World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies

Barcelona, July 19th - 24th 2010

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EMPIRE IN THE MIDDLE EAST: ANTIQUITY TO THE BRITISH/FRENCH MANDATES - 2/4: Sasanian to Byzantine (055) - NOT_DEFINED activity_field_Panel
 

· NOT_DEFINED date: MON 19, 5.00-7.00 pm

· NOT_DEFINED institution: University of Connecticut (USA)

· NOT_DEFINED organizer: Robin Adele Greeley

· NOT_DEFINED description: Concepts of empire and imperialism have long provoked serious reflection and intense controversy. Yet while studies continue to proliferate, troubling elisions remain. While serious investigations of modern empires in the Middle East abound, almost none have been contextualized within the longer history of empire available through the extended archaeological record. Alternatively, few archaeologists have attempted to theorize Ancient Near Eastern empires; even fewer undertake comparative analyses across time and space. Many ANE studies continue to rely on a straightforward model of territorial expansion through military conquest, patterned after standard interpretations of the Roman empire, thus neglecting evidence of other methods of maintaining political control over diverse polities and multiple states. Studies of the modern period, while often more nuanced, frequently maintain a sharp divide between capitalist and pre-capitalist imperial forms, and tend to view the latter, having been ?superseded? by capitalism, as irrelevant. A similar division is often constructed between the Islamic and pre-Islamic periods. This interdisciplinary symposium aims to redress these deficiencies by expanding theoretical and historical investigations of empire and its implications for studies of Middle Eastern civilizations. Fourteen scholars from the disciplines of history, art history and archaeology explore disparate models of the constitution, expansion, structure and destruction of Middle East empires from antiquity to the modern era. This panel, the second of four, treats the Sasanian, the Roman and the Byzantine empires.

Chair: Robin Greeley, University of Connecticut

Discussant: Harvey Weiss, Yale University

Paper presenter: Touraj Daryaee, University of California Irvine
“The Sasanian Empire: Form and Structure”

Paper presenter: Kevin Butcher, University of Warwick
“The Roman Empire in the Near East”

Paper presenter: Irfan Shahid, Georgetown University
“Byzantium”

Paper presenter: Hartmut Kühne, Freie Universität, Berlin “The Middle Assyrian Empire”