Citizenship and religion in the first-millennium bce Mediterranean: from Etruria to Iberia

Corinna Riva

doi:10.14324/111.444.ai.2021.10

Abstract

This short contribution summarises an impending research project that will be carried as part of the 2021–22 Distinguished Fellowship programme at the Max-Weber-Kolleg (University of Erfurt) within the research cluster Religion and Urbanity. The aim of the project is to contribute to a comparative understanding of first-millennium bce Mediterranean urbanism by focusing on citizenship, through the investigation of the archaeological record of ritual contexts in two selected regions: southern Tyrrhenian Etruria and southeastern Iberia. The project builds on recent research on comparative urbanism and the role of religion in urban life, from Greek history to interdisciplinary studies on religion. The particular focus will be to understand whether, and the extent to which, religion provided the conceptual and material space for expressing membership to the urban community or, in one word, citizenship.

Highlights

A recent volume on first-millennium bce urbanism between the Mediterranean and temperate Europe has put to rest centre–periphery perspectives on this wider region, notably the view of a Mediterranean primacy over temperate Europe in the emergence of urbanism, but has highlighted that debunking this view involves redirecting our predominant interest in the origins of this phenomenon (Zamboni et al 2020)
At the heart of the Classical Mediterranean city, Greek historians have taken the pivotal step of moving beyond narrow Aristotelian definitions that have dominated even global perspectives on cities and opened up new vistas on what it means to be a citizen or member of a city-state. This raises similar questions for other regions that have a solid archaeological documentary base such as Central Tyrrhenian Italy and southeastern Iberia, which can provide an entry into our comparative understanding of first-millennium bce Mediterranean urbanism
Such questions are at the heart of an impending project which will be carried out as part of the 2021–22 Distinguished Fellowship programme at the Max-Weber-Kolleg (University of Erfurt), within the research cluster Religion and Urbanity

Summary

Introduction

A recent volume on first-millennium bce urbanism between the Mediterranean and temperate Europe has put to rest centre–periphery perspectives on this wider region, notably the view of a Mediterranean primacy over temperate Europe in the emergence of urbanism, but has highlighted that debunking this view involves redirecting our predominant interest in the origins of this phenomenon (Zamboni et al 2020). Less coverage has been given to first-millennium bce urbanism of the non-Graeco-Roman Mediterranean per se, understood comparatively with the GraecoRoman region, partly because of the difficulties of studying text-rich regions along with those that are not.

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Conclusion