A SMALL GREEK WORLD by Irad Malkin ( 9780199315727 ) - Books & Audio Books at Pickabook.co.uk

Item Details

Title:

A SMALL GREEK WORLD
NETWORKS IN THE ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN

By:

Format:

Paperback

List price:	£23.99
We believe that this item is permanently unavailable, and so we cannot source it.

ISBN 10:

0199315728

ISBN 13:

9780199315727

Publisher:

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS INC

Pub. date:

1 August, 2013

Series:

Greeks Overseas

Pages:

306

Description:

The book claims it was a network-dynamics of Small World formation that rapidly foreshortened Mediterranean spaces, thus allowing the flows of civilizational content and self-aware notions of collective identity to overlap and proliferate.

Synopsis:

Greek civilization and identity crystallized not when Greeks were close together but when they came to be far apart. It emerged during the Archaic period when Greeks founded coastal city states and trading stations in ever-widening horizons from the Ukraine to Spain. No center directed their diffusion: mother cities were numerous and the new settlements ("colonies") would often engender more settlements. The "Greek center" was at sea; it was formed through back-ripple effects of cultural convergence, following the physical divergence of independent settlements. "The shores of Greece are like hems stitched onto the lands of Barbarian peoples" (Cicero). Overall, and regardless of distance, settlement practices became Greek in the making and Greek communities far more resembled each other than any of their particular neighbors like the Etruscans, Iberians, Scythians, or Libyans. The contrast between "center and periphery" hardly mattered (all was peri-, "around"), nor was a bi-polar contrast with Barbarians of much significance.Should we admire the Greeks for having created their civilization in spite of the enormous distances and discontinuous territories separating their independent communities? Or did the salient aspects of their civilization form and crystallize because of its architecture as a de-centralized network? This book claims that the answer lies in network attributes shaping a "Small Greek World," where separation is measured by degrees of contact rather than by physical dimensions.

Illustrations:

21 illus.

Publication:

Imprint:

Oxford University Press Inc

Returns:

Non-returnable

Some other items by this author:

A SMALL GREEK WORLD (HB)

ANCIENT PERCEPTIONS OF GREEK ETHNICITY (HB)

GREEK AND ROMAN NETWORKS IN THE MEDITERRANEAN