A caravan city at the edge of empire? The economy of Dura-Europos in the Syrian desert

Book synopsis: The Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies offers in three volumes the first comprehensive discussion of economic development in the empires of the Afro-Eurasian world region to elucidate the conditions under which large quantities of goods and people moved across continents and between empires. Volume 3: Frontier-Zone Processes and Transimperial Exchange analyzes frontier zones as particular landscapes of encounter, economic development, and transimperial network formation. The chapters offer problematizing approaches to frontier zone processes as part of and in between empires, with the goal of better understanding how and why goods and resources moved across the Afro-Eurasian region. Key frontiers in mountains and steppes, along coasts, rivers, and deserts are investigated in depth, demonstrating how local landscapes, politics, and pathways explain network practices and participation in long-distance trade. The chapters seek to retrieve local knowledge ignored in popular Silk Road models and to show the potential of frontier-zone research for understanding the Afro-Eurasian region as a connected space

Money in Ptolemaic Egypt

Money in Ptolemaic Egypt : from the Macedonian Conquest to the end of the third century BC. - Cambridge u.a. : Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007. - XX, 354 S

Imperial metropoleis and foundation myths: Ptolemaic and Seleucid capitals compared

In the two parts of this chapter, we investigate the ways in which major royal cities of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid realms were constructed as capitals of imperial states. In particular, we discuss how the foundation stories of these cities reflect conflicts and integration politics, which the creation of imperial metropoleis involved and which these stories aimed to control. Against the common assumption that the capitals of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires were culturally and politically uncontested, we will suggest that both Ptolemaic and Seleucid royal cities were constantly positioned and re-positioned vis-à-vis other royal or imperial cities that expressed, or had expressed in the past, similar claims. In the foundation myths of royal cities, we observe both competition and accommodation: competition and acommodation, that is, across the imperial zones of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kings, between Memphis and Alexandria, as well as between Alexandria and Rome