The Connected Iron Age: Interregional Networks in the Eastern Mediterranean, 900-600 BCE

An interdisciplinary consideration of how eastern Mediterranean cultures in the first millennium BCE were meaningfully connected. The early first millennium BCE marks one of the most culturally diverse periods in the history of the eastern Mediterranean. Surveying the region from Greece to Iraq, one finds a host of cultures and political formations, all distinct, yet all visibly connected in meaningful ways. These include the early polities of Geometric period Greece, the Phrygian kingdom of central Anatolia, the Syro-Anatolian city-states, the seafaring Phoenicians and the biblical Israelites of the southern Levant, Egypt’s Twenty-first through Twenty-fifth Dynasties, the Urartian kingdom of the eastern Anatolian highlands, and the expansionary Neo-Assyrian Empire of northern Mesopotamia. This volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the social and political significance of how interregional networks operated within and between Mediterranean cultures during that era.

About the Author

Jonathan M. Hall is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities and professor in the Departments of History and Classics and in the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity ; Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture , which was awarded the Gordon J. Laing Award; A History of the Archaic Greek World ; Artifact and Artifice: Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian ; and Reclaiming the Past: Argos and its Archaeological Heritage in the Modern Era . James F. Osborne is associate professor of Anatolian archaeology at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute and Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. He is the author of The Syro-Anatolian City-States: An Iron Age Culture , editor of Approaching Monumentality in Archaeology , and coeditor of Territoriality in Archaeology .