The first full length volume to approach the premodern Mediterranean from a fully interdisciplinary perspective, this collection defines the Mediterranean as a coherent region with distinct patterns of social, political, and cultural exchange. The essays explore the production, modification, and circulation of identities based on religion, ethnicity, profession, gender, and status as free or slave within three distinctive Mediterranean geographies: islands, entrepôts and empires. Individual essays explore such topics as interreligious conflict and accommodation; immigration and diaspora; polylingualism; classical imitation and canon formation; traffic in sacred objects; Mediterranean slavery; and the dream of a reintegrated Roman empire. Integrating environmental, social, political, religious, literary, artistic, and linguistic concerns, this collection offers a new model for approaching a distinct geographical region as a unique site of cultural and social exchange.

The first full length volume to approach the premodern Mediterranean from a fully interdisciplinary perspective, this collection defines the Mediterranean as a coherent region with distinct patterns of social, political, and cultural exchange. The essays explore the production, modification, and circulation of identities based on religion, ethnicity, profession, gender, and status as free or slave within three distinctive Mediterranean geographies: islands, entrepots and empires. Individual essays explore such topics as interreligious conflict and accommodation; immigration and diaspora; polylingualism; classical imitation and canon formation; traffic in sacred objects; Mediterranean slavery; and the dream of a reintegrated Roman empire. Integrating environmental, social, political, religious, literary, artistic, and linguistic concerns, this collection offers a new model for approaching a distinct geographical region as a unique site of cultural and social exchange."

What is the Mediterranean? The perception of the Mediterranean leans equally on the nature, culture, history, lifestyle, and landscape. To approach the question of identity, it seems that we have to give importance to all of these. There is no Mediterranean identity, but Mediterranean identities. Mediterranean is not about the homogeneity and uniformity, but about the unity that comes from diversities, contacts, and interconnections. The book tends to embrace the environment, society, and culture of the Mediterranean in their multiple and unique interconnections over the millennia, contributing to the better understanding of the essential human-environmental interrelations. The choice of 17 chapters of the book, written by a number of prominent scholars, clearly shows the necessity of the interdisciplinary approach to the Mediterranean identity issues. The book stresses the most serious concerns of the Mediterranean today - threats to biodiversity, risks, and hazards - mostly the increasing wildfires and finally depletion of traditional Mediterranean practices and landscapes, as constituent parts of the Mediterranean heritage.

Insularity – the state or condition of being an island – has played a key role in shaping the identities of populations inhabiting islands of the Mediterranean. As entities surrounded by water and usually possessing different landscapes and ecosystems from those of the mainland, islands allow for the potential to study both the land and the sea. Archaeologically, they have the potential to reveal distinct identities shaped by such forces as invasion, imperialism, colonialism, and connectivity. The theme of insularity and identity in the Roman period has not been the subject of a book length study but has been prevalent in scholarship dealing with the prehistoric periods. The papers in this book explore the concepts of insularity and identity in the Roman period by addressing some of the following questions: what does it mean to be an island? How has insularity shaped ethnic, cultural, and social identity in the Mediterranean during the Roman period? How were islands connected to the mainland and other islands? Did insularity produce isolation or did the populations of Mediterranean islands integrate easily into a common ‘Roman’ culture? How has maritime interaction shaped the economy and culture of specific islands? Can we argue for distinct ‘island identities’ during the Roman period? The twelve papers presented here each deal with specific islands or island groups, thus allowing for an integrated view of Mediterranean insularity and identity.

The book aims rethinking the cultural history of Mediterranean nationalisms between 19th and 20th centuries by tracing their specific approach to antiquity in the forging of a national past. By focusing on how national imaginaries dealt with this topic and how history and archaeology relied on antiquity, this collection of essays introduces a comparative approach presenting several cases studies concerning many regions including Spain, Italy and Slovenia as well as Albania, Greece and Turkey. By adopting the perspective of a dialogue among all these Mediterranean political cultures, this book breaks significantly new ground, because it shifts attention on how Southern Europe nationalisms are an interconnected political and cultural experience, directly related to the intellectual examples of Northern Europe, but also developing its own particular trends. Contributors are: Çiğdem Atakuman, Filippo Carlà, Francisco Garcia Alonso, Maja Gori, Eleni Stefanou, Rok Stergar, Katia Visconti.

Cultural identity in the classical world is explored from a variety of angles.

The role of the Phoenicians in the economy, culture and politics of the ancient Mediterranean was as large as that of the Greeks and Romans, and deeply interconnected with that 'classical' world, but their lack of literature and their oriental associations mean that they are much less well-known. This book brings state-of-the-art international scholarship on Phoenician and Punic studies to an English-speaking audience, collecting new papers from fifteen leading voices in the field from Europe and North Africa, with a bias towards the younger generation. Focusing on a series of case-studies from the colonial world of the western Mediterranean, it asks what 'Phoenician' and 'Punic' actually mean, how Punic or western Phoenician identity has been constructed by ancients and moderns, and whether there was in fact a 'Punic world'.