"A wide survey over four millennia is possible for quarrying tools and techniques because of their simplicity and long-lived traditions. The chief contribution of the Romans was their organisation of the stone trade by mass production, standardisation and long-distance transport. Indeed, in post-Roman Europe, especially in Britain, it was the excellence of Roman building stone which allowed so much subsequent 'quarrying' in the buildings themselves. One exception in Saxon times was the quarry for Bradford-on-Avon's church. With the 12th-century spurt in church building activity, however, natural stone quarries once more became common and distribution methods familiar to the Roman world re-emerged." - COPAC.

Egypt, with its ever-growing wealth of evidence from the papyri, has in recent decades been one of the liveliest areas of scholarship on the later Roman Empire. This volume collects two dozen articles on the social, economic, and administrative history of Egypt by Roger Bagnall, whose book 'Egypt in Late Antiquity' has helped to bring this region and this evidence into the mainstream of historical debate. In these studies some of the main themes of his work are visible, in particular attempts to explore the possibilities for quantifying not only questions like the burden of taxation or the distribution of land-ownership, but more tantalizing and controversial matters like the rate at which the population of Egypt was Christianized.

This Encyclopedia is the first attempt in a generation to map the social and behavioral sciences on a grand scale. Not since the publication in 1968 of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edited by David L. Sills, has there been such an ambitious project to describe the state of the art in all the fields encompassed within the social and behavioral sciences. Available in both print (26 volumes) and online editions, it comprises 4,000 articles, commissioned by 52 Section Editors, and includes 90,000 bibliographic references as well as comprehensive name and subject indexes.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Notes on Contributors -- Acknowledgements -- 1 The city and its regulations: Unexpected margins -- Part I Space and state regulation: The urban interstices -- 2 Markets and marginality in Beirut -- 3 The tremendous making and unmaking of the peripheries in current Istanbul -- 4 Resilient forms of urbanity on the margins? Al-Kherba: A vivid market in a damaged section of the medina of Tunis -- 5 Whose margins? Marginality, poverty and the moral geography of pre-Soviet Bukhara -- 6 On the margins of the city: Izmir Prison in the late Ottoman Empire -- Part II Diversity and moral policing: Making claims through marginalisation -- 7 'Texas': An off-centre district at the heart of nightlife in Odienné -- 8 The Manyema in colonial Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) between urban margins and regional connections -- 9 On the margins: Suburban space and religious deviancy in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur -- 10 Ethnic differentiation and conflict dynamics: Uzbeks' marginalisation and non-marginalisation in southern Kyrgyzstan -- Index