Search results for ""Author Peter Thonemann""

The three centuries which followed the conquests of Alexander are perhaps the most thrilling of all periods of ancient history. This was an age of cultural globalization: in the third century BC, a single language carried you from the Rhône to the Indus. A Celt from the lower Danube could serve in the mercenary army of a Macedonian king ruling in Egypt, and a Greek philosopher from Cyprus could compare the religions of the Brahmins and the Jews on the basis of first-hand knowledge of both. Kings from Sicily to Tajikistan struggled to meet the challenges of ruling multi-ethnic states, and Greek city-states came together under the earliest federal governments known to history. The scientists of Ptolemaic Alexandria measured the circumference of the earth, while pioneering Greek argonauts explored the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic coast of Africa. Drawing on inscriptions, papyri, coinage, poetry, art, and archaeology, in this Very Short Introduction Peter Thonemann opens up the history and culture of the vast Hellenistic world, from the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC) to the Roman conquest of the Ptolemaic kingdom (30 BC). ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

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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.

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Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua XI: Monuments from Phrygia and Lykaonia is a corpus of 387 Greek and Latin inscriptions and other ancient and medieval monuments from inner Anatolia (Phrygia, Lykaonia, and south-western Galatia). Most of these monuments were recorded by William Calder and Michael Ballance in annual expeditions to Asia Minor between 1954 and 1957. The results of these expeditions were never published, and around three-quarters of the monuments in the volume are published here for the first time. All the inscriptions are translated in full, with extensive commentaries and photographic illustration. The volume includes a geographical introduction to the sites and regions covered by the corpus, and full indices.Peter Thonemann teaches Greek and Roman history at Wadham College, Oxford. He is the author of The Maeander Valley: A Historical Geography from Antiquity to Byzantium (Cambridge, 2011), and the editor of Roman Phrygia: Culture and Society (Cambridge, 2013), a companion volume to this corpus.

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In late summer 2017, ongoing Turkish excavations at the site of Teos in Ionia uncovered one of the largest and most important Greek inscriptions to have been discovered this century. It records, in thrilling and moving detail, the assistance provided by the Teians in the repopulation and rebuilding of their daughter-city, Abdera in Thrace, after its sack by the Romans in 170 BC during the Third Macedonian War. The new text, published here for the first time, is startling testimony to the ancestral friendship- and support-networks that existed between Greek poleis in the Hellenistic world, and includes (among other things) the longest surviving description of an honorific statue to survive from the ancient world. In the light of the new inscription, the authors offer a full reassessment of the epigraphic and literary evidence for relations between Teos and Abdera, thereby providing a comprehensive long-term history of the two cities, from the sixth to the second century BC. The book also includes major new editions of the 'Teian Dirae' (public curses at Teos and Abdera in the early fifth century BC) and the second-century decree of Abdera for the Teian ambassadors Amymon and Megathymos, as well as two further new texts from the sanctuary of Dionysos at Teos.

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