Chapter 17. The Epitome of the World The Deipnosophists crystallizes a fluid chain of texts, fragments, and words, connected by the memory threads of a circle of literati and, ultimately, by the memory of Athenaeus himself. A double logic can be recognized in this, namely a centrifugal and a centripetal logic. By bringing together a vast complex of reading notes, the Deipnosophists condenses the library until it… Read more
Chapter 18. When a Culture Reflects on Itself The work of Athenaeus would thus be a periodos tēs bibliothēkēs, a “tour of the library”, perhaps the library of Larensius, but certainly also that of memory, and also the ideal library whose reconstruction is enabled by textual tradition, direct and indirect. That trip does not link the books between them but creates a multiplicity of links between the… Read more
Works Cited Anderson, G. 1974. “Athenaeus: The Sophistic Environment.” In Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, Teil II: Principat, Band 34.3, 2173–2185. Berlin. ———. 1993. The Second Sophistic: A Cultural Phenomenon in the Roman Empire. London. ———. 2000. “The Banquet of Belles-Lettres: Athenaeus and the Comic Symposium.” In Braund and Wilkins 2000:116–126. Arnott, W.G. Read more
Introduction: Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space Dimiter Angelov, Yota Batsaki, Sahar Bazzaz [In this on-line version, the page-numbers of the printed version are indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{69|70}” indicates where p. 69 of the printed version ends and p. 70 begins. These indications will be useful to readers who need to look up references made elsewhere to the printed version… Read more
1. Constantine VII and the Historical Geography of Empire Paul Magdalino History and geography were fundamental to the identity of Byzantium as an ecumenical empire with a long existence in time and an outreach that extended to three continents. Yet while the Byzantine elite maintained a long and distinguished tradition of history writing, it produced no geographers and travel writers to compare with those of antecedent… Read more
2. “Asia and Europe Commonly Called East and West”: Constantinople and Geographical Imagination in Byzantium Dimiter Angelov Writing in the years shortly before the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, Ioannes Kanavoutzes, a Greek teacher living in Genoese Phokaia in Asia Minor, addressed Palamede Gattilusio (1431–1455), the Genoese lord of Samothrace and Ainos, with a treatise on the ancient history of the island of Samothrace. In… Read more
3. Cartography and the Ottoman Imperial Project in the Sixteenth Century Pınar Emiralioğlu In the sixteenth century, Ottoman encounters with the Habsburg Empire in the West and the Safavids in the East turned violent as the Ottomans fought these rival empires on the battlefields. During this period, Ottoman ruling elites articulated the imperial claims of the Ottoman dynasty to universal leadership by representing the Ottoman sultans… Read more
4. Ferīdūn Beg’s Münşeʾātü ’s-Selāṭīn (‘Correspondence of Sultans’) and Late Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Views of the Political World Dimitris Kastritsis The question of Ottoman political geography has yet to be addressed in any depth. The place of the science of geography in the Ottoman Empire has received some attention in recent years, as has the cultural meaning of the geographical term “lands of Rūm,” broadly signifying the… Read more
5. Imperial Geography and War: The Ottoman Case Antonis Anastasopoulos Premodern empires in southeastern Europe and western Asia, with the Ottomans being the last in a succession of empires that controlled territories in both regions, [1] were big territorial entities, and as such more diverse in terms of physical and human geography than the modern nation-states. Physical geography, which will be… Read more
6. Ambiguities of Sovereignty: Property Rights and Spectacles of Statehood in Tanzimat Izmir Sibel Zandi-Sayek The relationship between modern state power and geographic space, as evidenced in monumental constructions, institutional buildings, public works, and spectacles, as well as surveys, cadastres, and other mapping technologies, has received scholarly attention across disciplines. [1] While these studies have significantly underscored the importance of material… Read more
