, Brepols, 2023 Paperback, x + 132 pages, Size:216 x 280 mm, Illustrations:56 b/w, 15 col., 9 tables b/w., 1 maps b/w, Language: English. ISBN 9782503603421.
Summary How did ancient cities like Palmyra survive? How did their people produce and manage the resources required for both their short- and long-term needs? Were their methods circular or wasteful? What materials did they reuse, and how? What form did their routine exchanges take? The material culture of Palmyra offers unique potential for addressing these questions in a concrete way. While the city is most famous for its long-distance commerce, a century of excavations at the site, together with a series of recent print publications and digital enterprises, have provided scholars with unprecedented amounts of material objects, among them inscriptions, statues, tesserae, coins, glass and metal finds, textiles, and other objects, all of which shed new light on Palmyra's economy and how its inhabitants consumed, maintained, exchanged, or reused key resources. Drawing together contributions from leading researchers on ancient Palmyra, this volume explores various dimensions of the city's economy from fresh angles. The chapters gathered here feature new methodologies for determining the size of Palmyra's population and for understanding the nature of coins in local exchanges, offer reassessments of the Palmyrene institutions that underpinned economic exchange, examine how Palmyrenes used and reused materials, and consider the forms of exchange and reuse that governed the building activity of Palmyrenes after the city's Roman heyday and within areas of Egypt. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations 1. Economy and Circularity at Roman Palmyra: Reconsidering Aspects of the Ancient Economy on the Basis of Single-Site Analysis Nathanael Andrade and Rubina Raja 2. Modelling an Urban Hinterland: The Case of Roman Palmyra Joan Campmany Jiménez, Iza Romanowska, Rubina Raja, and Eivind Heldaas Seland 3. Circuits of Exchange: Palmyrene Coins and Roman Monetary Plurality Kevin Butcher 4. Palmyrene Temples: Economic Institutions Aleksandra Kubiak-Schneider 5. Circular Economy in Palmyra in the Light of Sale and Reuse of Funerary Spaces Eleonora Cussini 6. Recarving of Palmyrene Funerary Portraits Julia Steding 7. The Jewellery of the Women of Palmyra: Inheritance and Reuse Olympia Bobou 8. Textile Economy of Roman Palmyra Marta ?uchowska 9. A Matter of Size: A Dimensional Approach to the Study of Reused Inscriptions and Sculptures from the Sanctuary of Baalshamin at Palmyra Emanuele E. Intagliata 10. The Palmyrene Diaspora in Egypt: Dependency, Sustainability, and Reuse Matthew Adam Cobb Index
, , 2026 Hardback, 395 pages, 156 x 234 mm, Illustrations:4 b/w, 6 col., 1 tables b/w, English text. *NEW. ISBN 9782503619835.
Labour in Antiquity, ranging from commerce and trade to physical labour, slavery, and the activity of subalterns, has long been studied, and the notion that certain elements of labour are not immediately visible in source material is widely accepted. Even so, the concept of ?invisible labour?, that is, labour hidden from the view of either ancient peoples or modern scholars, has, up to now, been very little studied. This volume aims to address the balance by examining how the quotidian behaviours and strategies of ?invisible? ancient people shaped economic life, and vice versa, and by exploring new ways to account for the invisible, both empirically and methodologically, through an analysis of environmental, social, and cultural factors. The scholars writing in this volume focus on different key trends. Some address the impact of practices determined by environmental or social factors, such as caravan trading, religious practice, transhumanism, and maritime commerce, on economies at a micro- and macro-level. Others examine the effect that daily routines of the invisible, including peasants, nomads, daily labourers, and vendors, had on local economies and the formation of broader socio-economic structures. Bridging classics, archaeology, history, and the natural sciences, the chapters gathered here offer important new insights into work that is often hardly visible in the evidence but that drove the economies of the Mediterranean, Europe, and Western Asia in antiquity.