A World of Local Cultures in a Roman Sea: The Rise of Urban Landscapes in the Near East

Data evento
4 Dicembre 2024

Contextualizing Roman Ruins: Urban Cultures of Antiquity and the Long Late Antiquity in the Near East

The impressive remaining ruins of the cities of the ancient Near East—cities such as Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem), Apamea, Baalbek (Heliopolis), Bostra, Caesarea Marittima, Jerash, and Palmyra—almost all date to the Roman period. This is no accident; the Roman empire was an “empire of cities.” In the western Mediterranean, where there had been relatively few cities, the Romans planted an enormous number of new ones. The East, on the other hand, was already densely populated with cities. Here the ancient settlements of the Levant flourished under Roman rule, growing steadily in size and prosperity.

These cities gradually took on a new appearance too, as they each acquired the grand appurtenances and amenities of a Roman metropolis or model city: aqueducts, vaulted bath buildings, stone theaters, covered markets, colonnaded streets, monumental frontal temple buildings. In recent years these cities have attracted a fair amount of attention from archaeologists and historians; nonetheless they generally remain outside our accepted narratives of the evolving urban cultures of the Roman world.

The Thomas Spencer Jerome Lecture series revisits these long-established centers of the Roman Near East and the various ancient peoples who inhabited them. The lectures will seek to trace, through archaeological evidence and historical sources, the transformation of these cities from the late first century BCE until late antiquity and into the early Islamic period. These lectures will reveal the emergence of new and distinctive kinds of “urbanity” in the monumental spaces of these Levantine communities.

Urban development in the Roman period prompted major political, social, and religious changes, generating different “regimes of urban living” distinctive to the region. The lectures will take us through a series of extremely varied, yet nonetheless recognizable urban landscapes: the Decapolis, the Limestone Massif and the Tetrapolis; the settlements along the Mediterranean coast; and places deep inland such as Palmyra in the Syrian Desert and the Hauran. By the end of the journey, the lectures shall have situated these cities as physical manifestations of a local or regional experiment in “urban self-fashioning”—as the peoples of the region, collectively and individually, availed themselves of the alluring opportunities of the Roman peace.

This lecture turns to the rapidly expanding city centers of the first three centuries of the Roman period. These grew fast and were embellished with the monumental buildings that we know from the core of the Roman Empire: temples, theatres, bath buildings, hippodromes, colonnaded streets. These monuments are well known, but not always in context. Here we look at examples, considering differences and similarities from region to region as well as wider urban settings—including the lack of knowledge about domestic housing. Urban epigraphic habits are brought into play to examine ways in which local cultures interacted with growing Roman influence and negotiated having become a more integrated part of an expanding imperialistic empire.

https://aarome.org/events/rubina-raja-world-local-cultures-roman-sea-rise-urban-landscapes-near-east