Download PDF | (Cities of the Ancient World) Andrea U. De Giorgi_ A. Asa Eger - Antioch_ A History-Routledge (2021).
611 Pages
ANTIOCH
This is a complete history of Antioch, one of the most significant major cities of the eastern Mediterranean and a crossroads for the Silk Road, from its foundation by the Seleucids, through Roman rule, the rise of Christianity, Islamic and Byzantine conquests, to the Crusades and beyond.
Antioch has typically been treated as a city whose classical glory faded permanently amid a series of natural disasters and foreign invasions in the sixth and seventh centuries CE. Such studies have obstructed the view of Antioch’s fascinating urban transformations from classical to medieval to modern city and the processes behind these transformations.
Through its comprehensive blend of textual sources and new archaeological data reanalyzed from Princeton’s 1930s excavations and recent discoveries, this book offers unprecedented insights into the complete history of Antioch, recreating the lives of the people who lived in it and focusing on the factors that affected them during the evolution of its remarkable cityscape. While Antioch’s built environment is central, the book also utilizes landscape archaeological work to consider the city in relation to its hinterland, and numismatic evidence to explore its economics. The outmoded portrait of Antioch as a sadly perished classical city par excellence gives way to one in which it shines as brightly in its medieval Islamic, Byzantine, and Crusader incarnations.
Antioch: A History ofters a new portal to researching this long-lasting city and is also suitable for a wide variety of teaching needs, both undergraduate and graduate, in the fields of classics, history, urban studies, archaeology, Silk Road studies, and Near Eastern/Middle Eastern studies. Just as importantly, its clarity makes it attractive for, and accessible to, a general readership outside the framework of formal instruction.
Andrea U. De Giorgi is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the Florida State University, USA. He specializes in Roman urbanism and visual culture from the origins to Late Antiquity, with emphasis on the Greek East. He is the author of Ancient Antioch: from the Seleucid Era to the Islamic Conquest (2016, paperback 2018), editor of Cosa and the Colonial Landscape of Republican Italy (2019), and co-editor of Cosa/Orbetello. Archaeological Itineraries (2016).
Dr. De Giorgi has directed excavations and surveys in Turkey, Syria, Georgia, Jordan, and the UAE. Since 2013, he has codirected the Cosa Excavations in Italy, and currently studies the 1930s Antioch collections at the Princeton University Art Museum, USA. He has also collaborated with the Museo di Antichita di Torino, the Museo di Cosa in Ansedonia, and the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida.
A. Asa Eger is Associate Professor of the Islamic World in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA. His research centers on Islamic and Byzantine history and archaeology of the eastern Mediterranean, with a focus on frontiers and the relationship between cities and hinterlands. He is the author of The Islamic-Byzantine Frontier: Interaction and Exchange Among Muslim and Christian Communities (2015), winner of ASOR’s G. Ernest Wright Book award for 2015; The Spaces Between the Teeth: A Gazetteer of Towns on the Islamic-Byzantine Frontier (2012, 2nd edition 2016); and editor of The Archaeology of Medieval Islamic Frontiers (2019). Dr. Eger has directed excavations and surveyed all around Antioch (Antakya) in Turkey since 2001, as well as in Israel, Cyprus, and Greece. He currently studies the 1930s Antioch collections at the Princeton University Art Museum, USA, and 1970s survey material from the Tell Rifa’at Survey, the hinterland of Aleppo, at the Louvre Museum, France.
INTRODUCTION
Antioch is among the cities in which the stranger finds comfort away from his homeland. — ‘Ali b. Abi Bakr al-Harawi!
It is an exciting time to be writing a history of Antioch, the most significant and continuously occupied major city of the eastern Mediterranean. An ongoing flurry of research initiatives attests to the vitality of the field of Antiochene studies. Whether bringing into focus the materiality of the city or its pivotal role in the religious discourse of Late Antiquity, which reverberated throughout the medieval period, these analyses teem with the energy, contradictions, and dilemmas of a city that eludes firm characterizations. We thus align ourselves to the group of scholars who are magnetically attracted to and, at least in our case, more often than not baffled by the city on the Orontes.
It seems that the more one engages with Antioch (modern Antakya in the Republic of Turkey), the more it deceives its beholder. Topography, foundation, political orientation, religion, demographics, downfall: these are but some of the topics with unanswered questions the city still poses. Antioch’s vast literary repertoire, primarily Late Antique and Crusader, indeed affords glimpses into the here and now of life in the city, but it is hardly a coherent narrative of the community. More to the point, the voices of the actors that made Antioch are missing. The meager numbers of inscriptions — fewer than 100 — further inhibit the braiding together of stories of the families, notables, and folks at large who inhabited the city. And if the epigraphic record for the classical and post-classical periods is lamentable, that for the Islamic epoch is equally regrettable.
Another challenge is the fact that the number of textual sources regarding Antioch far outweighs the archaeological work done on the city, particularly in certain periods. Merging and aligning these two is frequently not possible. On the one hand, we have a mountain of allusions to toponyms, places in the city where a myriad of events took place, from the largest conquests and sieges of its gates to the smallest sales of garden plots. Yet aside from the city wall, citadel, and hippodrome, we know virtually nothing about where any of these places were actually located in the city.
Of course, we are not the first authors to foreground Antioch’s paradoxes while stressing the city’s centrality. Glanville Downey wrote his masterly A History of Antioch in Syria from Seleucus to the Arab Conquest (1961), which remains a seminal work for any Antioch research. We have drawn greatly on his work and benefited from its unparalleled marshaling of the sources. But much has happened since 1961. For all his enthusiasm and stamina, Downey wrote in the aftermath of the Princeton excavations (1932-1939), a project that ultimately fell short at meeting the expectations of the scholars and stakeholders involved. Downey’s lukewarm treatment of the excavations reveals the shared sense of modest returns that he and others — especially one of the team’s primary (and non-Princetonian) field excavators, Jean Lassus? — stressed in their work. In the end, the excavations failed to expose the materiality of the city they had so adamantly sought to achieve, even as Downey’s personal involvement (on the 1932 Daphne Road dig) yielded no trace of the florid past of Antioch’s suburbs. Overall, his limited recourse to the archaeological record shows how Downey sidelined information that generally seemed impractical and convoluted. Corollary to this, publications and exhibitions on Antioch have focused much as the original excavators eventually did — on its mosaics. The significant volumes since Downey — including the Worcester Art Museum’s The Arts of Antioch and Antioch: The Lost Ancient City and Doro Levi's study of mosaics’ — all elevate the Antiochene mosaics above all else, as does the city’s brand new Hatay Archeological Museum. The dispersal of this collection, with hundreds of pavements scattered among key North American museums from Honolulu to Richmond, to name but two, further reinforces Antioch’s reputation as “the city of mosaics.”*
Conversely, our book seizes the opportunity to take up the 1930s excavations with a view toward enriching and finessing existing narratives. To that end, this book offers three contributions to the study of Antioch, from which emerge four dominant themes to connect each period of the city’s long history.
Contributions
New research
First, this study harnesses unpublished Antioch collections at the Princeton University Art Museum and the Visual Resources Collection of its Department of Art and Archaeology, as well as the latest published field research, to imbue the historical data with new topographic and material perspectives. For instance, the discovery between 2010 and 2012 of an extensive sixth-century bath complex and fifth-century villa and shops at the site of construction for a new high-end hotel raises new questions about the buildings that articulated life in Antioch, whether in its public areas or along its axes of movement. We also still have much to learn about the city’s topography and how it was experienced in antiquity. A GermanTurkish archaeological survey of the city studied its walls and water systems and conducted geophysical work, particularly on the plateau on top of Mt. Staurin, from 2004 to 2008, and produced a new topographic work with 355 archaeological features on both the plain and the mountains. It also discerned building phases for the Iron Gate via photogrammetry as well as for the citadel.> Current Turkish excavations in the area of the former Island by the local Mustafa Kemal University have also begun to pour new information into our understanding of the city’s physicality. Further, our study also gathers important new work that has appeared recently, such as the large, wonderfully well-researched, meticulous description of the city in the Tabula Imperii Byzantini volume on Syria and the almost completed French Lexicon Topographicum Antiochenum, based largely on written sources.° A US-based international team, the New Committee on the Excavations of Antioch and Its Vicinity, has also begun piecing together the material culture derived from the Princeton excavations of 90 years past, infusing the archival data with new studies on ceramics, glass, metal, coins, and small finds, and new interpretations on stratigraphy.’ One of these areas that we incorporate into almost every period is an overview of the coin evidence and how that informs wider questions of economy and links to the city’s political history. Certain key periods also continue to be the foci of new research, such as the Late Antique and Crusader eras, together with ongoing studies on Christianity, churches, and so forth, as well as the Crusader Principality of Antioch. Lastly, with the tremendous help of Steve Batiuk, we have pieced together a plan of the city for each of its main ten periods of occupation. These plans show the changing fortification walls, water supply and river channels, and gates of the city and all the features discussed therein (see Appendix 1). To be sure, these plans are not the final word on how Antioch appeared; however, they incorporate historical maps, excavations, topography, hydrology, geology, remote sensing, and textual accounts to show a city, not frozen in one specific time period (as numerous plans of Antioch show, not least Downey’s), but as constantly transforming, evolving to reflect the constraints of its ttme and meet the needs of its citizens.
Longer life and afterlife
Second, the book builds a narrative that, starting with the city’s foundation under the Seleucids, continues well into the twentieth century; this is a biography of a city. The version of Antioch typically remembered is invariably the classical one culminating in the fourth and fifth centuries, when it was an imperial capital city at its largest and most populated. Arguing that 900 years was its lifespan, Downey devoted but a single page to Antioch following the Islamic conquest of 638.° The Arts of Antioch volume, meanwhile, completely ignores the medieval period, including not a single object and only two coins dating to the Crusades, while Antioch: The Lost Ancient City was similarly published in this vein, with hardly any mention of medieval Antioch. The historical overview of the recent exhibition hosted by Kog University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Antioch on the Orontes: Early Explorations in the City of Mosaics, likewise winds down with the fourth century and draws a line after the Islamic conquests.” A book entitled Antiochia sull’Oronte, published in Italy by Capuchin Christians of Antioch, mentions the Islamic periods in two sentences.'° This limited version of the city indeed comes from the Byzantine authors themselves, like Libanius, whose biased descriptions concealed any notion of urban decline, neglect, or change in favor of a literature praising the city and its political prominence. We feel, however, that this presentation of the city does not adequately serve the discourse of a community that in the postclassical epochs reinvented itself time and again as it negotiated new realities of power and religion. We therefore offer a novel, holistic treatment of Antioch that intends to illustrate the history of the city in full.
Downey’s own omissions fit into a much larger pattern of how postclassical cities in the Mediterranean have been regarded. Despite a growing body of scholarship on the nature of early medieval cross-cultural interactions'' and a recent trend in trans-Mediterranean history, most Western civilization, art history, philosophy, and literature surveys still follow a common and entrenched assumption: that ““Western” culture was manifested in the great classical cities of the Greek and Roman periods in the Mediterranean, and when they declined, all achievements in learning, art, economics, and social organization transferred to medieval Europe. What is left out of this model and continues to remain uncritically engaged with is the crucial role played by post-Roman cities, mostly under Islamic rule, in shaping Mediterranean and European cultures, east and west. With few exceptions, archaeologists have excavated classical cities and discarded their later (Islamic and medieval) levels, granting institutions continue to give money to classical excavations and not Islamic or medieval ones, and tourist and antiquities departments of various countries present these cities to the public with their Islamic and medieval incarnations eviscerated. Inaccurate and incomplete knowledge about the development of Mediterranean society after the Roman period is thus a form of history-making that substantiates a fictional West-versus-East division, thereby disconnecting the West from an interconnected history with its Islamic forebears.
In contrast, we operate here within a theoretical framework of urban transformation as opposed to postclassical decline. This book thus significantly expands and revives Downey’s seminal volume, with its second half comprising entirely these “forgotten” chronologies: Early Islamic (638-969), Middle Byzantine (969-1084), Saljtiq (1084-1098), Crusader (1098-1268), Mamliik (1268-1516), and Ottoman (1516-1920). In doing so, the narrative of Antioch we present negates that of the seventh- or even sixth-century decline of the city, arguing instead for transformation from the classical city into a medieval one. Scholars have demonstrated that Antioch underwent substantial changes already in the sixth century, just before the Islamic conquests; however, the city was not abandoned and did not become useless, and it did not decline, an evaluation that serves only to discourage continuing inquiry after this period.'?
In fact, archaeological reanalysis shows that the city continued to thrive and transform well into the Islamic/medieval periods as a religious, intellectual, and economic center.'? With the available data, this volume thus seeks to shed light on the specific changes manifested in the city’s physical topography, economic life, and civic administration over the entire course of its occupation, to illuminate how urban space can show a society’s changing priorities, and to better trace the complicated systems of networks and cross-cultural exchange that took place across the Mediterranean between the seventh and early twentieth centuries.
Focusing on the built environment and its evolution will address why transformations occurred during the medieval period when, for example, the city contracted and was more densely populated, public areas filled in and became private, villas were abandoned, and entertainment and public institutions were transformed into industrial zones. It also serves to demonumentalize the city somewhat by bringing together equally processes of ruralization, encroachment, industrialization, and spoliation. Meanwhile, the material culture provides valuable data on the city’s economic health, the provenance of goods coming into or leaving the city gives evidence for trade, and excavated workshops show local production.
Indeed, this study shows that the roots of privatization of commerce, globalization, and capitalism in far-reaching market economies, commonly seen in medieval European cities, in fact have their origins in early medieval Islamic cities such as Antioch.'* Antioch is also a perfect case study of a border town inhabited by diverse populations. In addressing these matters, this book thus significantly fills in the rather large omission of Antioch’s influence at this time, apparent in all the scholarship on Late Antique and medieval Mediterranean archaeology, economy, settlement, urbanism, and social life over the last 80 years.
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