More than any other type of environment, with the possible exception of mountains, the sea has been understood since antiquity as being immovable to a proverbial degree. Yet it was the sea's capacity for movement – both literally and figuratively through such emotions as fear, hope and pity – that formed one of the primary means of conceptualizing its significance in Late Antique societies. This volume advances a new and interdisciplinary understanding of what the sea as an environment and the pursuit of seafaring meant in antiquity, drawing on a range of literary, legal and archaeological evidence to explore the social, economic and cultural factors at play. The contributions are structured into three thematic parts which move from broad conceptual categories to specific questions of networks and mobility. Part one takes a wide view of the Mediterranean as an environment with great metaphorical and symbolic potential. Part two looks at networks of seaborne communication and the role of islands as the characteristic hubs of the Mediterranean. Finally, part three engages with the practicalities of tackling the sea as a challenging environment that needs to be challenged politically, legally and for the means of travel.

"This book offers an archaeological analysis of maritime economy and connectivity in the Roman east. That seafaring was fundamental to prosperity under Rome is beyond doubt, but a tendency to view the grandest long-distance movements among major cities against a background noise of small-scale, short-haul activity has tended to flatten the finer and varied contours of maritime interaction and coastal life into a featureless blue Mediterranean. Drawing together maritime landscape studies and network analysis, this work takes a bottom-up view of the diverse socioeconomic conditions and seafaring logistics that generated multiple structures and scales of interaction. The material record of shipwrecks and ports along a vital corridor from the southeast Aegean across the northeast Mediterranean provides a case study of regional exchange and communication based on routine sails between simple coastal facilities. Rather than a single well-integrated and persistent Mediterranean network, multiple discrete and evolving regional and interregional systems emerge. This analysis sheds light on the cadence of economic life along the coast, the development of market institutions, and the regional continuities that underpinned integration-despite certain interregional disintegration-into Late Antiquity. Through this model of seaborne interaction, the study advances a new approach to the synthesis of shipwreck and other maritime archaeological and historical economic data, as well as a path through the stark dichotomies that inform most paradigms of Roman connectivity and trade"--

This book uses network ideas to explore how the sea connected communities across the ancient Mediterranean. We look at the complexity of cultural interaction, and the diverse modes of maritime mobility through which people and objects moved. It will be of interest to Mediterranean specialists, ancient historians, and maritime archaeologists.

This book changes our understanding of the Roman conceptions about the sea by placing the focus on shipwrecks as events that act as bridges between the sea and the land. The study explores the different Roman legal definitions of these spaces, and how individuals of divergent legal statuses interacted within these areas. Its main purpose is to chart and analyse the Roman conception of the maritime landscape from the Late Republican until the Severan period. This book integrates maritime history and ethnography with the physical remains of past maritime systems, such as shipwrecks, ports, villages, fortifications, and documented legal rulings.

"This text examines the ancient and medieval history of the Mediterranean Sea and the lands around it"--Provided by publisher.

Thirteen papers which originated in the seminar series The Transpennine Research Seminar, begun in 1996, and reflect a wide range of topics associated with the Mediterranean and Aegean from the Bronze Age to Late Antiquity. Subjects include: the sea and seafaring in Greek literature and hagiography; Mediterranean trade; the navies of the Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans; the ancient ship and pirates.