The Lives of Ancient Villages

Rural Society in Roman Anatolia

Bibliographic Data

ID19923643
AuthorsPeter Thonemann (0000-0002-2239-9281, University of Oxford, corresponding author)
Year2022
Publication date2022-11-30
Open AccessYes
TypeBOOK
VenueLives of Ancient Villages (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/9781009128452
OpenAlexW4307423045
Open LibraryOL44189243M
ISBN9781009128452
LanguageEN
Citations received8

Our conception of the culture and values of the ancient Greco-Roman world is largely based on texts and material evidence left behind by a small and atypical group of city-dwellers. The people of the deep Mediterranean countryside seldom appear in the historical record from antiquity, and almost never as historical actors. This book is the first extended historical ethnography of an ancient village society, based on an extraordinarily rich body of funerary and propitiatory inscriptions from a remote upland region of Roman Asia Minor. Rural kinship structures and household forms are analysed in detail, as are the region's demography, religious life, gender relations, class structure, normative standards and values. Roman north-east Lydia is perhaps the only non-urban society in the Greco-Roman world whose culture can be described at so fine-grained a level of detail: a world of tight-knit families, egalitarian values, hard agricultural labour, village solidarity, honour, piety and love

Ancient history · Archaeology · Ethnography · Geography · Honour · Kinship · Piety · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Solidarity · Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History · Anthropology · Byzantine Studies and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · History

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