The Hellenistic West
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Oxford
Department Name: Unknown
Abstract
Although the Hellenistic period has become increasingly popular as a focus of research and teaching in recent years, studies of the 'Hellenistic World' tend to ignore the western Mediterranean and to concentrate solely on the eastern kingdoms of Macedonia, Egypt, Asia Minor and the Levant. This rift between the 'Greek East' and the 'Roman West' is much more a product of the traditional separation in Classics departments of 'Roman' and 'Greek' history (and historians), however, than a reflection of the Mediterranean in this period, which was a strongly interconnected cultural and economic zone. The rising Roman Republic was but one among many powers in the region, including the great imperial and commercial state of Carthage along with a variety of other peoples, cities and kingdoms in the West and the East. Privileging any one or one group, of these powers creates a very one-sided account of the period. The term 'Hellenistic', however, offers a useful way of confronting this problem, in that it is both a conventional definition of a period (from Alexander to Actium, 323-31 BC), and an ambiguous cultural description (Hellenic-ish}, which can to a greater extent than is usually recognised apply to the western Mediterranean in this period as well as to the East.
Our project will be the first comprehensive exploration of the Hellenistic western Mediterranean. There will be a series of seminars in Oxford in the spring of 2006, followed in the early summer by a research workshop in preparation for publication as an edited collection of essays.
The project will involve scholars from different disciplines, including history, archaeology, art history, epigraphy, and numismatics, who work on a variety of regions (Italy, Sardinia, Spain, Sicily, North Africa, and the Eastern Mediterranean}, as well as a number of graduate students and post doctoral researchers. Papers will include studies of ideologies such as the ancient and modern historiography of the western Mediterranean, of material culture, artifacts and art history, of specific regions such as Sardinia and Spain, and of the !inks between the two halves of the sea in this period. As this is the first major investigation of a new topic, we are encouraging participants to focus on the 'the big picture' rather than confining themselves to individual cases and places, and to adopt speculative approaches where appropriate.
Our overall objective is the production of a book on 'The Hellenistic West', which will challenge the traditional regionalisation of history in the Mediterranean. The papers which will make up this book will, for the most part, have their origins in the seminar series. However, the collaborative address we have devised for the project will enable contributors to work their own ideas through more thoroughly, to draw together the themes of the project, and to develop a coherent approach to the topic in general and specifically to the publication in hand. The resulting book promises to be far more than just a set of seminar papers and is intended to transform the study of the western (and eastern) Mediterranean world in this crucial period.
The wider consequences of such a project will be felt both within specialist fields of historical and archaeological study of the western Mediterranean, and in the broader context of the teaching of the ancient world. We hope that it will encourage scholars and students to rethink their understanding of the Hellenistic world, and to avoid the rigid boundaries of East and West, Greek and Roman, and the excessively narrow vision which these encourage. More broadly, we aim to contribute to the growing interest in the Hellenistic period, for so long dismissed as an awkward transition stage between the historical highlights of Classical Greece and the Roman Empire, and help to bring a similar level of awareness to the history of the non-Roman western Mediterranean.
Our project will be the first comprehensive exploration of the Hellenistic western Mediterranean. There will be a series of seminars in Oxford in the spring of 2006, followed in the early summer by a research workshop in preparation for publication as an edited collection of essays.
The project will involve scholars from different disciplines, including history, archaeology, art history, epigraphy, and numismatics, who work on a variety of regions (Italy, Sardinia, Spain, Sicily, North Africa, and the Eastern Mediterranean}, as well as a number of graduate students and post doctoral researchers. Papers will include studies of ideologies such as the ancient and modern historiography of the western Mediterranean, of material culture, artifacts and art history, of specific regions such as Sardinia and Spain, and of the !inks between the two halves of the sea in this period. As this is the first major investigation of a new topic, we are encouraging participants to focus on the 'the big picture' rather than confining themselves to individual cases and places, and to adopt speculative approaches where appropriate.
Our overall objective is the production of a book on 'The Hellenistic West', which will challenge the traditional regionalisation of history in the Mediterranean. The papers which will make up this book will, for the most part, have their origins in the seminar series. However, the collaborative address we have devised for the project will enable contributors to work their own ideas through more thoroughly, to draw together the themes of the project, and to develop a coherent approach to the topic in general and specifically to the publication in hand. The resulting book promises to be far more than just a set of seminar papers and is intended to transform the study of the western (and eastern) Mediterranean world in this crucial period.
The wider consequences of such a project will be felt both within specialist fields of historical and archaeological study of the western Mediterranean, and in the broader context of the teaching of the ancient world. We hope that it will encourage scholars and students to rethink their understanding of the Hellenistic world, and to avoid the rigid boundaries of East and West, Greek and Roman, and the excessively narrow vision which these encourage. More broadly, we aim to contribute to the growing interest in the Hellenistic period, for so long dismissed as an awkward transition stage between the historical highlights of Classical Greece and the Roman Empire, and help to bring a similar level of awareness to the history of the non-Roman western Mediterranean.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Josephine Crawley Quinn (Principal Investigator) |
| Description | Amidst a huge variety of individual observations and investigations, the common themes and ideas that emerged as the project progressed can be summarised as follows: • Even considered independently of a Romano- or Helleno-centric narrative, the Western Mediterranean evinces high levels of socio-economic connectivity, cultural interaction and rapid transformation in this period (see in particular Kuttner, Prag, R. Wilson, Fentress, Quinn, Jefferson, Bispham, Wallace-Hadrill). • Furthermore, there are clear economic and cultural connections between the Eastern and Western Mediterranean in the Hellenistic era (Jefferson, van Dommelen, A. Wilson, Yarrow among others,; see Erskine, however, for a useful reminder that these connections may not have been a feature of contemporary perception). Few of these were mediated through Rome, and they occurred at a surprising variety of social levels (A. Wilson for the mass import/export of cooking ware as well as the transmission of luxury cultural practices, van Dommelen for the role of the rural peasantry). • Nonetheless there are also distinct economic and cultural 'zones' within the Mediterranean at this time which cross traditional scholarly divisions (such as East and West, North and South) and ignore boundaries of states and ethnicities, destabilising current concepts of cultural identity. The clearest example of this which emerged from several papers was a central Mediterranean zone encompassing Central and Southern Italy, Sicily, Cyrenaica and the Eastern Maghreb, and the islands inbetween (van Dommelen, A. Wilson, Fentress); Mauretania and Iberia would appear to constitute another, rather different, cultural and economic region, one which we were not able to study in as much detail as now seems desirable. But given the existence of such zones, and the levels of exchange and integration in the Mediterranean as a whole, are East and West helpful terms at all? • Many of the papers also stressed the political and cultural importance of non-Roman Western powers and cultures both in the West and in the Mediterranean as a whole in the Hellenistic era (Prag, Bispham, Jefferson, Quinn, R. Wilson). The non-Greco-Roman history of the ancient Mediterranean tends to be passed over in favour of the two societies which provide us with the most comprehensive literary (and epigraphic) account of themselves, but our project suggests that ignoring other states, in particular Carthage (Kuttner), and the Punic world more generally (van Dommelen, Fentress) as historical actors and focal points in this period produces a drastically skewed image of the ancient Mediterranean. • Merchants emerged as another set of crucial political and cultural actors (Fentress, A. Wilson, Jefferson); it seems that the current custom of confining trade and traders largely to the rubric of economic history misses important aspects of the role merchants played in catalysing and carrying out cultural transmission and exchange. Similarly, the role of religious and funerary ritual in transmitting cultural practices, if not meanings, was an important theme (van Dommelen, Quinn, Bispham, Jefferson). • Papers addressed the conception and definition of 'Hellenistic' from a variety of perspectives (see especially Wallace-Hadrill, Bispham, van Dommelen). The term usefully denotes the period (traditionally Alexander to Actium, c. 323-31 BCE) within which our investigations largely fall - although the fact that many of the social, economic and cultural patterns identified begin in the early fourth century or before, and continue into the Augustan period or later, suggests that the chronological (political) boundary is an artificial one, and perhaps misleading as a result. At the same time, however, the term implies a cultural description (Hellenic-ish) that many contributors felt was appropriate to describes aspects of the culture of the Western Mediterranean, often in juxtaposition or contradiction with other regional traditions; the attraction and importance of Greek (-identified) culture is for them a significant factor in the West in this period. However, some felt that describing aspects of Western culture as 'Hellenistic' was too narrow or perhaps not appropriate at all. Some papers pointed out the primacy of the Western (and especially Punic) Mediterranean in cultural developments more often considered as (in a broad sense) 'Greek', and others suggested that the integration of East and West in this period (in, perhaps, a proto-globalisation) should prevent us from privileging a cultural description with an embedded Eastern bias; if 'Hellenistic' is to be used as a description of aspects (or the whole) of the socio-cultural phenomena of the Western Mediterranean, is it being redefined too far? Is Hellenistic a useful term to think with in the West - and is it an entirely helpful one even in the heartland of the successor kingdoms? The same set of problems apply to 'Punic', a word with a parallel cultural meaning (Phoenician-ish after and beyond Phoenicia) to Hellenistic (Greek-ish after and beyond Greece): should we be looking too for the Punic East? Or is it the case that in a world where Carthage itself is looking increasingly Greek, but where Cyrenaicans are adopting Punic mosaic techniques and importing large quantities of Punic coarseware, one or both of these terms is redundant? All agree, however, that the variety of viewpoints expressed is a strength of the project, exposing a major issue for debate in the historiography of the ancient Mediterranean, and hope that it will be a stimulus to others to develop these questions further. • Another, related, area of fruitful debate was over the relationship of the global and the local or regional in the culture of the Hellenistic Mediterranean (R. Wilson, Quinn, Bispham, Prag). Is it inevitably true, as a commonplace of globlization theory would have it, that as worlds globalize they also localize? Our project suggests that the relationship between these two tendencies is more complex and often more distant than that. • Finally, the papers took on the modern debate on the Mediterranean as a place with 'a history of its own', with some (including Purcell and Quinn) suggesting that the Mediterranean region is too restricted to treat as a bounded historical space, and that historians of the Hellenistic world should be looking at connections beyond as well as within it, to the North, South and West as well as to the (further) East. We believe that as a result of our project and the publication currently in progress it will in the future be much more difficult to talk about the Western Mediterranean in the Hellenistic period solely or largely in terms of Rome as the prime mover and necessary centre of events, and that both Roman and Hellenistic historians will feel the need to consider the Mediterranean (and beyond) in this period as a whole. Study of the western Mediterranean from this new Hellenistic/Mediterranean perspective will, we hope, provide one means towards moving on from problematic paradigms such as "Romanization". |
| Exploitation Route | Further research in this area. |
| Sectors | Other |
| URL | http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/classical-studies/ancient-history/hellenistic-west-rethinking-ancient-mediterranean |
| Description | As a basis for further academic research. |
| Description | The Punic Mediterranean |
| Organisation | British School at Rome |
| Country | Italy |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Our collaboration with the British School at Rome over this AHRC Research Network led to a new project in conjunction with the British School at Rome and the Society for Libyan Studies on the Punic Mediterranean. This project attracted British Academy funding, was led by Josephine Crawley Quinn with Jonathan Prag, Nicholas Vella, Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew Wilson and Simon Keay, and resulted in an edited collection of essays and a graduate student network of Punic Studies in the UK. |
| Start Year | 2008 |
| Description | Utica Excavations |
| Organisation | Utica Excavations |
| Country | Tunisia |
| Sector | Private |
| PI Contribution | Archaeological Excavations at the site of Utica in Tunisia, co-directed by AHRC Research Network participants Josephine Crawley Quinn, Andrew Wilson and Elizabeth Fentress, and funded through the generosity of Baron Lorne Thyssen. |
| Start Year | 2007 |