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Description of  Cities as Palimpsests?: Responses to Antiquity in Eastern Mediterranean Urbanism (Impact of the Ancient City)

The metaphor of the palimpsest has been increasingly invoked to conceptualize cities with deep, living pasts. This volume seeks to think through, and beyond, the logic of the palimpsest, asking whether this fashionable trope slyly forces us to see contradiction where local inhabitants saw (and see) none, to impose distinctions that satisfy our own assumptions about historical periodization and cultural practice, but which bear little relation to the experience of ancient, medieval or early modern persons. Spanning the period from Constantines foundation of a New Rome in the fourth century to the contemporary aftermath of the Lebanese civil war, this book integrates perspectives from scholars typically separated by the disciplinary boundaries of late antique, Islamic, medieval, Byzantine, Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern studies, but whose work is united by their study of a region characterized by resilience rather than rupture. The volume includes an introduction and eighteen contributions from historians, archaeologists and art historians who explore the historical and cultural complexity of eastern Mediterranean cities. The authors highlight the effects of the multiple antiquities imagined and experienced by persons and groups who for generations made these cities home, and also by travelers and other observers who passed through them. The independent case studies are bound together by a shared concern to understand the many ways in which the cities pasts live on in their presents. 1. Historical distance, physical presence and the living past of cities 2. Between wars and peace: Some archaeological and historiographical aspects to studying urban transformations in Jerusalem 3. Visualizing Constantinople as a palimpsest 4. Transcultural encounters in medieval Anatolia: The Sungur Aa Mosque in Nide 5. The water of life, the vanity of mortal existence and a penalty of 2,500 denarii: Thoughts on the reuse of classical and Byzantine remains in Seljuk cities 6. Echoes of late antique Esbus in Mamluk isbn (Jordan) 7. Constantinoples medieval antiquarians of the future 8. William of Tyre and the cities of the Levant 9. Portraits of Ottoman Athens from Martin Crusius to Strategos Makriyannis 10. Perceptions, histories and urban realities of Thessalonikis layered past 11. From Byzantion to Constantinople 12. Looking in two directions: Urban (re)building in sixth-century Asia Minor 13. Byzantine urban imagination: Idealisation and political thinking (eighth to fifteenth centuries) 14. Ottoman urbanism and capital cities before the conquest of Constantinople (1453) 15. New history for old Istanbul: Late Ottoman encounters with Constantinople in the urban landscape 16. Medieval Arabic archaeologies of the ancient cities of Syria 17. (Re)constructing Jarash: History, historiography and the making of the ancient city 18. Constantinople in the sixteenth-century Maghrib imaginary: The travelogue of Al al-Tamgrt 19. Beirut as a palimpsest: Conflicting present pasts, materiality and interpretation Read more