Cities as Palimpsests?

Elizabeth Key Fowden is Senior Researcher on the Impact of the Ancient City project at the University of Cambridge. Her research explores Hellenism and Islam in the Hellenic sphere from late antique Syria to Ottoman Greece, drawing together architectural, visual and textual sources to analyse cultural exchange. Suna Çağaptay is a medievalist working on the artistic and cultural interactions in the eastern Mediterranean and their reflections in the built environment. She is a research associate on the Impact of the Ancient City project at the University of Cambridge. She also teaches at Bahçeşehir University (BAU), Istanbul. Edward Zychowicz-Coghill was a research associate on the Impact of the Ancient City project and is now a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He is a cultural historian of the early Islamic world whose work encompasses historiography, conceptions of the city, and ideas about wealth and inequality. Louise Blanke is Lecturer in Late Antique Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh and previously a research associate on the Impact of the Ancient City project at the University of Cambridge. She directs the ongoing Late Antique Jerash Project.

Series Preface

Acknowledgments

Illustrations

Contributors

 

Introduction

1. Historical distance, physical presence and the living past of cities

Elizabeth Key Fowden, Suna Çağaptay, Edward Zychowicz-Coghill and Louise Blanke

 

Accumulation and juxtaposition

2. Between wars and peace: Some archaeological and historiographical aspects to studying urban transformations in Jerusalem

Gideon Avni

3. Visualizing Constantinople as a palimpsest

Robert Ousterhout

4. Transcultural encounters in medieval Anatolia: The Sungur Ağa Mosque in Niğde

Suna Çağaptay

5. The water of life, the vanity of mortal existence and a penalty of 2,500 denarii: Thoughts on the reuse of classical and Byzantine remains in Seljuk cities

Scott Redford

6. Echoes of late antique Esbus in Mamluk Ḥisbān (Jordan)

Bethany J. Walker

 

Erasure and selective memory

7. Constantinople’s medieval antiquarians of the future

Benjamin Anderson

8. William of Tyre and the cities of the Levant

Sam Ottewill-Soulsby

9. Portraits of Ottoman Athens from Martin Crusius to Strategos Makriyannis

Elizabeth Key Fowden

10. Perceptions, histories and urban realities of Thessaloniki’s layered past

Nikolas Bakirtzis

 

The new and the old

11. From Byzantion to Constantinople

Paul Magdalino

12. Looking in two directions: Urban (re)building in sixth-century Asia Minor

Ine Jacobs

13. Byzantine urban imagination: Idealisation and political thinking (eighth to fifteenth centuries)

Helen Saradi

14. Ottoman urbanism and capital cities before the conquest of Constantinople (1453)

Dimitri J. Kastritsis

15. New history for old Istanbul: Late Ottoman encounters with Constantinople in the urban landscape

Göksun Akyürek      

 

Whose past?

16. Medieval Arabic archaeologies of the ancient cities of Syria

Edward Zychowicz-Coghill

17. (Re)constructing Jarash: History, historiography and the making of the ancient city

Louise Blanke

18. Constantinople in the sixteenth-century Maghribī imaginary: The travelogue of ʿAlī al-Tamgrūtī

Amira K. Bennison

19. Beirut as a palimpsest: Conflicting present pasts, materiality and interpretation

Assaad Seif