Translations by Elizabeth Key Fowden
Alexandros Papadiamandis, The Boundless garden: Selected Short Stories, Vol. 2, 2019
Books by Elizabeth Key Fowden
Series preface viii eries pre ace and Umayyad Spain (Sam Ottewill-Soulsby), an Arabist and histor... more Series preface viii eries pre ace and Umayyad Spain (Sam Ottewill-Soulsby), an Arabist and historian of the medieval Middle East (Edward Zychowicz-Coghill), an archaeologist working on late antique and early Islamic Jordan and Egypt (Louise Blanke), an architectural historian exploring the transition from Byzantine to Ottoman (Suna a aptay), a late antique historian who has turned her attention to Ottoman Greece (Elizabeth Key Fowden), a PhD student with a background in Classics studying urban planning in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Italy (Sofia Greaves) and a principal investigator specializing in Roman social history and urban archaeology in Italy (Andrew Wallace-Hadrill). Other Cambridge colleagues joined our discussions on a regular basis, notably Tom Langley, writing a PhD on ideas of the city in Greek Patristic writers, Professor Amira Bennison, a historian of the medieval Maghrib, especially its cities, Professor Rosamond McKitterick, a leading figure in the study of Carolingian France and papal Rome, and Professor Martin Millett, a Roman archaeologist with a longstanding interest in urbanism. We benefited from the support and advice of the members of our Advisory Committee, both in Cambridge (in addition to the above named, Cyprian Broodbank, Robin Cormack, Garth Fowden, Alessandro Launaro, Robin Osborne and John Patterson) and beyond-Luuk de Ligt (Leiden), i dem Kafescio lu (Istanbul), Ray Laurence (Sydney), Keith Lilley (Belfast) and from Oxford, Josephine Quinn, Bryan Ward-Perkins and Chris Wickham. We also enjoyed the invaluable support of two administrators, Nigel Thompson of the Classics Faculty and Beth Clark, whose calm efficiency facilitated conferences and seminars, enabled foreign travel and smoothed contact with the bureaucracies at both ends. We invited many scholars, from Cambridge or further afield, to share their knowledge with us at our weekly seminars. We also organised one-day workshops, including one on the Roman and Islamic city in North Africa and one on Cities and Citizenship after antiquity (that led to an l as special issue) 1 , as well a panel for the 2018 Leeds International Medieval congress on 'Memory' and two three-day conferences, one in Istanbul and one in Rome. The last three underlie the three volumes in the present series. In each of those conferences, the members of our group contributed, but we knew that to cover the ground we needed to bring in international colleagues. The three volumes that constitute the present series are far from exhausting the output of the project, and each of us has papers and monographs in the pipeline or already out. Each of the three volumes has its own set of questions, but together they build up an overriding collective agenda of exploring how the cities of the Greek and Roman past, and such ideas of the city that were articulated around them, have impacted on the city and the idea of the city in later periods.
Mελετήματα 54: Research Centre for Greek and Roman Antiquity, National Hellenic Research Foundation (Athens 2008)
Μελετήματα 37: Research Centre for Greek and Roman Antiquity, National Hellenic Research Foundation (Athens 2004)
Articles and chapters by Elizabeth Key Fowden
in Javier Martínez Jiménez and Sam Ottewill-Soulsby, eds., Remembering and Forgetting the Ancient City, 2022
in E.K. Fowden, S. Cagaptay, E. Zychowicz-Coghill and L. Blanke, eds., Cities as Palimpsests? Responses to Antiquity in Eastern Mediterranean Urbanism, 2022
On two occasions, in 1436 and 1444, diplomat and antiquarian Cyriac of Ancona visited Athens and ... more On two occasions, in 1436 and 1444, diplomat and antiquarian Cyriac of Ancona visited Athens and sketched the city's antiquities. Most famous is his drawing of the Parthenon's west facade, which he depicted not as it was-the entrance to a Catholic church with a high tower of reused ancient marble-but as he wanted it to bean ancient temple in pristine condition. 1 In 1458, the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II also ascended the citadel of Athens and 'from the ruins and the remains, he reconstructed mentally the ancient buildings, being a wise man and as a great king, and he conjectured how they must have been originally'. 2 That, in any case, was the report of the contemporary chronicler Kritovoulos of Imbros, who had not been with the sultan when he visited the recently conquered city. Mehmed's interest in drawing and in maps is well-attested and the Constantinopolitan historian Doukas even depicts the Conqueror sketching the walls of the Queen of Cities as he prepared his final assault. 3 We might quite plausibly imagine the Ottoman prince, like Cyriac some twenty years earlier, sketching the Parthenon, or perhaps a more distant view of the acropolis with its impressive Frankish defences. Neither Cyriac's nor Mehmed's admiring visits to Athens did much to stimulate antiquarian pilgrimage to Athens in the fifteenth century. Adapting Henri Pirenne's comment on America, 'discovered by the Norsemen and then forgotten, because, in the eleventh century, the world had as yet no need of it,' it seems that the world 1 Copies of Cyriac's sketch survive; see the excellent studies by Howard, 'Responses' and Tanoulas, 'Through the broken looking glass'. Also, Tanoulas, Τὰ Προπύλαια, 40-41, 310-314. 2 Kritovoulos, Histories, 3.9.5-6, tr. 136. Inserted after 'a wise man', the marginalium 'and a Philhellene' is found at 3.9.6, lines 27-28 of the unique manuscript dedicated to the sultan and kept in his private library.
How many a city We have destroyed in its evildoing, and now it is fallen down upon its turrets! H... more How many a city We have destroyed in its evildoing, and now it is fallen down upon its turrets! How many a ruined well, a tall palace! Qur'an 22.45 It is not quite known: Is it the work of humans for jinn to live in or the work of jinn for humans? al-Buḥturī, Īwān Kisrā Ruins that don't take you back to the past, but coexist on the same plane as buildings still living. Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis, 'Thessaloniki and life' Time is made to curl up end to end, so that distance draws near and the past becomes present; depth disappears in a flattening effect that brings up to the surface what once lay buried. Marina Warner, 'Freud's couch: A case history'
L. Korn and Ç. İvren (edd.), Encompassing the Sacred in Islamic Art and Architecture (Beiträge zur Islamischen Kunst und Archäologie 6) (Wiesbaden 2020) 5-23, 2020
in B. Dogramaci (ed.), Uninterrupted Fugue: Art by Kamal Boullata (Munich 2019) 109-133
What made Athens different from other multi-layered cities absorbed into the Ottoman Empire was t... more What made Athens different from other multi-layered cities absorbed into the Ottoman Empire was the strength of its ancient reputation for learning that echoed across the Arabic and Ottoman worlds. But not only sages were remembered and Islamized in Athens; sometimes political figures were too. In the early eighteenth century a mufti of Athens, Mahmud Efendi, wrote a rarely studied History of the City of Sages (Tarih-i Medinetü'l-Hukema) in which he transformed Pericles into a wise leader on a par with the Qur'anic King Solomon and linked the Parthenon mosque to Solomon's temple in Jerusalem.
With the power of this God as my ally, beginning from the shores of Ocean I have raised up the wh... more With the power of this God as my ally, beginning from the shores of Ocean I have raised up the whole world step by step with sure hopes of salvation. Constantine's letter to Shapur II, King of Persia (Eus. VC 4.9.) I F or the Emperor Constantine, the east was both a goal and a return. By the end of his reign, victory over the Persian empire was "what he had still to achieve," 1 but his motivations for eastern conquest were complex. Strategic concerns about Rome's eastern provinces were joined with a vision of a universal Christian empire in an intimate marriage of interests that has perplexed commentators both ancient and modern. Constantine's propaganda repeats the image suggested in the epigraph above, not just in this letter to the Persian shah, Shapur II (309/10-379), but also in the emperor's letter to the eastern provincials. So too, in his Life of Constantine, Eusebius of Caesarea portrays Constantine's triumphal progress from Britain and the remotest western Ocean, eastward toward India and the sun: [Constantine] campaigned against the land of the Britons and the dwellers at the very Ocean where the sun sets. He annexed the whole Scythian population, which was in the 3 7 7
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Translations by Elizabeth Key Fowden
Books by Elizabeth Key Fowden
Articles and chapters by Elizabeth Key Fowden