Cities as Palimpsests?: Responses to Antiquity in Eastern Mediterranean Urbanism (Impact of the Ancient City)

"The metaphor of the palimpsest has been increasingly invoked to conceptualise cities with deep, living pasts. This volume thinks through, and beyond, the logic of the palimpsest, asking whether this fashionable trope slyly forces us to see contradiction where local inhabitants saw (and see) none, to impose distinctions that satisfy our own assumptions about historical periodisation and cultural practice, but which bear little relation to the experience of ancient, medieval or early modern persons. Spanning the period from Constantine's foundation of a New Rome in the fourth century to the contemporary aftermath of the Lebanese civil war, this book integrates perspectives from scholars typically separated by the disciplinary boundaries of late antique, Islamic, medieval, Byzantine, Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern studies, but whose work is united by their study of a region characterised by resilience rather than rupture. The volume includes an introduction and eighteen contributions from historians, archaeologists and art historians who explore the historical and cultural complexity of eastern Mediterranean cities. The authors highlight the effects of the multiple antiquities imagined and experienced by persons and groups who for generations made these cities home, and also by travellers and other observers who passed through them. The independent case studies are bound together by a shared concern to understand the many ways in which the cities' pasts live on in their presents."-- Publisher's website Contents 6 Series preface 8 Acknowledgements 10 Illustrations 12 Contributors 18 Introduction 22 Chapter 1 Historical distance, physical presence and the living past of cities 24 Chapter 2 Between wars and peace: Some archaeological and historiographical aspects to studying urban transformations in Jerusalem 50 Chapter 3 Visualising Constantinople as a palimpsest 68 Chapter 4 Transcultural encounters in medieval Anatolia: The Sungur Ağa Mosque in Niğde 82 Chapter 5 The water of life, the vanity of mortal existence and a penalty of 2,500 denarii: Thoughts on the reuse of classical and Byzantine remains in Seljuk cities 106 Chapter 6 Echoes of late antique Esbus in Mamluk Ḥisbān (Jordan) 124 Chapter 7 Constantinople’s medieval antiquarians of the future 146 Chapter 8 William of Tyre and the cities of the Levant 162 Chapter 9 Portraits of Ottoman Athens from Martin Crusius to Strategos Makriyannis 176 Chapter 10 Perceptions, histories and urban realities of Thessaloniki’s layered past 220 Chapter 11 From Byzantion to Constantinople 246 Chapter 12 Looking in two directions: Urban (re)building in sixth-century Asia Minor 268 Chapter 13 Byzantine urban imagination: Idealisation and political thinking (eighth to fifteenth centuries) 286 Chapter 14 Ottoman urbanism and capital cities before the conquest of Constantinople (1453) 308 Chapter 15 New history for old Istanbul: Late Ottoman encounters with Constantinople in the urban landscape 328 Chapter 16 Medieval Arabic archaeologies of the ancient cities of Syria 350 Chapter 17 (Re)constructing Jarash: History, historiography and the making of the ancient city 372 Chapter 18 Constantinople in the sixteenth-century Maghribī imaginary: The travelogue of ʿAlī al-Tamgrūtī 392 Chapter 19 Beirut as a palimpsest: Conflicting present pasts, materiality and interpretation 408 The metaphor of the palimpsest has been increasingly invoked to conceptualise cities with deep, living pasts. This volume thinks through, and beyond, the logic of the palimpsest, asking whether this fashionable trope slyly forces us to see contradiction where local inhabitants saw (and see) none, to impose distinctions that satisfy our own assumptions about historical periodisation and cultural practice, but which bear little relation to the experience of ancient, medieval or early modern persons.0Spanning the period from Constantine's foundation of a New Rome in the fourth century to the contemporary aftermath of the Lebanese civil war, this book integrates perspectives from scholars typically separated by the disciplinary boundaries of late antique, Islamic, medieval, Byzantine, Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern studies, but whose work is united by their study of a region characterised by resilience rather than rupture. The volume includes an introduction and eighteen contributions from historians, archaeologists and art historians who explore the historical and cultural complexity of eastern Mediterranean cities. The authors highlight the effects of the multiple antiquities imagined and experienced by persons and groups who for generations made these cities home, and also by travellers and other observers who passed through them. The independent case studies are bound together by a shared concern to understand the many ways in which the cities' pasts live on in their presents