Can we study the social and legal practices related to families in an ancient society even in the absence of relevant literary and legal sources? In Lycia, thanks to our rich corpus of inscriptions, and the regional funerary epigraphic habit, we can. This book brings together for the first time the full range of Lycian epigraphic evidence, examines it in a systematic way, and investigates three central elements of familial life in the Hellenistic and Roman periods: marriage, children, and inheritance practices; in doing so it briefly touches on a number of prosopographical, demographic, and anthropological questions. The book makes an innovative contribution not only to the history of Lycia but also to the wider study of ancient families.

Life and Death in Asia Minor combines contributions in both archaeology and bioarchaeology in Asia Minor in the period ca. 200 BC – AD 1300 for the first time. The archaeology topics are wide-ranging including death and territory, death and landscape perception, death and urban transformations from pagan to Christian topography, changing tomb typologies, funerary costs, family organization, funerary rights, rituals and practices among pagans, Jews, and Christians, inhumation and Early Byzantine cremations and use and reuse of tombs. The bioarchaeology chapters use DNA, isotope and osteological analyses to discuss, both among children and adults, questions such as demography and death rates, pathology and nutrition, body actions, genetics, osteobiography, and mobility patterns and diet. The areas covered in Asia Minor include the sites of Hierapolis, Laodikeia, Aphrodisias, Tlos, Ephesos, Priene, Kyme, Pergamon, Amorion, Gordion, Boğazkale, and Arslantepe. The theoretical and methodological approaches used make it highly relevant for people working in other geographical areas and time periods. Many of the articles could be used as case studies in teaching at schools and universities. An important objective of the publication has been to see how the different types of results emerging from archaeological and natural science studies respectively could be integrated with each other and pose new questions on ancient societies, which were far more complex than historical and social studies of the past often manage to transmit.

City Government in Hellenistic and Roman Asia Minor examines the social and administrative transformation of Greek society within the early Roman empire, assessing the extent to which the numerous changes in Greek cities during the imperial period ought to be attributed to Roman influence. The topic is crucial to our understanding of the foundations of Roman imperial power because Greek speakers comprised the empire's second largest population group and played a vital role in its administration, culture, and social life. This book elucidates the transformation of Greek society in this period from a local point of view, mostly through the study of local sources such as inscriptions and coins. By providing information on public activities, education, family connections, and individual careers, it shows the extent of and geographical variation in Greek provincial reaction to the changes accompanying the establishment of Roman rule. In general, new local administrative and social developments during the period were most heavily influenced by traditional pre-Roman practices, while innovations were few and of limited importance. Concentrating on the province of Asia, one of the most urbanized Greek-speaking provinces of Rome, this work demonstrates that Greek local administration remained diverse under the Romans, while at the same time local Greek nobility gradually merged with the Roman ruling class into one imperial elite. This conclusion interprets the interference of Roman authorities in local administration as a form of interaction between different segments of the imperial elite, rejecting the old explanation of such interference as a display of Roman control over subjects.

The studies presented in this volume deal with numerous and often undervalued aspects of multilingualism in Ancient Europe and the Mediterranean. Primarily, but not exclusively, they explore the impact of the great transnational languages, Greek and Latin, on numerous indigenous languages: the latter mostly disappeared apart from a number of written texts, often not well comprehensible, but at the same time provided the dominant languages with loanwords, some of them destined to enduring success. Moreover, Greek and Latin were remarkably affected by their mutual contact, with the complication that Greek was notoriously far from monolithic, and in some areas its different dialects intermingled with each other and with the local languages. The case studies of this volume were conducted in the frame of a European HERA research on Multilingualism and Minority Languages in Ancient Europe, which covered a number of very diverse areas, with an emphasis on Sicily and Southern Italy, Illyria, Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace, Egypt and Asia Minor (also in medieval and modern times). This book makes indispensable reading for anyone with an interest in multilingualism and language contact in Ancient Europe.

This collection of papers illustrates how our picture of the Greco-Roman East has changed in recent decades. The chapters, by a distinguished international cast of contributors, present a view of life in the Eastern Empire from the bottom up, and show how a thoughtful use of both more recent and existing material evidence can shed light on aspects of social and political life that could barely be guessed at from the literary record alone. The evidence of coins, inscriptions and archaeological data is used in the investigation of wider socio-historical issues, including processes of Hellenization and acculturation, the permeability and flexibility of political boundaries at all levels, the interaction of civil and religious authority, and the operation of networks of patronage and power from the highest to the lowest social level.

The focus of Regional Urban Systems in the Roman World is on urban hierarchies and interactions in large geographical areas rather than on individual cities. Based on a painstaking examination of archaeological and epigraphic evidence relating to more than 1,000 cities, the volume offers comprehensive reconstructions of the urban systems of Roman Gaul, North Africa, Sicily, Greece and Asia Minor. In addition it examines the transformation of the settlement systems of the Iberian Peninsula and the central and northern Balkan following the imposition of Roman rule. Throughout the volume regional urban configurations are examined from a rich variety of perspectives, ranging from climate and landscape, administration and politics, economic interactions and social relationships all the way to region-specific ways of shaping the townscapes of individual cities.

The Luwians played at least as important a role as the Hittites in the history of the Ancient Near East during the second and first millennia BCE, but for various reasons they have been overshadowed by and even confused with their more famous relatives and neighbours. Redressing this imbalance, the present volume by an international team of scholars offers a comprehensive, state-of-the-art appraisal of the Luwians, the first of its kind in English. A brief introduction sets the context and confronts the problem of defining 'the Luwians'. Following chapters describe their prehistory, history, writing and language, religion, and material culture.