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In Trading Communities, Taco Terpstra shows that long-distance trade in the Roman Empire was conducted through foreign trading communities living overseas, held together by ethnic and geographical identity.
Ancient Roman trade was severely hampered by slow transportation and by the absence of a state that helped traders enforce their contracts. In Trading Communities in the Roman World: A Micro-Economic and Institutional Perspective Taco Terpstra offers a new explanation of how traders in the Roman Empire overcame these difficulties. Previous theories have focused heavily on dependent labor, arguing that transactions overseas were conducted through slaves and freedmen. Taco Terpstra shows that this approach is unsatisfactory. Employing economic theory, he convincingly argues that the key to understanding long-distance trade in the Roman Empire is not patron-client or master-slave relationships, but the social bonds between ethnic groups of foreign traders living overseas and the local communities they joined.
Previous scholars have largely approached Wisdom and Torah in the Second Temple Period through a type of reception history, whereby the two concepts have been understood as signifiers of independent, earlier “biblical” streams of tradition that later came together in the Hellenistic and Roman eras, largely under the process of a so-called “torahization” of wisdom. Recent studies critiquing the nature of wisdom and wisdom literature as operative categories for understanding scribal cultures in early Judaism, as well as newer approaches to conceptualizing Torah and authorizing-compositional practices related to the Pentateuchal texts, however, have challenged the foundations on which t...
This book explores strategies for limiting transnational market failures, governance failures and constitutional failures impeding protection of the universally agreed sustainable development goals like climate change mitigation and access to justice and transnational rule-of-law. Can multilevel democratic and judicial protection of fundamental rights and public goods across frontiers be extended through plurilateral agreements? Can transnational economic and environmental constitutionalism be reconciled with ‘constitutional pluralism’ and with democratic constitutionalism depending on individual and democratic consent of free and equal citizens? Will judicial challenges (e.g. of EU carb...
With contributions from thirty archaeologists, epigraphists, historians, and philologists, this book covers Palmyra's archaeological remains and history from its earliest phases in the pre-Roman era to the destruction of many of its monuments during the Syrian Civil War and subsequent looting. The authors give comprehensive overviews of already published evidence, as well as significant new findings and analyses from fieldwork, and cover a broad range of themes, which not only relate to the archaeology and history of the site, but also to its relationship with the rest of the ancient world as a major trade hub during the Roman period.
Palmyra has long attracted the attention of the world. Even before its rediscovery in the eighteenth century it had gained legendary status because of its third-century CE Queen Zenobia, who had rebelled against the Romans and expanded Palmyra's territory into that of an Empire, stretching from what is modern eastern Turkey into Egypt. The city and its queen featured in European art and literature already in the century. Zenobia's Palmyra already existed as a mirage in the minds of the educated Europeans. Even though Zenobia's reign and extensive power was a fairly short interlude and the Romans struck hard against the Palmyrenes devastating the city, this path to imperial power was one whic...
Every year, the Bibliography catalogues the most important new publications, historiographical monographs, and journal articles throughout the world, extending from prehistory and ancient history to the most recent contemporary historical studies. Within the systematic classification according to epoch, region, and historical discipline, works are also listed according to author’s name and characteristic keywords in their title.
The studies in this volume share a focus on religion in the ancient Mediterranean world: How ritual, myth, spectatorship, and travel reflect the continual interaction of human beings with the richly fictive beings who defined the boundaries of groups, access to the past, and mobility across land and seascapes. They share as well the methodological exploration of the intersection between human sciencesthe integration of numerous disciplines around the study of all aspects of human life from the biological to the culturaland the study of the past. In so doing, they continue a long dialogue that engages with critical models derived from specializations within history, philology, archaeology, sociology, and anthropology, and addresses, increasingly, the potentialities and pitfalls of quantitative and digital analyses. Many of the threads in this long conversation inform these chapters: the comparative project, human social evolution, disciplinary reflexivity, religion as an embedded, functional, and structural system, and the role for agency, networks, and materiality.
Imperial and Local Citizenship in the Long Second Century CE explores the significance of Roman citizenship in the long century before Caracalla's universal grant of citizenship in 212 CE. From this emerges a new portrait of the early Roman empire: an exclusive regime of citizenship persisted, in a context of remarkable political and cultural integration.