J. F. Osborne. 2017. Review of Harmanşah, Ö. Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013; and Harmanşah, Ö. Place, Memory, and Healing: An Archaeology of Anatolian Rock Monuments. New York, NY: Routledge, 2015. CAAreviews, Taylor & Francis (original) (raw)
Related papers
Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East
2013
""This book investigates the founding and building of cities in the ancient Near East. The creation of new cities was imagined as an ideological project or a divine intervention in the political narratives and mythologies of Near Eastern cultures, often masking the complex processes behind the social production of urban space. During the Early Iron Age (ca. 1200–850 BCE), Assyrian and Syro-Hittite rulers developed a highly performative official discourse that revolved around constructing cities, cultivating landscapes, building watercourses, erecting monuments, and initiating public festivals. This volume combs through archaeological, epigraphic, visual, architectural, and environmental evidence to tell the story of a region from the perspective of its spatial practices, landscape history, and architectural technologies. It argues that the cultural processes of the making of urban spaces shape collective memory and identity as well as sites of political performance and state spectacle. Excerpt http://www.cambridge.org/servlet/file/store6/item7256988/version1/9781107027947\_excerpt.pdf""
Place, Memory and Healing: An Archaeology of Anatolian Rock Monuments
2014
Place, Memory and Healing: An Archaeology of Anatolian Rock Monuments investigates the complex and deep histories of places, how they served as sites of memory and belonging for local communities over the centuries, and how they were appropriated and monumentalized in the hands of the political elites. Focusing on Anatolian rock monuments carved into the living rock at watery landscapes during the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, this book develops an archaeology of place as a theory of cultural landscapes and as an engaged methodology of fieldwork in order to excavate the genealogies of places. Advocating that archaeology can contribute substantively to the study of places in many fields of research and engagement within the humanities and the social sciences, this book seeks to move beyond the oft-conceived notion of places as fixed and unchanging, and argues that places are always unfinished, emergent, and hybrid. Rock cut monuments of Anatolian antiquity are discussed in the historical and micro-regional context of their making at the time of the Hittite Empire and its aftermath, while the book also investigates how such rock-cut places, springs, and caves are associated with new forms of storytelling, holy figures, miracles, and healing in their post-antique life. Anybody wishing to understand places of cultural significance both archaeologically as well as through current theoretical lenses such as heritage studies, ethnography of landscapes, social memory, embodied and sensory experience of the world, post-colonialism, political ecology, cultural geography, sustainability, and globalization will find the case studies and research within this book a doorway to exploring places in new and rewarding ways.
The urbanization of Syro-Hittite (Luwian and Aramaean) states is one of most complex yet little explored regional processes in Near Eastern history and archaeology. In this study, I discuss aspects of landscape and settlement change in northern Syria and southeastern Anatolia during the Early Iron Age (ca. 1200–850 BC), and suggest that the emergent geo-politics of the region involved the foundation of cities and construction of specific types of commemorative monuments including rock reliefs, steles and city gates. While defining new forms of territorial power, these monuments linked local polities to a shared Hittite past through their literary and visual rhetoric, and a discourse of inherited agricultural land. To contextualize the subject matter, I first discuss the gradual southward shift of an imperial Hittite center of power from central Anatolia towards Karkamiš and Tarhuntašša at the end of the Late Bronze Age, arguing against the widespread models of a sudden collapse of the Hittite Empire followed by dark ages. Furthermore, I present archaeological and epigraphic evidence for the formation of the regional state Malizi/Melid. This Syro-Hittite kingdom established itself in the Malatya-Elbistan Plains in eastern Turkey during the first centuries of the Early Iron Age as one of the earliest political entities to emerge from the ashes of the Hittite Empire. Monuments raised by Malizean ‘country lords’ in rural and urban contexts suggest a picture of a fluid landscape in transition, one that was configured through the construction of cities, and other practices of place-making.
Fondare e ri-fondare. Parma, Reggio e Modena lungo la via Emilia romana. (Atti del simposio internazionale, Parma 12 e 13 dicembre 2017), ed. Alessia Morigi and Carlo Quintelli (Padova, Il Poligrafo casa editrice, 2018), 35-46, 2018
Contrasting conscious and unconscious modes by which cities preserve and display their past, this paper looks at the case studies of Thessaloniki, Zaragoza and Taragona to illustrate the different ways in which the traces of the past are deployed, displayed, and deleted.
Cities are layered topographies of personal and collective histories, enchanted places of experience, theaters of action, places of belonging and love, and messy landscapes of everyday life. City spaces come alive with public events, while they are built through daily acts of the city’s citizens, sometimes dramatic decisions of its planners, and always the residues of its material past. As Charles Baudelaire has put it “the form of a city changes more quickly than the human heart.” In the last century, artists, writers, intellectuals have radically criticized the deteriorating urban life and alienation in industrial and post-industrial cities, and discussed social and political potentials of urban life known from history. In this class, we will explore the cities of the ancient past from the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East to discuss those potentials, negotiated between ideal visions of the city and architectural realities, and between the ambitious projects of developing urban centers and the everyday action of people on city streets. What did the ancient cities look like and how were they shaped in architectural form and in the imagination of its citizens? How did public events, festivals, rituals, and state spectacles shape or impact the layout of a city? In the light of contemporary theories of cities and urban space, this class will investigate eleven cities drawn chronologically from the cities of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, starting with the Mesopotamian cities such as Ur and Nippur to the Assyrian capital Nineveh and Nebuchadnezzar II's Babylon, ending with late antique Jerusalem and Byzantine Constantinople. We will discuss the making of cities with emphasis on the organization of public events such as festivals, urban rituals, ceremonies, and carnivals that shape their urban spaces. We will therefore discuss the making of cities, negotiated between the representations of urban ideals, politics of space, monumental construction, and the material practices of the society, and explore aspects of the recent scholarly opinion that societies established their relationship with history through their construction and manipulation of architectural spaces.
During the reign of Rusa II in the first half of 7th century BC, Lake Van Basin underwent a remarkable process of urbanization and reconfiguration of its political landscapes through the construction of new cities. The urban spaces that were eventually created were demarcated with a particularly powerful and innovative architectonic culture: finely carved stone masonry. I argue in this article that monumental building activity, as a historically conspicuous event, creates a medium of exchange of artisanal knowledge and technological innovation. The dramatic urban landscape of the Iron age city at Ayanis (ancient Rusahinili-Eiduru-kai) in Eastern Turkey on the Eastern shore of Lake Van, features an impressive fabric of such architectonic culture, not only a product of long-term building technologies in the region, but also that of a series of innovations associated with the reign of its founder Rusa II. This paper specifically focuses on the complex set of stone masonry techniques in the monumental structures at Ayanis, and attempts to reflect on the multi-faceted aspects of symbolic technologies of production in the context of the foundation of the city. It argues that the highly refined stone masonry in Urartu was a symbolically charged architectural technology that effectively operated as royal insignia in the public sphere, but it also derived from the local corpus of building knowledge in the Lake Van basin.