Aizanoi and Anatolia. Town and countryside in late Late Antiquity (original) (raw)
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Change or no change? Revised perceptions of urban transformation in late Antiquity
TRAC, 1999
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Cities Through the Ages: One Thing or Many
Frontiers in Digital Humanities, 2019
The variability among cities, from the ancient world to the present, can be organized usefully in two ways. First, a focus on the dominant urban activities and processes leads to the recognition of two basic urban types: economic cities and political cities. Most cities today are economic cities in which growth proceeds through agglomeration processes. By contrast, most cities in the ancient world (and some today) are political cities, in which power and administration play a major role in structuring cities and generating change. Second, an alternative focus on processes of social interaction within the urban built environment leads to the recognition that there is only one kind of settlement that includes all cities-economic and political; past and present. Cities in this sense are settings for "energized crowding." Processes of interaction generate both economic and political growth, and they produce and influence the built forms and social characteristics of all cities. Our model helps scholars distinguish the unique from the universal traits of cities today and in the past.
'Urbanised' villages in early Byzantium, an overview
Transformations of City and Countryside in the Byzantine Period
In the last few decades, a lot of attention has been devoted to the development of the city in late antique and early Byzantine times. Changes in the late antique and Byzantine countryside have been receiving more attention too; surveys in cities’ hinterlands and territories have multiplied and new approaches to evaluate the productivity of the land have been introduced. Although the interdependence of city and countryside is widely acknowledged, when urban and rural physical evolutions are compared, the spotlight generally is on the city, which is said to have undergone a ‘ruralisation.’ In this article, I revisit urban-rural relations, but I move the focus to rural settlements. In many regions of the eastern Mediterranean they were doing well. Between the fourth and seventh/eighth century, villages grew in size and number and played an important part in the economy as producers but possibly also consumers. I refrain from making general statements on rural versus urban ‘prosperity’ in late antique centuries – something that is exceptionally hard to determine – but instead focus on three noticeable developments in urban-rural relations. After a quick look at the villages of the Aezanitis, where investments in rural architectural decoration match or even outdo those in the urban centre of Aizanoi, I discuss rural settlements in Cilicia that built late antique tetrapyla and arches, and then move on to the villages of Jordan where one of the most remarkable collections of seventh-century mosaics and epigraphy can be found. Finally, I raise some questions concerning the initiators of building works in villages.
Elton Changing Patterns of Urbanization
Sebaste: Studies in Honour of Eugenia Equini Schneider, 2019
This paper summarizes changing urban settlement patterns in Roman Isauria. From the beginning of the Roman period in the first century BC to its end in the seventh century AD, Isauria had two patterns of urbanism. Along the coast and to the north around Isaura Vetus and Nova, cities were small but similar to other Hellenistic to Roman cities in Anatolia. These two areas surrounded an interior zone where the Roman state had significant impact, but there was little monumental architecture. Many of the cities in both coastal and interior zones were created or expanded in the first century AD. The region as a whole was not wealthy and had a reputation for pirates and bandits. Despite the poverty, the interior was connected to the rest of the Roman world. Since many of the cities in the were recently created, urbanism in Isauria was a very different phenomenon than in the Cilician lowlands or in the west coast of Anatolia where cities could often trace back a history to before the Achaemenid Persian conquest in the sixth century BC.
Settlement, Urbanization, and Population
Bowman, A. K. and Wilson, A. I. (eds) (2011). Settlement, Urbanization, and Population (Oxford Studies on the Roman Economy). Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011
This volume presents a collection of studies focussing on population and settlement patterns in the Roman empire in the perspective of the economic development of the Mediterranean world between 100 BC and AD 350. The analyses offered here highlight the issues of regional and temporal variation in Italy, Spain, Britain, Egypt, Crete, and Asia Minor from classical Greece to the early Byzantine period. The chapters fall into two main groups, the first dealing with the evidence for rural settlement, as revealed by archaeological field surveys, and the attendant methodological problems of extrapolating from that evidence a view of population; and the second with city populations and the phenomenon of urbanization. They proceed to consider hierarchies of settlement in the characteristic classical pattern of city plus territory, and the way in which those entities are defined from the highest to the lowest level: the empire as 'city of Rome plus territory', then regional and local hierarchies, and, more precisely, the identity and the nature of the 'instruments' which enables them to function in economic cohesion. Introduction: http://fdslive.oup.com/www.oup.com/academic/pdf/13/9780199602353\_chapter1.pdf