Identities in Antiquity

Acknowledgements 

List of illustrations 

List of Abbreviations 

Notes on contributors 

Introduction

Joseph Skinner, Vicky Manolopoulou, and Christina Tsouparopoulou

PART I Approaching ancient identities 

1 Challenging essentialism: disentangling ancient and modern notions of ethnicity 

Johannes Siapkas

2 Elite identities: Greece and Egypt in comparative perspective 

Matthew Haysom

3 The identities of enslaved persons 

Kostas Vlassopoulos

4 Personal names and identity: a socio-onomastic approach to naming practices in the ancient world 

Andreas Gavrielatos

5 Religious identities in ancient cities 

Jörg Rüpke

6 Open dynamic stewardship: alternatives to understanding diversity and transformation 

Elena Isayev

PART II The ancient Near East

7 Construction of gender identities in Mesopotamia 

Agnès Garcia-Ventura and Saana Svärd

8 Mercantile and religious identities in Anatolia in the Middle Bronze Age 

Yağmur Heffron and Nancy Highcock

9 The identities of enslaved persons in ancient Mesopotamia 

J. Nicholas Reid

10 Exilic communities in Babylonia 

Laurie Pearce

11 Ancient Judaism: nation, ethnicity, or religion? 

Erich S. Gruen

PART III The Mediterranean world until the age of the successors 

12 A community of practice perspective on craft production and culture change in the Bronze Age Cyclades 

Natalie Abell

13 Reconstructing Phoenician identities: a glass half-full 

Carolina López-Ruiz

14 Transcultural tokens of identity: the mechanics of crossing borders in the ancient Mediterranean 

Denise Demetriou

15 Classical Greek racism 294

Thomas Harrison

16 Race and the Athenian metic 

Rebecca Futo Kennedy

17 Greek local identity and Greek local history 

Daniel Tober

PART IV The Roman world: from early republic to late empire 

18 Roman aristocratic family identity in the Late Republic and Early Empire 

Gary D. Farney

19 Identities of enslaved persons in the Roman world 

Christer Bruun

20 Identity construction in Alexandria: Greeks, Jews and Romans 

Kimberley Czajkowski

21 Roman military identities 

Andrew Gardner

PART V From Late Antiquity until the Early Middle Ages: Rome, Byzantium and others 

22 Peripheral identities: ethnicity, Anglo-Saxons and the Stützarmfibeln 

James Gerrard

23 The identity of the Huns 

Hyun Jin Kim

24 Sacrifice, banquets, and drunken elephants: the problem of Christian identity in Libanius’s Oration 30 

Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos

25 The open secret of Byzantium’s national identity 

Anthony Kaldellis

26 Demarcating Rome: the papal strategy of Othering and the re-invention of Greeks 

Clemens Gantner

27 The case of Manuel I Komnenos: articulating identity through gender, sexuality, and racialization 

Roland Betancourt

Index 

Biography

Joseph Skinner is Senior Lecturer in Ancient Greek History at Newcastle University. His publications include The Invention of Greek Ethnography: From Homer to Herodotus (New York, 2012), and (as co-editor) Ancient Ethnography: New Approaches (London, 2013) and Herodotus and the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2020).

Vicky Manolopoulou is Research Fellow in Environmental History at Ca’Foscari University, Venice. Her work centres on the intersection of landscape studies, environmental humanities, and the history of emotions, focusing on the Eastern Mediterranean during the first millennium. Key research interests include human environment interactions, emotions, ritual, and mnemonic landscapes.

Christina Tsouparopoulou is Assistant Professor in Near Eastern Archaeology and History at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw, Honorary Research Fellow at Durham University and Editor of Near Eastern Archaeology. Her work bridges the material, visual, and textual culture of the ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean.

"Identities in Antiquity is a successful and worthwhile contribution to the field...the diversity of the papers serves to demonstrate …. the variety of approach, evidence-base and historiographical background that characterises the study of identities in the various disciplines represented." - The Classical Reivew