Studia Ceranea. Journal of the Waldemar Ceran Research Centre for the History and Culture of the Mediterranean Area and South-East Europe, 2021

This collection of papers is based on a one-day conference held at Somerville College, Oxford on 29th May 1999. Around that time, a number of Fellows and doctoral students at the University of Oxford were conducting (or had recently completed) various research into topics both directly and tangentially related to the late antique economy and long-distance exchange in the East Mediterranean (fourth to seventh centuries A.D. in Greece, Cyprus, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Libya).l This seemed an opportune moment to bring various scholars 'out from the cold' to discuss and compare fresh and unpublished results. We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to all the speakers for their hard work in preparing their presentations, and for finding the time in their busy schedules to transform them into publishable form.2 This project was supported morally and academically by several scholars: Bryan Ward-Perkins and Marlia Mango encouraged some of their doctoral students to present new work at the conference, and subsequently 'endorsed' its publication. Bryan Ward-Perkins also made invaluable comments about the text, graciously permitted us to coerce him into penning a summary, and generally supported all stages of the conference and publication unreservedly and with humour; our great appreciation is extended to him. James Howard-Johnston chaired the afternoon session of the conference with his usual aplomb and charm; everyone at the event was extremely pleased that he managed to fly back from Jerusalem in time to attend. The day would simply not have been the same without him. It is a great regret that illness deprived the conference of the sharp mind, energy, and depth of knowledge of John Lloyd (Lecturer in Roman Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford, and doctoral supervisor to A. Wilson and S. Kingsley), who passed away the day after the conference. Dr. Lloyd's spirit did, however, affect the proceedings deeply: amphorae, quantification techniques, landscape archaeology, and urban economies were all themes which he was fascinated by and passionate about. As unassuming as he was, we would like to think that he would have been proud of how his legacy has been received by a younger generation. Thus, it is wholly appropriate that Andrew Wilson's paper is dedicated to John Lloyd (Dr. Wilson continues his work as the new Lecturer in Roman Archaeology at Oxford, and through the ongoing excavations at Euesperides/Benghazi in Libya). The conference was enthusiastically sponsored by Somerville College. Resources were generously made available from the Katharine and Leonard Woolley Fellowship Fund at Somerville, and we would like to sincerely thank Dame Fiona Caldicott (College Principal), Miriam Griffin, and all the committee for their support and interest. Somerville has an interesting tradition in Near Eastern archaeology, having educated the Biblical Archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon, and bestowed a Fellowship on Prof. Claudine Dauphin (the renowned Byzantinist specialising in demography, society, vi Preface and mosaics in late antique Palestine). It is fitting that the conference should have been sponsored through the Woolley Fund because Leonard Woolley was a pioneer of late antique archaeology in the East Mediterranean in his own right: at the turn of the twentieth century, along with one T.E. Lawrence (subsequently ' of Arabia'), he surveyed the standing Byzantine ruins in the Negev Desert of southern Palestine on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund. Our continued awe at these impressive remains, and ongoing endeavours to understand how such an arid landscape was made to blossom, derives directly from their fieldwork and published results (The Wilderness of Zin, by C.L. Woolley and T.E. Lawrence 1914-1915-PEF Annual, 3rd. Volume). Thanks are also offered to Sandy Hellig for helping arrange the conference logistics; to Phillip Munday and the catering staff for their hard work organising lunch and refreshments; to Mark Merrony for the loan of his precious laptop; to Eric Cooper for assistance proofreading. As ever, thanks to our families for trying to understand the personal sacrifices which assembling such a volume requires. Finally, a word of appreciation to Classic FM for late night moments of sanity.

Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 2004

Scross the medieval Mediterranean, luxury goods were exchanged as objects of tr I as spoils of war, and as gifts.' For a cultural historian, the interest of exchange or e port of goods lies less in the fact of the exchange itself than in why a particular artifact (or type of artifact) was selected for export or import, pillage, or gift exchange and how object was redefined once it was in a new context. The complexities of trade, war, an diplomacy give way to the ambiguities of socially constructed meaning, which is itself static: moving an object changes its meaning. Sometimes the new meaning was calculated by the exporter. In 506 Cassiodorus ordered Boethius to take a water clock to the ruler of the Burgundians, and to show the B gundians how it worked, so that, in Cassiodorus's words, "when they have turned fro their amazement, they will not dare to think themselves the equals of us, among whom they know, sages have thought up such devices."2 In 757 the East Roman emperor Co stantine V may have had similar hopes when he sent the Frankish king Pepin an orga along with Byzantines to show the Franks how to use it.3 Later described by Notker as "most remarkable of organs ever possessed by musicians,"4 the instrument-like the c sent by Cassiodorus to Burgundy-represented technology not available to its recipien and thus had the potential to demonstrate the superiority of the sender. It is a pleasure to thank participants in the Symposium on Realities in the Medieval Mediterranean, an later, the Byzantine Seminar at Oxford, for their comments after this paper was delivered. I am grateful to anonymous readers for helpful comments; to Mayke de Jong, David Ganz, Rosamond McKitterick, and J Nelson for advice on Carolingian bibliography; and, as always, to Chris Wickham.

2022

This volume contains some of the papers presented at the webinar Art, Culture and Trade as Evidence of Bonds between East and West: 11th to 21st Century, carried out online on 28 and 29 May 2021 within the ASRT/ CNR bilateral project Intercultural Influence between East and West: 11th-21st Centuries (2018-2019), whose principal investigators are prof. Ali El-Sayed (Damanhour University, Egypt) and Dr. Luciano Gallinari (CNR-ISEM). Giving an overview of this volume, we can say that the images it proposes on the relations between the Western/ Christian world and the Islamic one in the Mediterranean basin are not in line with what was affirmed in the 1990s by some fortunate publications (for their diffusion), which proposed the image of that geographical area as the theatre of the clash of civilisations. On the contrary, the conclusions that can be drawn from reading the book are much more in line with the 1995 Barcelona Mediterranean Conference, in which the Mediterranean area was considered as a place of culturally and religiously pluralist societies. In fact, the Mediterranean basin has always been not only the demarcation but also the copula and linkage between East and West. It was through the Mediterranean that ships wandered carrying trade from the East to West and vice versa, bringing with them tastes, manners, thoughts, modalities and styles. It was the bind that paved the way to trade relations that even enforced political and diplomatic relations between East and West. Moreover, it was the safe venue that facilitated the movement of individuals and communities between East and West. As a result, throughout the medieval times, groups of all nationalities, races, religions, social statuses and competences moved between East and West. They settled temporarily or permanently in a different country, interacted with its inhabitants and left their fingerprints there. The encounter between the national inhabitants and the foreign incomings has always been an ongoing process that left its marks on both sides.

Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 2004

A cross the medieval Mediterranean, luxury goods were exchanged as objects of trade, as spoils of war, and as gifts.' For a cultural historian, the interest of exchange or export of goods lies less in the fact of the exchange itself than in why a particular artifact (or type of artifact) was selected for export or import, pillage, or gift exchange and how that object was redefined once it was in a new context. The complexities of trade, war, and diplomacy give way to the ambiguities of socially constructed meaning, which is itself not static: moving an object changes its meaning. Sometimes the new meaning was calculated by the exporter. In 506 Cassiodorus ordered Boethius to take a water clock to the ruler of the Burgundians, and to show the Burgundians how it worked, so that, in Cassiodorus's words, "when they have turned from their amazement, they will not dare to think themselves the equals of us, among whom, as they know, sages have thought up such device^."^ In 757 the East Roman emperor Constantine V may have had similar hopes when he sent the Frankish king Pepin an organ, along with Byzantines to show the Franks how to use it.Xater described by Notker as the "most remarkable of organs ever possessed by musicians,"Qhe instrument-like the clock sent by Cassiodorus to Burgundy-represented technology not available to its recipients, and thus had the potential to demonstrate the superiority of the sender. It is a pleasure to thank participants in the Symposium on Realities in the Medieval Mediterranean, and, later, the Byzantine Seminar at Oxford, for their comments after this paper was delivered. I am grateful to the anonymous readers for helpful comments; to Mayke de Jong, David Ganz, Rosamond McKitterick, and Jinty Nelson for advice on Carolingian bibliography; and, as always, to Chris Wickham. For overviews, see A.