The ancient shore /
As we learn from The Odyssey and the Argonauts, Greek dramas frequently played out on a watery stage. In particular, antiquity's key events and exchanges often occurred on coastlines. Yet the shore was not just a site of conquest and trade, ire and yearning. The seacoast was a singular kind of...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English Greek, Ancient (to 1453) |
| Language Notes: | In English ; some words and phrases in Greek. |
| Published: |
Cambridge, Massachusetts :
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
[2024].
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | As we learn from The Odyssey and the Argonauts, Greek dramas frequently played out on a watery stage. In particular, antiquity's key events and exchanges often occurred on coastlines. Yet the shore was not just a site of conquest and trade, ire and yearning. The seacoast was a singular kind of space and was integral to the cosmology of the Greeks and their neighbors. In The Ancient Shore, award-winning historian Paul Kosmin reveals the influence of the coast on the inner lives of the ancients: their political thought, scientific notions, artistic endeavors and myths, their sense of wonder and of self. The Ancient Shore transports readers to a time when the coast was an unpredictable, formidable site of infinite and humbling possibility. Shorelines served as points of connection and competition that fostered distinctive political identities. It was at the coast, ever violent, ever permeable to predation, that state power ended, and so the coast was fundamental to theories of sovereignty. Then too, the boundary of land and sea symbolized human limitation, making it the subject of elaborate and continuous philosophical, scientific and religious attention. Kosmin's ancient world is expansive, connecting the Atlantic to the Straits of Malacca, the Black Sea to the Indian Ocean. And his methods are similarly far-ranging, integrating accounts of statecraft and commerce with intellectual, literary, religious and environmental history. The Ancient Shore is a radically new encounter with people, places, objects and ideas we thought we knew. |
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| Physical Description: | x, 399 pages : illustrations, maps ; 22 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780674296244 0674296249 |