#The power of the ancients series#
This meeting examines the Panathenaia of classical Athens (a series of games, ceremonies and processions which took place every four years) alongside the Festival of the Dionysia and the public funerals of the war dead. We will consider how theory and study of the modern city provides certain tools with which to analyse the ancient city, and will consider the other tools necessary to examine ancient and medieval cities. Turner on liminality, Lefebvre on the social production of space, Habermas on the public sphere. What is a city? What was a city, in the premodern period? Why should cities constitute a category in historical inquiry? We will chart how questions about ancient and medieval cities have changed over the past 50 years, and identify the strands of anthropological and sociological theory which have supported historical research on performance, ritual, and urban experience, eg.
We will thus also consider ancient and medieval cities as places of memory as well as projections of the future. Our focus on performance and ceremony allows us to consider in detail the means by which events which took place in cities – a series of games, an anniversary celebration, or a tragic military defeat – took advantage of certain qualities of the urban fabric, such as the proximity of certain monuments, or the legacy of previous events in a given place. While reflecting on the individual circumstances of each case, we will also examine the experience of urban ceremony comparatively looking not only at classical and Roman cities and their heritage, but also the roles of urbanism in the Byzantine, Islamicate, and Northern European worlds.
We will consider a number of case-studies, across a wide chronological and geographical range of cities, from classical Athens to later medieval Europe, examining city-states as political entities and looking at long-lived cities as well as newly founded ones. Starting in classical antiquity and ending in the later middle ages, students will explore different aspects of performance, celebration, and ceremony in cities of the premodern past and ask why and how rulership came to be so tightly related to urbanism in these places. This Option explores the experience of cities in the Mediterranean and Europe from a comparative perspective and through a wide range of evidence, from archaeology and standing buildings to archival records from daily life, histories, and legends of cities. Cities also served as places of memory, recording events of the past and enabling the reconfiguration of history in the production of new legacies. The representation and practice of power in cities, often through ceremonies and processions, aided rulers in communicating ideas about authority and culture. Fundamentally, they were also a means by which ancient and medieval rulers claimed and conveyed their authority to rule.
Classical and medieval societies of the Mediterranean and Western Eurasia valued cities as hallmarks of civilisation cities were economic tools, administrative centres, and religious shrines. If (slot) slot.addService(googletag.Cities of the ancient and medieval worlds were the canvasses upon which ideas of rulership and society were expressed. (function (a, d, o, r, i, c, u, p, w, m)
‘Arteology’ exhibit showcases archaeology-inspired art at Western Wall - The Jerusalem Post
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