The Water Supply Of Byzantine Constantinople

A study of the water supply of Constantinople from Roman to early Ottoman times, including detailed maps of the system.

This collection of papers on the city of Constantinople by a distinguished group of Byzantine historians, art historians, and archaeologists provides new perspectives as well as new evidence on the monuments, topography, social and economic life of the Byzantine imperial capital.

This collection explores the ancient fountains of Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul, reviving the senses of past water cultures.

The collected essays explore late antique and Byzantine Constantinople in matters sacred, political, cultural, and commercial.

From its foundation, the city of Constantinople dominated the Byzantine world. It was the seat of the emperor, the centre of government and church, the focus of commerce and culture, by far the greatest urban centre; its needs in terms of supplies and defense imposed their own logic on the development of the empire. Byzantine Constantinople has traditionally been treated in terms of the walled city and its immediate suburbs. In this volume, containing 25 papers delivered at the 27th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies held at Oxford in 1993, the perspective has been enlarged to encompass a wider geographical setting, that of the city’s European and Asiatic hinterland. Within this framework a variety of interconnected topics have been addressed, ranging from the bare necessities of life and defence to manufacture and export, communications between the capital and its hinterland, culture and artistic manifestations and the role of the sacred.

Istanbul, Europe’s largest city, became an urban centre of exceptional size when it was chosen by Constantine the Great as a new Roman capital city. Named ‘Constantinople' after him, the city has been studied through its rich textual sources and surviving buildings, but its archaeology remains relatively little known compared to other great urban centres of the ancient and medieval worlds. Constantinople: Archaeology of a Byzantine Megapolis is a major archaeological assessment of a key period in the development of this historic city. It uses material evidence, contemporary developments in urban archaeology and archaeological theory to explore over a thousand years of the city’s development. Moving away from the scholarly emphasis on the monumental core or city defences, the volume investigates the inter-mural area between the fifth-century land walls and the Constantinian city wall – a zone which encompasses half of the walled area but which has received little archaeological attention. Utilizing data from a variety of sources, including the ‘Istanbul Rescue Archaeology Project’ created to record material threatened with destruction, the analysis proposes a new model of Byzantine Constantinople. A range of themes are explored including the social, economic and cognitive development, Byzantine perceptions of the city, the consequences of imperial ideology and the impact of ‘self-organization’ brought about by many minor decisions. Constantinople casts new light on the transformation of an ancient Roman capital to an Orthodox Christian holy city and will be of great importance to archaeologists and historians.

"This book presents translations of six speeches by Eustathios of Thessaloniki, accompanied by a detailed commentary which analyses the language used in these complex pieces of oratory and explains the allusions to the historical events of the time that they contain. Ten appendices provide further details on a range of topics."--Australian Association for Byzantine Studies website.

The Routledge Handbook of Infrastructure Design explores the multifaceted nature of infrastructure through the global lens of architectural history. Infrastructure holds the world together. Yet even as it connects some people, it divides others, sorting access and connectivity through varied social categories such as class, race, gender, and citizenship. This collection examines themes across broad spans of time, raises questions of linkage and scale, investigates infrastructure as phenomenon and affect, and traces the interrelation of aesthetics, technology, and power. With a diverse range of contributions from 33 scholars, this volume presents new research from regions including South and East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, North America, Western Europe, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union. This extraordinary group of authors bring close attention to the materials, functions, and aesthetics of infrastructure systems as these unfold within their cultural and political contexts. They provide not only new knowledge of specific artifacts, such as the Valens Aqueduct, the Hong Kong waterfront, and the Pan-American Highway, but also new ways of conceptualizing, studying, and understanding infrastructure as a worlding process. The Routledge Handbook of Infrastructure Design provides richly textured, thoroughly evidenced, and imaginatively drawn arguments that deepen our understanding of the role of infrastructure in creating the world in which we live. It is a must-read for academics and students.