{"id":1001,"date":"2022-07-02T09:24:49","date_gmt":"2022-07-02T13:24:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.philipharland.com\/Blog\/?p=1001"},"modified":"2025-11-03T18:18:28","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T23:18:28","slug":"ethnic-relations-and-migration-in-the-ancient-world-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.philipharland.com\/Blog\/2022\/07\/ethnic-relations-and-migration-in-the-ancient-world-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to Ethnic Relations and Migration in the Ancient World (edited by Kotrosits and Harland)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Forthcoming<\/a>

Forthcoming with University of Chicago Press in June 2026. Available for preorder now.<\/p><\/div>\n

[For Phil’s other websites or courses, please navigate using the main menu at the top.]<\/p>\n

Recent scholarly publications arising from the project:<\/strong> Harland, “Putting the Persian Back in ‘Magic’: Problems with Ignoring Ancient Ethnographic Discourses<\/a>” (2025).<\/p>\n

Highlighted contributors:<\/strong> > Maia Kotrosits<\/a> > Richard Last<\/a> > Daniel Mitchell<\/a>\u00a0 > Justin Nadeau<\/a><\/p>\n

The purpose of this website (now with over 525 posts) is to collect, organize, and make public resources for the reconstruction of ethnic relations and ethnographic culture in the ancient Mediterranean and near eastern worlds (fifth century BCE-sixth century CE). Please use the accordion-style arrows and categories in the right sidebar<\/strong> to navigate the site.<\/p>\n

“Ethnographic culture,” as we intend it, moves beyond the idea of “ethnography” (literally “representing peoples” or “writing about peoples”) as a Greek and Roman literary genre describing non-Greek and non-Roman peoples (“barbarians”). Instead, ethnographic culture refers to the ways in which the imagination, classification, description, and representation of “other peoples” actively played out in large-scale and small-scale ways across societies and among many different peoples. This is especially the case in connection with conquest and colonization, but also in local social interactions and within diasporic communities of immigrants. Judeans (Jews) and Jesus adherents (Christians) were very much a part of this larger sphere of ethnic encounters, so they have a place here too (see especially category five to your right).<\/p>\n

This website, then, combines literary, papyrological, epigraphic, numismatic, and other visual data in order to aid students and researchers in a fuller understanding of ethnographic culture and interactions between peoples. It also facilitates the reconstruction of minoritized ethnic groups spread across time (from the fifth century BCE to the sixth century CE) and geography (across the Mediterranean and near east).<\/p>\n

There are times when the organization of material mimics or uses terms from the ancient material. This is not to naturalize those categories or terms, but rather to more clearly demonstrate the categories with which ancient people were working.<\/p>\n

Who did it?:<\/em> This website reflects the ongoing work of Maia Kotrosits and Phil Harland (along with voluntary scholarly contributors) supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) under the rubric of “Ethnicity, Diaspora, and Ethnographic Culture in the Greco-Roman World.” Many thanks to the Research Assistants from York University who have helped with inputting or checking translations: Amy House (Strabo), Victoria Muccilli (Diodoros), Daniel Mitchell (Herodotos, Lucian), Justin Nadeau (Persian related items and others), and Rosalie Reis (detailed proof-reading). Special thanks also go out to several websites that have already taken the time to clean up and convert to html public domain sources, including Lacus Curtius<\/a> (led by Bill Thayer), Attalus<\/a> (led by Andrew Smith), and Topostext<\/a> (led by Brady Kiesling).<\/p>\n

Who are those guys shaking hands at the top?: <\/em>Aglibol and Malakbel. The monument is from Rome and is a dedication to the Palmyrene gods Aglibol (Moon) and Malakbel (Sun) by Iahari son of Haliphi from Palmyra in Syria (IGUR <\/em>I 119-120; 236 CE). The inscription is bilingual, in both Greek and Palmyrene. That is not a giant asparagus in the middle. (Currently in the basement of the Capitoline museum in Rome; photo by Harland).<\/p>\n

Who is the cowering figure?<\/em> This is a somewhat disturbing depiction of a soon-to-be subjugated, defeated and killed Persian, likely originally depicted in a monument set up by king Attalos of Pergamon, on which go to this link<\/a> (now in the Louvre; photo by Harland).<\/p>\n

How to cite this website:<\/em> Maia Kotrosits and Philip A. Harland, eds., Ethnic Relations and Migration in the Ancient World<\/em>, accessed 2023, https:\/\/philipharland.com. For citing individual posts, see the short link citation at the top of each post.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[For Phil’s other websites or courses, please navigate using the main menu at the top.] Recent scholarly publications arising from the project: Harland, “Putting the Persian Back in ‘Magic’: Problems with Ignoring Ancient Ethnographic Discourses” (2025). Highlighted contributors: > Maia Kotrosits > Richard Last > Daniel Mitchell\u00a0 > Justin Nadeau The purpose of this website […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[299,296],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ancient-ethnography-ethnographic-culture","category-ethnicity-ancient-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philipharland.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philipharland.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philipharland.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philipharland.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philipharland.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1001"}],"version-history":[{"count":67,"href":"https:\/\/www.philipharland.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22529,"href":"https:\/\/www.philipharland.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001\/revisions\/22529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philipharland.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philipharland.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philipharland.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}