The Lives of Ancient Villages: Rural Society in Roman Anatolia

by Peter Thonemann

Our conception of the culture and values of the ancient Greco-Roman world is largely based on texts and material evidence left behind by a small and atypical group of city-dwellers. The people of the deep Mediterranean countryside seldom appear in the historical record from antiquity, and almost never as historical actors. This book is the first extended historical ethnography of an ancient village society, based on an extraordinarily rich body of funerary and propitiatory inscriptions from a remote upland region of Roman Asia Minor. Rural kinship structures and household forms are analysed in detail, as are the region's demography, religious life, gender relations, class structure, normative standards and values. Roman north-east Lydia is perhaps the only non-urban society in the Greco-Roman world whose culture can be described at so fine-grained a level of a world of tight-knit families, egalitarian values, hard agricultural labour, village solidarity, honour, piety and love.

396 pages, Hardcover

Published February 2, 2023

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really compelling book. The author digs deep into analyzing rural life in Western Anatolia, based mostly on a series of grave and religious inscriptions. It uses these inscriptions to paint a lively picture of family formation and relationships, demographics, kinship structures, religious requirements, and generally social life.

Be warned though -- this is definitely meant for a specialist reader, and it can get fairly technical at points (for instance, there were many pages on the exact translation of certain Greek kinship terms, many of which are only found in this area, which I had to mostly skip over since I do not know any myself). Even with that in mind, I found the book very well written, and I was able to follow the main flows of the argument even if the details were a little beyond me. It also builds on itself -- the beginning starts a little slowly, but each chapter brings new layers that really add up (I *loved* Chapter 8, on sacred spaces and the often fraught relationship between religious sanctuaries and more earthly concerns).

Methodologically, my main question is how much can you actually infer about family kinship from just the terminology used? I assume this is already studied in-depth, but would love a comparison across multiple "modern" examples where we have better access to "ground truth".