Intitulé du projet :
Production and Politics. A global perspective on the Ancient Mediterranean City-State
Porteur de projet :
Julien Zurbach
Etablissement porteur :
ENS
Etablissements partenaires :
EHESS
Axe de l’IRIS Etudes Globales ou projet transversal :
Résumé du projet :
This project follows two aims – To build a common, global history of the Mediterranean in the first millennium BC, that is, the age of city-states before the Roman unification of this part of the world; – To do this through a new perspective on the ancient City-State, taking into account not only the formal aspects of the ‘political space’ but also relations of production and the role of different forms of forced labor, the connection between political and economic rights being essential. Only in that way will it be possible to undermine ethnocentric perspectives (the many forms of ‘Greek miracle’), and to go beyond the ethnocultural boundaries inherited from colonial archaeology (‘the Greeks’, ‘the Romans’), by giving their full place to other zones and people and to pan-mediterranean historical processes.
Durée du projet (pour les colloques, date de l’événement) :
2017-2022 (5 ans)
Update Jan. 2018
Short report on Production and Politics 2017
The funding granted in the first year (2017) corresponded to the fieldwork planned in the original project. This fieldwork took place in the summer of 2017 mainly in Kirrha (Greece) but also, as planned, in Miletus (Turkey). The core of the work done at each site was the definition of the ‘craftsmen village’ appearing in the Late Bronze Age texts from the Eastern Mediterranean, around 1400 to 1100 BC. This was the first objective of the project, since it is a crucial part in the redefinition of the history of state formation from Late Bronze Age communities to Greek and Mediterranean city-states of the first millennium BC. The precise understanding of the working of these craftsmen villages or communities relies on stratigraphic analysis and other work, notably plant remains, in both sites. This was completed by a seminar in Oct.-Dec. 2017 at the ENS on the texts bearing indications on that kind of specialization, together with one mission to Greece by two epigraphists to check critical textual data.
Publications
Zurbach, J. 2013. La formation des cités grecques. Statuts, classes et systèmes fonciers, Annales HSS, 2013, 957-998.
Zurbach, J. 2017. La terre, les hommes et la dette en Grèce, ca. 1400 – ca 500, Scripta Antiqua 95, Bordeaux.
Zurbach, J., ed. 2015. La main-d’oeuvre agricole en Méditerranée archaïque. Statuts et dynamiques économiques, Scripta Antiqua 73, Bordeaux
Seminars
The Economic History of the pre-Roman Mediterranean, ENS, 2017-2018:
http://www.histoire.ens.fr/Histoire-economique-de-la.html