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Title Cities as palimpsests? : responses to antiquity in eastern Mediterranean urbanism. / Edited by Elizabeth Key Fowden, Suna Çağaptay, Edward Zychowicz-Coghill, Louise Blanke
Published Oxford : Oxbow Books, 2022

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Description 1 online resource (xx, 410 pages)
Summary The metaphor of the palimpsest has been increasingly invoked to conceptualize cities with deep, living pasts. This volume seeks to think through, and beyond, the logic of the palimpsest, asking whether this fashionable trope slyly forces us to see contradiction where local inhabitants saw (and see) none, to impose distinctions that satisfy our own assumptions about historical periodization and cultural practice, but which bear little relation to the experience of ancient, medieval or early modern persons. Spanning the period from Constantine's foundation of a New Rome in the fourth century to the contemporary aftermath of the Lebanese civil war, this book integrates perspectives from scholars typically separated by the disciplinary boundaries of late antique, Islamic, medieval, Byzantine, Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern studies, but whose work is united by their study of a region characterized by resilience rather than rupture. The volume includes an introduction and eighteen contributions from historians, archaeologists and art historians who explore the historical and cultural complexity of eastern Mediterranean cities. The authors highlight the effects of the multiple antiquities imagined and experienced by persons and groups who for generations made these cities home, and also by travelers and other observers who passed through them. The independent case studies are bound together by a shared concern to understand the many ways in which the cities' pasts live on in their presents
Subject Cities and towns -- Balkan Peninsula -- History
Cities and towns -- Middle East -- History
Sociology, Urban -- Balkan Peninsula -- History
Sociology, Urban -- Middle East -- History
Cities and towns
Sociology, Urban
Balkan Peninsula
Middle East
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781789257694
1789257697
9781789257700
1789257700