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The alluvial lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in southern Mesopotamia are widely known as the “cradle of civilization”; owing to the scale of the processes of urbanization that took place in the area by the second half of the fourth millennium bc. This book draws on the work of modern economic geographers to explore how the unique river-based ecology and geography of the Tigris–Euphrates alluvium impacted the development of urban civilization in southern Mesopotamia. It argues that these natural conditions granted southern polities significant competitive advantages over their landlocked rivals elsewhere in Southwest Asia, most importantly the ability to transport easily commodities. In due course, this resulted in increased trade and economic activity and higher population densities in the south than were possible elsewhere. As southern polities grew in scale and complexity throughout the fourth millennium, revolutionary new forms of labor organization and record keeping were created, and it is these socially created innovations, the author argues, that ultimately account for why fully developed city-states emerged earlier in southern Mesopotamia than elsewhere in Southwest Asia or the world.

This book encompasses a vast arc of space and time—Western Asia to North Africa and Europe from the third millennium BCE to the fifth century CE—to explore mapmaking and worldviews in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. In each society, maps served as critical economic, political, and personal tools, but there was little consistency in how and why they were made. Much like today, maps in antiquity meant very different things to different people. The book presents an ambitious, fresh overview of cartography and its uses. The seven chapters range from broad-based analyses of mapping in Mesopotamia and Egypt to a close focus on Ptolemy's ideas for drawing a world map based on the theories of his Greek predecessors at Alexandria. The remarkable accuracy of Mesopotamian city-plans is revealed, as is the creation of maps by Romans to support the proud claim that their emperor's rule was global in its reach. By probing the instruments and techniques of both Greek and Roman surveyors, the book uncovers how their extraordinary planning of roads, aqueducts, and tunnels was achieved. Even though none of these civilizations devised the means to measure time or distance with precision, they still conceptualized their surroundings, natural and man-made, near and far, and felt the urge to record them by inventive means that this book reinterprets and compares.

During the first millennium bce, complex encounters of Phoenician and Greek colonists with natives of the Iberian Peninsula transformed the region and influenced the entire history of the Mediterranean. This book brings together a multinational group of contributors to explore ancient Iberia's colonies and indigenous societies, as well as the comparative study of colonialism. These scholars—from a range of disciplines including classics, history, anthropology, and archaeology—address such topics as trade and consumption, changing urban landscapes, cultural transformations, and the ways in which these issues played out in the Greek and Phoenician imaginations. Situating ancient Iberia within Mediterranean colonial history and establishing a theoretical framework for approaching encounters between colonists and natives, these studies exemplify the new intellectual vistas opened by the engagement of colonial studies with Iberian history.

Ancient Greece was a connected world. This book turns to the flipside of omnipresent connectivity. It argues that the local had a pervasive influence on the communal experience in Greece. The investigation begins with a conceptual introduction that situates the study of Greek localism and the local in the context of ongoing scholarly and public conversations about globalization. The book then examines how Greek cities were subject to the dynamics of appropriating the land around them, charging place with narratives of meaning (Chapter Two). Subsequently, the study turns to the local as a cultural currency. The human sense of place is driven by sensory recognition and interpretative choices; both are subject to the reins of culture. In the third chapter, this cultural encoding is traced in the discussion of communal excitement: from the sensation of local taste and food traditions to pride in local skillsets and to excitement of athletic spectacles and public performances. Chapter Four demonstrates how the excitement of place was magnified by the fact that the land was inhabited by humans and gods alike. It is argued that the grounding of Greek religion in place marks one of the landmark principles in the repertoire of locally enshrined values and meanings. The final section examines the intricate question of how the conduct of politics was governed by ideas of the local (Chapter Five). The author demonstrates that polis societies were susceptive to and geared toward a genuinely local reading of the world.