exchange, which so far has been looked at mostly from the perspective of imperial centers and final destinations rather than regions that-for various reasons and in different ways-were involved in inter-imperial contacts and exchange. As befits the complexity of the topic and the surviving evidence, the range of approaches is also wide, including archaeology , philology, numismatics, the study of excavated texts, and more. The program is divided into five thematic sessions that transcend both regional and disciplinary boundaries. Three sessions emphasize the role of political power, and two focus on the more acephalous network aspects of exchange systems. Political Power and Economies examines the interplay between the growth and decline of imperial systems and economic processes. Nodes: Ports and Border Markets focuses on specific places through which goods, people, and ideas flowed. Links: People in Motion explores how and why these people and goods traveled. Centers and Peripheries interrogates the particular nature of relationships between places that have been considered cores and hinterlands. Finally, Inter-imperial Exchange considers the role of empires in exchange networks beyond their borders.
The Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires are usually studied separately, or otherwise included into bro... more The Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires are usually studied separately, or otherwise included into broader studies of the Hellenistic World. The present conference proposes a more systematic comparison of the roles of local elites and local populations in the construction, negotiation, and adaptation of political, economic, military and ideological power of these multi-ethnic empires. They are sufficiently similar to make comparisons valid, while in the process of comparing them differences should become more sali- ent and better explained. Regions that were successively included in the Ptolemaic and then Seleucid empires deserve particular attention, but can only be understood within a broader picture of the ruling strategies of both empires.
The papers are organized along three main lines of research for examining the role and the level of integration of the local populations. The first line explores forms of communication as can be observed from coins, inscriptions and visual culture. The second explores the effects of settlement policies on the relationship between rulers, immigrants and local populations. The third assesses how local priestly elites collaborated with and resisted against the new ruling classes and immigrant populations. All three lines will shed different light on the development of communication, monarchic ideology, royal and dynastic cult, as well as on the mediation between competing ruling coalitions.