Cityscapes and Monuments of Western Asia Minor

Memories and Identities

Eva Mortensen, Birte Poulsen, Eva Mortensen, Birte Poulsen

• Verlag: Oxbow Books
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781785708374
• Thema: Geschichte
• Thema: Altertum

Cityscapes consist of houses, streets, civic buildings, sanctuaries, tombs, monuments, and inscriptions created by multiple generations of citizens and foreigners with an interest in the city; they are interpreted and reinterpreted as expressions of past lives, changing relations of power, memories, and various identities. The present volume publishes 25 contributions written by scholars specializing in the history and archaeology of western Asia Minor. New and well-known material – literary, epigraphical, numismatic, and archaeological – is presented and analyzed through the twin lenses of memory and identity.The contributions cover more than 1000 years of cultural diversity during changing political systems, from the Lydian and Persian hegemony in the Archaic period through Athenian supremacy and Persian satrapal rule in the Classical period, then autocratic kingship in Hellenistic times until, finally, more than half a millennium of Roman rule.Identities are voiced through several media and visible at many levels of the ancient societies. So are the places of memory – the Lieux de Mémoire – and the studies presented here provide new insights into how human beings chose, deliberately or subconsciously, to commemorate their past and their ancestors, and how identity was displayed and expressed under shifting political rule.

Part I

Introduction

1

Constructing Memories: Gateways between Identity and Socio-Political Pluralism in Ancient Western Asia Minor

Martina Seifert

“Despite the obsessive practice of recording architecture and physical features in the greatest detail imaginable, archaeologists were somehow missing the point in their substitution of description for understanding” – when Mike Parker Pearson wrote this sentence in 1994, the movement referred to as the spatial turn had already, for two decades, influenced studies in social sciences and the humanities. It was however, hardly noticed by those working in the field of Mediterranean Archaeology.¹ This brief introduction will focus on some aspects of the theoretical and methodological background related to social space and memory studies. It is intended to provide some clues for the following conference papers, but it will take into account neither the variety of approaches nor the whole of important recent studies on Hellenistic and Roman Asia Minor.

Historical background

The spatial turn

Dealing with the study of architectural plans and urban layouts, the historians Jacob Burckhardt and Heinrich Wölfflin were the first to start treating the built environment explicitly as one indicator of cultural tendencies.² But it was due to the exceptional work of Nikolaus Pevsner and his successors that scientists in the 20th century considered social and technological innovations as crucial criteria in their descriptions of the evolution of particular building types.³ Last, but not least, through the work of Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja the spatial turn was established in the social sciences.⁴ According to Henri Lefebvre “(Social) space is a (social) product … the space thus produced also serves as a tool of thought and of action; that in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power; yet that, as such, it escapes in part from those who would make use of it.”⁵ And furthermore: “Space commands bodies, prescribing or proscribing gestures, routes and distances to be covered … Monumentality … always embodies and imposes a clearly intelligible message … Monumental buildings mask the will to power and the arbitrariness of power beneath signs and surfaces which claim to express collective will and collective thought”.⁶ Architecture, i.e. the built environment, was now approached as a source of historical information. Here, the focus was especially on aspects of social life which left no other traces, but had the potential to influence and determine society’s development in a most effective way. The built environment reveals an image of rationalized orders e.g. by following the ideas of political or economic organization in various contexts.

Space, place and architecture

What about archaeologists? In what way do scientists reflect upon aspects of urban space architecture or geography? Until the 1990s archaeologists rarely referred to the theoretical framework of the spatial turn using descriptive approaches in the study of ancient architecture and urban layout. As the archaeologists Mike Parker Pearson and Colin Richards worked out, subjectivity and the experience of space determine the relationship of archaeologists to the built environment.⁷ Both pointed out the dynamic and reflexive relationship between architecture and space referring to Amos Rapoport’s idea of environments being thought before being built.⁸ This idea refers to the permanent, interactive processes of non-verbal communication, considering individuals as well as societies. As part of a cultural system of symbols, the environment holds meanings by influencing actions and determining the social order. To express it more clearly: by naming and categorizing the environment, space is differentiated and marked. One often cited example deals with the conceptualization of “the forest” in its historical transformation.⁹ Being treated as a place of dangerous spirits and wild creatures in former storytelling, the concept nowadays has shifted to the forest as a place for retreat and recreation. The oral tradition of storytelling and myth reflects the designated space as a culturally constructed part of a historical or fictive landscape.¹⁰ Nowadays, the scientific community widely accepts theories and concepts resulting from the discussion on the spatial turn within archaeology in general. Working with the theoretical framework of the spatial turn opens the door for reinterpreting facts and changing meanings, i.e. space is an accepted field not only of experience but also of practice and usage. The relationship between spatial form and human agency, therefore, could be described as being mediated by meaning. People actively ascribe meanings to their physical environments, and then act upon those meanings.¹¹ Dealing with the concept of environment as a cultural artefact, two causal relationships between space, place and architecture were hence proposed by scholars: form follows function or function follows form.¹²

Space, architecture and memory

In the course of time, environments were created, shaped, changed, and destroyed by human impact. Settlements and cities were built and abandoned; by this process, urban landscapes not only accompany or influence people, but also become depositories of memory. In this sense, the reminiscence of ancestors – in Antiquity and nowadays – is embedded in the different layers of a landscape or, even better, of the cityscape. Thus, these sites are also projected memories. As memory is especially connected with marked places, i.e. physical sites, the role of the built environment is quite important in the processes of remembrance,¹³ and it plays an important role in the analysis of archaeological features. The processes of remembrance also are linked to the identity of individuals and communities, because both imagine their identity in relation to marked places. Cityscapes and places which support and promote memory through their visibility are of prime significance in that case. Inter alia, Aleida and Jan Assmann argued that individual and collective identities are largely based on a common remembrance of a common past.¹⁴ The built environment turns into a component of power and urban planning into an instrument of a policy of remembrance and identity. Architecture being the constitutional element of the urban space, the outer appearance of a building – its dimensions, the design of its façade – provide a wealth of information about the ideals, the taste and the aesthetic preferences or the financial background of its builder.¹⁵ The theorization of memory studies as well as the analysis of the social frameworks and sites of memory were influenced by the sociological studies concerned with the memoire collective and the concept of the lieux de memoire.¹⁶ Individuals remember less than groups and they usually share a pool of knowledge and information in the memories of different members of a social group. Despite the number of members in small or large social groups, collective memory is constructed – by daily life’s experience as well as by decision-making processes. Each social group is able to influence its specific collective memory intentionally. According to Maurice Halbwachs, collective memory is sustained through a continuous production of representational forms. These representational forms are expressed by the built environment, and focus on the city e.g., by its architecture and built infrastructure. We can now talk about the general architectural shape of a city including all memory as “symbolic capital”.¹⁷ Following this idea, symbolic capital plays a key-role in the promotion of political, economic and other interests.

Ancient Asia Minor

Some of these thematic concerns involving the relation between memory, urban space¹⁸ and the symbolic capital, are also the focus of recent studies on the archaeology of Asia Minor. One important aspect is the social memory, which identifies larger groups such as families and communities looking ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Cityscapes of Remembrance
• Part III Recollections of the Past in Public Civic Monuments
• Part IV Representations of Memories and Identities in the Private Sphere
• Part V Narratives of Remembrance in a Religious Context
• Part VI Commemoration of the Dead
• Back Cover