Identities in Antiquity

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-138-54516-8
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 632 Seiten, Format (B × H): 174 mm x 246 mm, Gewicht: 453 g

Reihe: Rewriting Antiquity

Identities in Antiquity is multi-disciplinary platform for the synthetic study of ancient identities, set in a more rounded and inclusive notion of Antiquity.

The volume showcases methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of ancient identities by scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds and career stages. In doing so, it promotes a more holistic approach to the study of ancient identities, facilitating comparisons between different periods and disciplines and generating new knowledge in the process. Chapters illustrating the intersecting, multifaceted, and mutable (or else highly immutable) nature of ancient identities address themes such as ethnicity, race, gender, mobility, religion, and elite and sub-elite identities – most notably that of the enslaved – in case studies spanning the ancient Mediterranean world and beyond, from the third millennium BCE until the early Middle Ages.

The volume is suitable for students and scholars working on the Ancient Near East, the Graeco-Roman Worlds, Late Antiquity, and Byzantium, offering a valuable contribution to the study of past identities and the internal workings of ancient societies.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tsouparopoulou, Christina

Skinner, Joseph

Manolopoulou, Vicky

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements 

List of illustrations 

List of Abbreviations 

Notes on contributors 

 

Introduction

Joseph Skinner, Vicky Manolopoulou, and Christina Tsouparopoulou

 

PART I Approaching ancient identities 

 

1 Challenging essentialism: disentangling ancient and modern notions of ethnicity 

Johannes Siapkas

 

2 Elite identities: Greece and Egypt in comparative perspective 

Matthew Haysom

 

3 The identities of enslaved persons 

Kostas Vlassopoulos

 

4 Personal names and identity: a socio-onomastic approach to naming practices in the ancient world 

Andreas Gavrielatos

 

5 Religious identities in ancient cities 

Jörg Rüpke

 

6 Open dynamic stewardship: alternatives to understanding diversity and transformation 

Elena Isayev

 

PART II The ancient Near East

 

7 Construction of gender identities in Mesopotamia 

Agnès Garcia-Ventura and Saana Svärd

 

8 Mercantile and religious identities in Anatolia in the Middle Bronze Age 

Yagmur Heffron and Nancy Highcock

 

9 The identities of enslaved persons in ancient Mesopotamia 

J. Nicholas Reid

 

10 Exilic communities in Babylonia 

Laurie Pearce

 

11 Ancient Judaism: nation, ethnicity, or religion? 

Erich S. Gruen

 

PART III The Mediterranean world until the age of the successors 

 

12 A community of practice perspective on craft production and culture change in the Bronze Age Cyclades 

Natalie Abell

 

13 Reconstructing Phoenician identities: a glass half-full 

Carolina López-Ruiz

 

14 Transcultural tokens of identity: the mechanics of crossing borders in the ancient Mediterranean 

Denise Demetriou

 

15 Classical Greek racism 294

Thomas Harrison

 

16 Race and the Athenian metic 

Rebecca Futo Kennedy

 

17 Greek local identity and Greek local history 

Daniel Tober

 

PART IV The Roman world: from early republic to late empire 

 

18 Roman aristocratic family identity in the Late Republic and Early Empire 

Gary D. Farney

 

19 Identities of enslaved persons in the Roman world 

Christer Bruun

 

20 Identity construction in Alexandria: Greeks, Jews and Romans 

Kimberley Czajkowski

 

21 Roman military identities 

Andrew Gardner

 

PART V From Late Antiquity until the Early Middle Ages: Rome, Byzantium and others 

 

22 Peripheral identities: ethnicity, Anglo-Saxons and the Stützarmfibeln 

James Gerrard

 

23 The identity of the Huns 

Hyun Jin Kim

 

24 Sacrifice, banquets, and drunken elephants: the problem of Christian identity in Libanius’s Oration 30 

Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos

 

25 The open secret of Byzantium’s national identity 

Anthony Kaldellis

 

26 Demarcating Rome: the papal strategy of Othering and the re-invention of Greeks 

Clemens Gantner

 

27 The case of Manuel I Komnenos: articulating identity through gender, sexuality, and racialization 

Roland Betancourt

 

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Joseph Skinner is Senior Lecturer in Ancient Greek History at Newcastle University. His publications include The Invention of Greek Ethnography: From Homer to Herodotus (New York, 2012), and (as co-editor) Ancient Ethnography: New Approaches (London, 2013) and Herodotus and the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2020).

Vicky Manolopoulou is Research fellow in Environmental History at Ca’Foscari University, Venice. Her work centres on the intersection of landscape studies, environmental humanities and the history of emotions, focusing on the Eastern Mediterranean during the first millennium. Key research interests include human environment interactions, emotions, ritual and mnemonic landscapes.

Christina Tsouparopoulou is Assistant Professor in Near Eastern Archaeology and History at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw and an Honorary Research Fellow at Durham University. Her work bridges the material, visual, and textual culture of the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean.