The Syro-Anatolian City-States: An Iron Age Culture

by James F. Osborne

Overview

This book presents a new model for understanding the collection of ancient kingdoms that surrounded the northeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea from the Cilician Plain in the west to the upper Tigris River in the east, and from Cappadocia in the north to western Syria in the south, during the Iron Age of the ancient Near East (ca. 1200 to 600 BCE). Rather than presenting them as homogenous ethnolinguistic communities like "the Aramaeans" or "the Luwians" living in neatly bounded territories, this book sees these polities as being fundamentally diverse and variable, distinguished by demographic fluidity and cultural mobility. The Syro-Anatolian City-States sheds new light via an examination of a host of evidentiary sources, including archaeological site plans, settlement patterns, visual arts, and historical sources. Together, these lines of evidence reveal a complex fusion of cultural traditions that is nevertheless distinctly recognizable unto itself. This book is the first to specifically characterize the Iron Age city-states of southeastern Turkey and northern Syria, arguing for a unified cultural formation characterized above all by diversity and mobility and that can be referred to as the "Syro-Anatolian Culture Complex."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780197545782
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	12/01/2020
Series:	Oxford Studies in the Archaeology of Ancient States
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	26 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

James F. Osborne is Assistant Professor of Anatolian Archaeology at the University of Chicago.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: History and Historiography of the Syro-Anatolian Culture Complex Chapter 2: Diaspora and the Origins of the Syro-Anatolian Culture Complex Chapter 3: Mobility and SACC During the Early First Millennium Chapter 4: On the Edge of Empire: Middle Ground Interactions with Assyria Chapter 5: Space and Place in the Syro-Anatolian Culture Complex Chapter 6: Defining the Syro-Anatolian Culture Complex

Editorial Reviews

"a most valuable and useful companion to researchers and students interested in Near Eastern history and archaeology" — Sabine Fourrier, Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies

"O. has produced a book that is compelling in its argument and energetic in its scholarship. The book is proudly omnivorous, devouring a wide range of ancient source material as well as a variety of anthropological and social theories." — Naoise MacSweeney, The Classical Review

"The book will have a broader value in attracting more attention to this fascinating historical case of a peer-polity network characterized by remarkably creative adaptations of inherited traditions, whose crazy quilt of variability and homogeneity contradicts the essentializing assumptions of ethnolinguistic nationalism." — Virginia R. Herrmann, BASOR

"Diligently incorporating a tremendous array of archaeological and textual evidence, coupled with highly informative plans, graphs, and maps, this first book-length synthesis on the Syro-Anatolian city-states was a much needed, timely intervention. The author clearly accomplishes the goals he set out for himself, and this book will certainly remain a most reliable source in the field." — Erhan Tamur, Ancient Near Eastern Studies

From the Publisher