Conference: Sinews of empire: Networks and regional interaction in the Roman Near East and beyond

Finally the time has arrived for our project conference, which takes place at the Norwegian Institute in Athens over the next few days (Dec. 2nd-4th). Proceedings will be published in due time. For now this is a list of our speakers: 

Vincent Gabrielsen, University of Copenhagen: Alongside the State, Beside the Temple, Next to the Market: Exemplifying the Network as a category of historical analysis

Kasper Grønlund Evers, University of Copenhagen, Crucibles of collaboration: a comparative study of associations and other organisations in ancient Near Eastern commerce

Michael Sommer, University of Oldenburg, The mechanics of empire. Personal networks and the modus operandi of Roman hegemony

Tom Brughmans, University of Konstanz, Simulating Roman economic integration: correlations between transport distance and price in a network model of tableware distribution in the Roman East

Henrik Gerding and Per Östborn, University of Lund, Brick makers, builders, and commissioners in the Hellenistic world: modelling social networks to fit archaeological data

Lara Fabian, University of Pennsylvania, Numismatic communities of the South Caucasus: Geospatial analysis of 3nd c. BCE- 3th c. CE coin finds

Leonardo Gregoratti, Durham University, Sinews of the other Empire: Parthian Great King’s rule over vassal Kingdoms

Kerstin Droß-Krüpe, University of Kassel, Businessmen and local elites in Roman Asia Minor

Yanne Broux, Leuven University, Trade networks among the army camps of the Eastern Desert of Roman Egypt

Rubina Raja, Aarhus University, Networking beyond death: Social networks in Palmyra - the funerary evidence

Ted Kaizer, Durham University, Networks between Palmyra and Dura Europos

Katia Schörle, University of Nice, Mapping Economic Integrations in Palmyrene Networks  

Giovanni Ruffini, Fairfield University, The Social Networks of Late Antique Thebes

Håkon Teigen, University of Bergen, The Manichaean Church in Roman Egypt: church officials and their networks

Mattias Brand, University of Leiden, Exploring speech patterns in social networks as indicators of religious change: the Manichaean community in late antique Egypt

Anna Collar, Aarhus University, Sinews of belief, anchors of devotion: the cult of Zeus Kasios in the Mediterranean

Taco Terpstra, Northwestern University, Mediterranean Connectivity, State Institutions, and Phoenician Trade.

Eivind Heldaas Seland, University of Bergen, Networks in the Roman Near East: Cases, perspectives, lessons

The social in the past, some reflexions

I'm just back from a four-day workshop with colleagues at the Centre for Advanced Study, Norwegian Academy of Sciences, where both Håkon and I take part in the project Local Dynamics of Globalisation in the pre-modern Levant, which is housed at the centre for this Academic Year. Our workshop was called The Social in the Past. Things, Networks, and Texts: A Material Approach to the Pre-Modern (description and program). Speakers came from a range of disciplines, including theology, religion, anthropology, archaeology, history, and cultural studies, but the unifying interest was in how we can move from our things and text – the material that we are all interested in and the signs that have come down to us from the past – to understanding the social associations between these things, texts and the people who made and used them. The workshop was way too varied and rich for me to do justice to all of it in a short blog post, nevertheless I'd like to put down a few points that relate to networks, which is of course my main interest in this, that we discussed in the first session, and that I continued to think about during and after the workshop.

Our keynote was Professor Ian Hodder from Stanford University. Hodder spoke about his work at Neolithic Çatalhöyük  in present-day Turkey, one of the earliest (complex?) societies we know of, taking his recent book Entangled as his point of departure. Neolithic people, of course, produced no texts, and we rely solely on things, in a wide sense of the word, when we try to understand their social world. Hodder showed us how things are associated with things and also reveal interaction with people, for instance clay and temper are obtained – balls are formed – balls are fired – then stored – then heated in oven – placed hot in a basket – meat is cooked – broken balls are discarded and so on. Reconstructing relationships of contingence and dependence, leading to reliance and dependency, he drew what he called tanglegrams, showing how things at the site related to each other, and in some cases led to what he characterised as entrapment, resembling the economic term of path-dependence.

Hodder also shared examples of his ongoing cooperation with network analyst and archaeologist Angus Mol (Leiden), using the same dataset of thing-thing relations from Çatalhöyük in a computer based network analysis. Hodder argued that the tanglegram is different from network analyst in the sense that the network consists of dyads, whereas the entanglegram highlights chains.

To me both methods represent ways of approaching networks. I think we need to do both. The tanglegram takes the thing as the point of departure, and tries to see how it associates to other things (or to human agents), following these associations creates entangled chains, that very well demonstrates the complexity that Hodder underlines. Network analysis looks at the whole structure (to the extent that we know it), and let's us ask how the things and the associations between them fit into that structure. It is true that it is an agglomeration of dyads, but series of dyads are also chains (or rather networks), and if we combine the quantitative analysis with a qualitative one, we could trace associations in much the same way. One advantage of network analysis might be that it could enable us to identify which parts of the network offer themselves, and are in need of qualitative analysis.

These points illustrate what we are grappling with. During the workshop we discussed a number of theories, including those of Latour, Bordieu, Foucault, Braudel, Michael Mann, and Robert Redfield, and how they allow us to see the past through different lenses. Although I, as others, have my favourites, they all offer perspectives that allow us to interpret the relationship between things, texts and people. What I often miss are the models that enable us to make our assumptions explicit, and to test them. The tanglegram and network analysis are two examples of how one can develop or borrow models that make sense of some aspects of the data, but inevitably obscure or leave out others.

Is it rewarding for scholars of the ancient world to engage consciously with theory and model building. To me the answer is a clear yes. Our sources don't speak for themselves. Theoretical perspectives allow us to situate our data in a wider context, models allow us to test our assumptions.

Case study: The social networks of client-rulers in the Roman Near East

John the Baptist before Herod Antipas,
Albrecht Dürer 1509. Source: Wikipedia

This week I went to the annual meeting of the UK Classical Association, which was hosted by the University of Nottingham this year. Colleagues Leonardo Gregoratti (Durham) and Eran Almagor (Ben Gurion University of the Negev) organized a session on "the Eastern Client States", where I took part. Client states in this context refer to polities in the Near East, that held a large degree of autonomy and were rued by local princes, but which were part of the Roman Empire or the Parthian Empire. Herod the Great, king of Judea 37-4 BCE and universally infamous due to the infanticide ascribed to him in the Gospel of Matthew, is perhaps the most famous of these rulers. In fact there were many of them, and even if there is a clear tendency towards direct and centralized rule over time, the Roman Empire always remained a patchwork of cities, tribes, and principalities with varying degree of autonomy, although there was never any doubt that the real power was in Rome and later in Constantinople.

The client rulers are one of the cases I am studying, with the aim of better understanding the fabric of Near Eastern society in the Roman period. In time I plan to make a study of them for the whole period of Roman rule in the Near East, but for the presentation in Nottingham I started in an end, and attempted a network analysis of the system in the first century BCE and the first century CE. Below is a short summary of my preliminary ideas and finds. Comments and advice on how I could develop this are greatly appreciated.

I started by plotting 163 members of ruling dynasties in the Near East from 63 BCE (the start of Roman Rule) until 125 CE and the 369 ties of full siblinghood, marriage and descent between them in Excel. The entries were based on Richard Sullivan's invaluable prosopographical articles for the Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, bolstered with information from classical encyclopedias. The resulting spreadsheet was saved in csv-format and easily imported into the open-source graph visualization software Gephi using this great tutorial from University of Wisconsin Green Bay Digital Humanities blog. After some time spent identifying and correcting errors in my database that became evident during the import-process, i got this unprocessed graph (below). It does not immediately make much sense. The thick lines represent connections between individuals sharing more than one tie, in effect people marrying their siblings, an unusual, but not unheard-of practice among royals at the time.

The next step was to find a good way of visualizing the whole network. I used the force atlas 2 algorithm in order to arrange nodes and edges in a pattern where they did not overlap. Then I assigned the different dynasties different colors, based on the dynasties people were borne into (as opposed to those they married into. This I did by assigning different series of node id's to different dynasties in my spreadsheet, for instance all individuals belonging to the Herodian dynasty got an id-numer starting with 3. In this way I was able to easily filter out all members of this dynasty in Gephi. Now the network looked like this:

Here, the network is organized according to dynasty, showing the different connections of marriage, descent and siblinghood for the period from 75 BCE until 150 AD and colored after which dynasty people were born into. On one hand of course this is problematic, because dead and living people are included in the same network, on the other hand it is useful, as dynastic connections were used for claims to legitimacy as well as territory and position, and it helps us see which families were important local players and who were more marginal. In that sense it gives us a more comprehensive picture than the stemma we usually look at when we study dynastic networks.

Then I wanted to see how the network changed over time. The problem with this is that we don't have secure information about when all the people in question actually lived. I've tried to overcome this by assigning them quarter centuries when they were politically active, either as rulers or simply as marriage partners and parents. Some were active in dynastic politics for almost 75 years, others only briefly. By assigning each period a unique value in Gephi and using the software's partition feature I was able to create time-series of the network. I've made a short movie of these (below).

Here individuals have been sorted into overlapping 25-years intervals, according to the periods in which they were active. Some of them were political figures for three quarters of a century, others only briefly The slides show how the different dynasties engaged with each other over time, making it possible to discuss questions of integration, fragmentation and marginalisation. It shows very well, for instance how the Herodian dynasty of Judea emerges as the regional power-broker in the late first century BC, and how Armenia is constant arena of dynastic competition, where different dynasties vie for influence. Dynasties such as Emesa never really becom important, while Commagene and Cappadocia remained in the game, but were marginalized over time.

Next, I used the really useful Geo Layout algorithm developed by Alexis Jacomy in order to arrange my nodes according to geographical position (which I had included in my spreadsheet). Now all nodes belonging to the same dynasty were gathered in one point, and thus indiscernible, but instead the geographical development of the network over time became visible:

In this example we no longer see the individuals, but ties between the different dynastic centres instead. They move slightly because the scale of the network varies over time. In terms of geography, we have three main clusters, centered on Anatolia, Northern Mesopotamia and Judea, with Armenia and Commagene as not only the geographical, but also the main dynastical links between them. Also this allows us to look at interaction across the so-called border between the Parthian and Roman worlds or spheres of influence. Doing this, we see that these networks are geographically very expansive, spanning from Mauretania and Rome in the West, to Ctesiphon in Mesopotamia in the east at their greatest. We also see that the great rivals of the Romans, the Arsacid dynasty, by way of Parthia and Media Atropatene, are active participants in the dynastic networks of the Roman Near East, although they seem to become less important over time.

I had great fun while trying to model the client king system, but I also found it scholarly very rewarding. More on this at a later stage, but network perspectives allow us to move the focus from the imperial center to a multiplicity of peripheral points of view. Each of the 163 individuals in the network were at the centre  of their own world, and approaching them as a social network allows us to appreciate this in a different manner. At this stage this is very much work in progress, and I'll continue to develop the technical as well as the scholarly side of this in months to come.

Thanks to the audience and my co-panelists in Nottingham for a good discussion!

Call for papers, session at the 2014 ASOR annual meeting

Together with Dr. Kerstin Droß-Krüpe, University of Kassel, we are hosting a session on "Sinews of Empire": Networks in the Near East" at the 2014 annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research, which will be held in San Diego, November 19-22.

Here is the abstract for our session:

Sinews of empire: Networks in the Near East

This session addresses the role of networks and social relationships, as facilitators of interaction and integration between imperial, regional and local levels in the history and archeology of the Near East. Contributors are encouraged to situate their papers within theoretical frameworks that facilitate comparison between periods and empirical settings.

From the Neo-Assyrian Empire to the end of the colonial period, the Near East was dominated by a series of large, multiethnic empires, most of them centered outside the region itself. Recent studies have moved emphasis from metropolitan to regional and local points of view, but arguably most have continued to cast representatives of imperial rule as protagonists or antagonists in narratives of domination, resistance, integration and fragmentation. In recent years, a resurgence in interest in network approaches has offered new tools to conceptualize, visualize and arguably even measure interaction in past societies. In this session we aim to utilize network perspectives in an attempt to shift attention to everyday ties of business, religion, power and social interaction. How did networks develop? What where the institutions underpinning interaction and fostering integration? What impact did formal and informal rules have on interaction within these networks? How did networks react to stress on imperial level, such as invasions, economic crisis or civil war? We especially welcome papers situating data within theoretical frameworks such as Network Analysis, Social Network Analysis, Actor Network Theory and Agency Theory, in order to facilitate comparison between groups, over time and between different parts of the Near East.


If you are interested in participating, paper proposals can be submitted via ASOR's online submission system

New Connected Past conference next April

My great colleagues in the Connected Past community is hosting a conference in Paris next April. Their 2012-conference in Southampton was a great success, and this is an event that should not be missed!

Workshop at Durham University: A thousand worlds...

Just back from Durham, UK, where Assyriologist and PhD-candidate in archaeology, Rune Rattenborg, hosted the workshop A Thousand Worlds: Network Models in Archaeology (follow link for program and abstracts). The workshop gathered scholars bringing data such as roads and routes, place-names, settlements, temples, agricultural estates and cuneiform texts into play using a range of different network approaches. I especially appreciated the variety of approaches represented, from Network Science over Social Network Analysis to Actor Network Theory and Michael Mann-style networks of social power. I see these approaches as complementary rather than mutually exclusive, the theories of Latour and Mann being potential tools for the qualitative analysis of the results created by quantitative approaches such as Network Science and SNA. It remains to see, of course, how feasible this is to carry out in practice.

My own paper was about the challenges of tracing dynamic phenomena, such as trade and movement, through static proxies, such as archeological finds, texts and inscriptions. Here I think network analysis has much to offer compared to traditional, descriptive analysis, as it forces us to make the assumptions underlying our conclusions explicit.

Among the highlights in Durham, by the way, was Anna Collar's presentation on religious networks in the Roman Empire. Her book on the topic is coming out on Cambridge University Press in a few weeks. Being interested in religious networks myself I promise to blog about the book once its out.


Update 28.10.13:
Tom Brughmans gives a more comprehensive summary of the workshop at electricarchaeology.ca with a highly readable discussion of some of the main questions we touched on there.

First NeRoNE meeting held at Voss, Sep. 25th-27th 2013

Last week saw the first research meeting of the NeRoNE project at Voss near Bergen. 12 scholars from 10 universities came together in order to discuss how we can approach the ancient world in general and the Roman Near East in particular in terms of networks. The speakers came from different traditions and disciplines, but all based their discussions on empirical case-studies. This proved to be a constructive way to foster discussion on how different approaches can highlight different aspects of network interaction. Below I summarize the proceedings. Please mind that this is my interpretation of the papers delivered, and that the authors might not agree with it.

As host, I started myself, introducing the NeRoNE project, and outlining how I believe that the methodological and theoretical frameworks from Social Network Analysis and New Institutional economics can be combined in order to help us map, explain and maybe even to some extent measure the importance of everyday interaction in the Roman Near East and other traditional societies.

Terje Stordalen, University of Oslo, followed up with a paper on Mapping potential ancient Near Eastern associations with Latour and Bourdieu. Terje’s presentation used the example of mass-produced Roman period clay figurines from Egypt, in order to show how networks are continuously reproduced by often unintended and unconscious practice. Imperial networks, for instance, might be said to be reproduced by the usage of roads, currency etc., without actors being consciously aware of this, but we also find example of anti-imperial practices, revealing alternative networks.  

Next up was Tom Brughmans, Southampton University, with a paper called From network pattern to network process: exploring tableware distribution networks in the Roman East, 150BC-200AD. Tom, who is a part of the Connected Past group, and at the forefront of archaeological network science, followed the process from data via theory and methodology to results and interpretation. To me, this highlighted the point that theory is there mainly because it can help you with your material and your research questions, but that it is also necessary to be explicit on your use of theory, because there are always theoretical assumptions underlying your work.

Kerstin Droß-Krüpe, Phillips University Marburg, gave a talk on Regional mobility and private good exchange - an interpretative attempt within the framework of agency theory. Kerstin’s talk gave a wonderful insight into everyday life in Roman Period Egypt, showing how ties of trust can be established between people with different kinds of relationship and thus contributing towards our understanding of how the ties connecting different parts of a network are constituted.

Michał Gawlikowski, recently retired from Warsaw University after more than four decades of research on the Roman Near East in general and the city of Palmyra in particular, then gave a talk on The Syrian Connection. Palmyra as the hub of the Syrian Foreign Trade. Here he argued that Palmyra was not only a node in a transit trade between Indian Ocean and Mediterranean, but primarily served demand for Eastern textiles and spices in the regional market. For me this came as a useful reminder that the Near East was not only a contact zone between east and west, but can also be seen as a system in itself, perhaps approachable as a small world, following the lead of Irad Malkins recent book on archaic period Greek networks in the Mediterranean.

The next speaker was Ted Kaizer from Durham University. His paper was about Lucian on the temple at Heliopolis. Ted showed how Lucian’s The Syrian Goddess, gives a narrative map of the Near East, where Roman Imperial presence is downplayed, while indigenous and local traditions are emphasised. Arguably, this is an example of the anti-imperial or at the very least non-imperial practices that Terje’s talk had mentioned, showing how underneath the superstructure of Roman rule, alternative networks continued to exist and reproduce.

Oystein LaBianca from Andrews University continued along the same line with Jordan in Global History: The View from Tall Hisban and the Madaba Plains, Jordan. Four decades of archaeology at the site of Hisban have revealed how changing imperial networks have formed life, subsistence and material culture at a site in present day-Jordan. Oystein’s talk called attention to how imperial “Great traditions” and local “Little traditions” meet, co-exist and interact.

Miko Flohr, Leiden University, gave a paper on Networks of the East in the Roman West. Miko discussed evidence of the presence of individuals and groups originating in the Near East from Delos, Puteoli and Rome, warning that it is not always possible to conclude on the existence of networks in general from the presence of individuals and on trading networks from the presence of groups of expatriates.

Leonardo Gregoratti, Durham University, followed up on this with Palmyra and Emesa or "Palmyre sans Emese", showing how contact between places should not be taken as evidence of interdependence, and how trajectories of imperial rule and long distance commerce not always follow the same patterns as those of everyday connectivity.

Michael Sommer, Oldenburg University, returned attention to Social Network Analysis with a paper on Networking the frontier. Roman soldiers and veterans in the Near East. Here he argued that Roman army veterans settling in border areas after service formed a dense local elite network that was closely affiliated with imperial culture, but also connected to local society. Michael’s paper, to me, was a good example of how it is possible to study the relation between networks on different levels.

In her paper The Palmyrene presence in Egypt, Katia Schörle, University of Oxford addressed the presence of people from Palmyra, Syria in Egypt. Generally viewed as a product of the situation on the border between the Roman and Sasanian empires and of Palmyrene territorial expansion into Egypt in the third quarter of the third century, Katia made a strong case for vertical as well as horizontal integration of Palmyrene commercial activities being factors behind Palmyrene activities in Egypt and the Red Sea.

The last paper was by Håkon Steinar Fiane Teigen, who will shortly join the NeRoNE project with his PhD project. A web of missionaries. Dynamics of religious networks in the Middle East in Late Antiquity. Håkon’s project uses the case of Manichaean communities in the Near East in general and in Egypt in particular to investigate the role of religious networks in Late Antiquity. The project clearly has potential for understanding the role of minority groups and for addressing the relationship between local, regional and empire-level networks.  I’ll ask Håkon to write a blog entry about his project as soon as he joins us in Bergen, which I hope will be soon.

To my delight, although not surprise, presentations with quite different points of departure came together very nicely. Just for the fun of it, I've made these two visualizations of their relationship based on the content keywords of network analysis, cohesion, trade, mobility, ideology, tradition, regionality and imperialism. The first is represented as a two-mode network, the second as a one-mode network.

Pre-project workshop: Local Dynamics of Globalization in the pre-modern Levant

Next week I'm heading to Oslo to take part in a pre-project workshop for an exciting project called Local Dynamics of Globalization in the pre-modern Levant. The project, headed by Terje Stordalen, Professor of Theology, Oslo, and Oystein La Bianca, Professor of Anthropology, Andrews University has been awarded Centre for Advanced Study (CAS) status for the academic year 2014/15. Nine scholars from Europe, North-America and Norway along with a wider "outer circle" of project participants will work together to "[investigate] how local cultures in the pre-modern Levant adapted policies, trends, habits, and technologies that reached them through imperial and other globalizing channels, and also how local discourse fed back into trans-local dialogue". Chronologically, our research stretches from the Bronze Age to the Ottoman period. You can read more about our group and our planned work here. My contribution will be a study of The In-Betweens: Studies of Traders, Soldiers, Administrators and Nomads in the Ancient Levant, which will fit nicely into my research on the NeRoNE project. The purpose of this first meeting will be to get to know each other personally and professionally, as well as to meet our hosts and se our facilities at the CAS.

Call for papers!

Together with Dr. Kerstin Dross-Krüpe, Marburg, I'm hosting this session at the ASOR annual meeting in Baltimore nov. 20-23.

Sinews of Empire: Networks in the Roman Near East

Most of the Near East was under Roman rule for almost seven centuries, representing the longest period of political stability in the history of the region. Since the 1990s there has been an explosion of scholarly interest in the field, with studies moving emphasis from the metropolitan to regional and local points of view, but arguably most contributions have continued to cast representatives of imperial rule as protagonists or antagonists in narratives of domination, resistance, integration and fragmentation. In this session we aim to move the focus of attention to the everyday ties of trade, religion and day-to-day regional politics connecting people and places in the Roman Near East. How did networks develop? What where the institutions underpinning interaction and fostering integration on local, regional and imperial levels? What impact did formal and informal rules have on economic, social and political activities within these networks? How did networks react to stress on imperial level, such as invasions, economic crisis or civil war? We especially welcome papers situating empirical data within theoretical frameworks such as Social Network Analysis or New Institutional Economy, in order to facilitate comparison between groups, over time and between different parts of the Roman Near East.

Details can be found here: http://www.asor.org/am/2013/2013-call-for-papers.shtml
Deadline for abstracts is feb. 15.