More than any other type of environment, with the possible exception of mountains, the sea has been understood since antiquity as being immovable to a proverbial degree. Yet it was the sea's capacity for movement – both literally and figuratively through such emotions as fear, hope and pity – that formed one of the primary means of conceptualizing its significance in Late Antique societies. This volume advances a new and interdisciplinary understanding of what the sea as an environment and the pursuit of seafaring meant in antiquity, drawing on a range of literary, legal and archaeological evidence to explore the social, economic and cultural factors at play. The contributions are structured into three thematic parts which move from broad conceptual categories to specific questions of networks and mobility. Part One takes a wide view of the Mediterranean as an environment with great metaphorical and symbolic potential. Part Two looks at networks of seaborne communication and the role of islands as the characteristic hubs of the Mediterranean. Finally, Part Three engages with the practicalities of tackling the sea as a challenging environment that needs to be challenged politically, legally and for the means of travel.

This book uses network ideas to explore how the sea connected communities across the ancient Mediterranean. We look at the complexity of cultural interaction, and the diverse modes of maritime mobility through which people and objects moved. It will be of interest to Mediterranean specialists, ancient historians, and maritime archaeologists.

Drawing together maritime landscape studies and network analysis, this book offers an archaeological exploration of seaborne economy and connectivity across the Roman eastern Mediterranean, where the material record of shipwrecks and ports reveals multiple evolving regional and interregional systems of interaction.

In the ancient Mediterranean world, the sea was an essential domain for trade, cultural exchange, communication, exploration, and colonisation. In tandem with the lived reality of this maritime space, a parallel experience of the sea emerged in narrative representations from ancient Greece and Rome, of the sea as a cultural imaginary. This imaginary seems often to oscillate between two extremes: the utopian and the catastrophic; such representations can be found in narratives from ancient history, philosophy, society, and literature, as well as in their post-classical receptions. Utopia can be found in some imaginary island paradise far away and across the distant sea; the sea can hold an unknown, mysterious, divine wealth below its surface; and the sea itself as a powerful watery body can hold a liberating potential. The utopian quality of the sea and seafaring can become a powerful metaphor for articulating political notions of the ideal state or for expressing an individual’s sense of hope and subjectivity. Yet the catastrophic sea balances any perfective imaginings: the sea threatens coastal inhabitants with floods, tsunamis, and earthquakes and sailors with storms and the accompanying monsters. From symbolic perspectives, the catastrophic sea represents violence, instability, the savage, and even cosmological chaos. The twelve papers in this volume explore the themes of utopia and catastrophe in the liminal environment of the sea, through the lens of history, philosophy, literature and classical reception. Contributors: Manuel Álvarez-Martí-Aguilar, Vilius Bartninkas, Aaron L. Beek, Ross Clare, Gabriele Cornelli, Isaia Crosson, Ryan Denson, Rhiannon Easterbrook, Emilia Mataix Ferrándiz, Georgia L. Irby, Simona Martorana, Guy Middleton, Hamish Williams.

2008 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine Conventional scholarship on the Mediterranean portrays the Inner Sea as a timeless entity with unchanging ecological and agrarian features. But, Faruk Tabak argues, some of the "traditional" and "olden" characteristics that we attribute to it today are actually products of relatively recent developments. Locating the shifting fortunes of Mediterranean city-states and empires in patterns of long-term economic and ecological change, this study shows how the quintessential properties of the basin—the trinity of cereals, tree crops, and small livestock—were reestablished as the Mediterranean's importance in global commerce, agriculture, and politics waned. Tabak narrates this history not from the vantage point of colossal empires, but from that of the mercantile republics that played a pivotal role as empire-building city-states. His unique juxtaposition of analyses of world economic developments that flowed from the decline of these city-states and the ecological change associated with the Little Ice Age depicts large-scale, long-term social change. Integrating the story of the western and eastern Mediterranean—from Genoa and the Habsburg empire to Venice and the Ottoman and Byzantine empires—Tabak unveils the complex process of devolution and regeneration that brought about the eclipse of the Mediterranean.

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This volume brings together scholars of Mediterranean archaeology, ancient history, and complexity science to advance theoretical approaches and analytical tools for studying maritime connectivity. For the coast-hugging populations of the ancient Mediterranean, mobility and exchange depended on a distinct environment and technological parameters that created diverse challenges and opportunities, making the modeling of maritime interaction a paramount concern for understanding cultural interaction more generally. Network-inspired metaphors have long been employed in discussions of this interaction, but increasing theoretical sophistication and advances in formal network analysis now offer opportunities to refine and test the dominant paradigm of connectivity. Extending from prehistory into the Byzantine period, the case studies here reveal the potential of such network approaches. Collectively they explore the social, economic, religious, and political structures that guided Mediterranean interaction across maritime space.

The Impact of Mobility and Migration in the Roman Empire assembles a series of papers on key themes of Roman mobility and migration, discussing i.a. the mobility of the army, of the elite, of women, and war-induced mobility and deportations.

Maritime Archaeology and Ancient Trade in the Mediterranean comprises twelve papers that look at the shifting patterns of maritime trade as seen through archaeological evidence across the economic cycle of Classical Antiquity. Papers range from an initial study of Egyptian ship wrecks dating from the sixth to fifth century BC from the submerged harbour of Heracleion-Thonis through to studies of connectivity and trade in the eastern Mediterranean during the Late Antique period. The majority of the papers, however, focus on the high point in ancient maritime trade during the Roman period and examine developments in shipping, port facilities and trading routes.

That seafaring was fundamental to Roman prosperity in the eastern Mediterranean is beyond doubt, but a tendency by scholars to focus on the grandest long-distance movements between major cities has obscured the finer and varied contours of maritime interaction. This book offers a nuanced archaeological analysis of maritime economy and connectivity in the Roman east. Drawing together maritime landscape studies and network analysis, Roman Seas takes a bottom-up view of the diverse socioeconomic conditions and seafaring logistics that generated multiple structures and scales of interaction. The material record of shipwrecks and ports along a vital corridor from the southeast Aegean across the northeast Mediterranean provides a case study of regional exchange and communication based on routine sails between simple coastal harbors. Rather than a single well-integrated and persistent Mediterranean network, multiple discrete and evolving regional and interregional systems emerge. This analysis sheds light on the cadence of economic life along the coast, the development of market institutions, and the regional continuities that underpinned integration-despite imperial fragmentation-between the second century BCE and the seventh century CE. Roman Seas advances a new approach to the synthesis of shipwreck and other maritime archaeological and historical economic data, as well as a path through the stark dichotomies-either big commercial voyages or small-scale cabotage-that inform most paradigms of Roman connectivity and trade. The result is a unique perspective on ancient Mediterranean trade, seafaring, cultural interaction, and coastal life.