Environment And Habitation Around The Ancient Black Sea

Environment and human habitation have become principal topics of research with the growing interest in the Black Sea region in antiquity. This book highlights their interaction around all the coasts of the region, from different perspectives and disciplines. Here, archaeological excavation and survey combine with studies of classical texts, cults, medicine, and more, to explore ancient experiences of the region. Accordingly, the region is examined from external viewpoints, centred in the Mediterranean (Herodotus, the Hippocratics, ancient geographers, and poets), and through local lenses, particularly supplied by archaeology. While familiar disconnects emerge, there is also a striking coherence in the results of these different pathways into the study of local environments, which embrace not only Graeco-Roman settlement, but also a broader range of agricultural and pastoralist activities across a huge landscape which stretches as far afield as ancient Hungary. Throughout, there are methodological implications for research elsewhere in the ancient world. This book shows people in landscapes across a huge expanse, in local reality and in external conceptions, complete with their own agency, ideas, and lifestyles.

This book underpins the geography of the Black Sea, covering topics such as morphology, morphography, geology, and history of the Black Sea. It also discusses environmental aspects affecting the population in the Black Sea's coastal settlements and looks to the future of the Black Sea region. This book covers a gap in research in the field of world regional geography of the Black Sea by providing a comprehensive methodology and terminology to readers, students and teachers in the field.

The lands surrounding the Black Sea share a colourful past. Though in recent decades they have experienced ethnic conflict, economic collapse, and interstate rivalry, their common heritage and common interests go deep. Now, as a region at the meeting point of the Balkans, Central Asia, and the Middle East, the Black Sea is more important than ever. In this lively and entertaining book, which is based on extensive research in multiple languages, Charles King investigates the myriad connections that have made the Black Sea more of a bridge than a boundary, linking religious communities, linguistic groups, empires, and later, nations and states.

This volume is a collection of reports presented at the International NATO Advanced Research Workshop Conservation of the Biological Diversity as a Prerequisite for Sustainaible Development of the Black Sea Region. The seminar was held at Batumi - Kobuleti, Georgia, on the Black Sea during October 5 -12, 1996 with participants from the countries of the Black Sea Region -Georgia, Russia, the Ukraine, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, as well as Germany, Italy and the United States of America. The Black Sea Region is an essential and unique part of southern Europe because of its geographical, cultural and historical features. It is the cradle of European civilisation, together with Greece and Rome. For centuries it neighboured onto and interacted with the cultures of the northern and southern Mediterranean, the Christian and Moslim worlds, and was the route of conquerors and migrations of whole nations. Here are closely interwoven the cultures and customs of nations, economic and trade relations, the history of wars and civilised relations of neighbouring countries.

This volume presents essays on the ancient history and classical archaeology of the Black Sea. Like a Periplus, it offers a journey throughout the Pontus. The introductory chapter provides an overview of developments across the region over the last 20 years in the study of Greek colonisation, the local population and the relationship between them. The following chapters take the journey to the Cimmerians and Thrace, and how we understand them from written sources. Next to the southern Black Sea and recent surveys and excavations there, local peoples and the early Greek presence; then to the west and an account of archaeological research from the Archaic period to the Roman conquest. To the north, with an essay on recent archaeological research, a chapter on one of the local peoples, the Taurians, and another on the economy of the Greek colonies of the region, presented through an examination of Kerkinitis in the Crimea. The northern and western shores are combined in a consideration, based on epigraphic sources, of religious experience there. The final journey is to the eastern Black Sea, and a survey of recent discoveries and studies in Colchis.

Ancient Greek geographical writing is represented not just by the surviving works of the well-known authors Strabo, Pausanias, and Ptolemy, but also by many other texts dating from the Archaic to the Late Antique period. Most of these texts are, however, hard for non-specialists to find, and many have never been translated into English. This volume, the work of an international team of experts, presents the most important thirty-six texts in new, accurate translations. In addition, there are explanatory notes and authoritative introductions to each text, which offer a new understanding of the individual writings and demonstrate their importance: no longer marginal, but in the mainstream of Greek literature and science. The book includes twenty-eight newly drawn maps, images of the medieval manuscripts in which most of these works survive, and a full Introduction providing a comprehensive survey of the field of Greek and Roman geography.

Several papers focus on Tios (the Acropolis, the lower city and coin finds). Its place in ancient geography/cartography is considered before moving on to the indigenous inhabitants of the surrounding area, the immediate and greater region, then the Turkish Black Sea region, and outwards to the western, northern and eastern shores of the Black Sea.