Mediterranean Valley

Mediterranean Valley

Author: Graeme Barker

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 1995-11-01

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 0567312852

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Integrating the techniques of archaeology, history and geography, this book traces the history of human settlement in the Biferno Valley from early prehistory to the present century. It also covers the parallel story of landscape development, showing that the two have to be understood together. It argues for the importance of human settlement, rather than climate (as is often argued) in shaping the Mediterranean landscape. This book provides an interdisciplinary study of a restricted region, but about an important theme: the relationship between people and landscape in the past, and what we can learn from it for the future.


The Syro-Anatolian City-States

The Syro-Anatolian City-States

Author: James F. Osborne

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-11-06

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0199315841

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This book presents a new model for understanding the collection of ancient kingdoms that surrounded the northeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea from the Cilician Plain in the west to the upper Tigris River in the east, and from Cappadocia in the north to western Syria in the south, during the Iron Age of the ancient Near East (ca. 1200 to 600 BCE). Rather than presenting them as homogenous ethnolinguistic communities like "the Aramaeans" or "the Luwians" living in neatly bounded territories, this book sees these polities as being fundamentally diverse and variable, distinguished by demographic fluidity and cultural mobility. The Syro-Anatolian City-States sheds new light via an examination of a host of evidentiary sources, including archaeological site plans, settlement patterns, visual arts, and historical sources. Together, these lines of evidence reveal a complex fusion of cultural traditions that is nevertheless distinctly recognizable unto itself. This book is the first to specifically characterize the Iron Age city-states of southeastern Turkey and northern Syria, arguing for a unified cultural formation characterized above all by diversity and mobility and that can be referred to as the "Syro-Anatolian Culture Complex."