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This is a monograph about the medieval Jewish community of the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria. Through deep analyses of contemporary historical sources, mostly documents from the Cairo Geniza, life stories, conducts and practices of private people are revealed. When put together these private biographies convey a social portrait of an elite group which ruled over the local community, but was part of a supra communal network.

Historians generally study elite public gift-giving in ancient Greek cities as a phenomenon that gained prominence only in the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods. The contributors to this volume challenge this perspective by offering analyses of various manifestations of elite public giving in the Greek cities from Homeric times until Late Antiquity, highlighting this as a structural feature of polis society from its origins in the early Archaic age to the world of the Christian Greek city in the early Byzantine period. They discuss existing interpretations, offer novel ideas and arguments, and stress continuities and changes over time. Bracketed by a substantial Introduction and Conclusion, the volume is accessible both to ancient historians and to scholars studying gift-giving in other times and places.

The internal dynamics driving the relationship between the state and local society during the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties has both captivated and baffled scholars. In this book, Sukhee Lee posits an alternative understanding of the relationship between the state and social elites in the middle period of Chinese imperial history. Directly challenging the assumption of a zero-sum competition between the power of the state and that of local elites, Negotiated Power shows in vivid detail how state power and local elite interests were mutually constitutive and reinforcing. It was precisely the connectedness of social elites to the state, as well as the presence of the state in local life, that was essential to the rise of a self-conscious local elite society during this period. In probing the historical trajectory of Mingzhou prefecture (today's Ningbo), Lee makes extensive use of local gazetteers from the Southern Song and the Yuan dynasties, and the abundant literary collections that still survive from this area, including some 280 epitaphs written for Mingzhou people of the time.

Das Buch erzählt die Geschichte der Elite Athens zwischen 600 und 400 v. Chr. anhand der Bilder auf der Luxuskeramik, aus der die Reichen bei ihren Festen tranken. Über 6000 ausgewertete Darstellungen liefern Erkenntnisse über das Leben der Elite als Pferdehalter, Athleten und Bankettgesellschaft. Der Bildanalyse ist ein kulturgeschichtlicher Teil vorangestellt ist, der die Elite über die Historie und sozioökonomische Aspekte definiert.

Examining the evolution of kingship in the Ancient Near East from the time of the Sumerians to the rise of the Seleucids in Babylon, this book argues that the Sumerian emphasis on the divine favour that the fertility goddess and the Sun god bestowed upon the king should be understood metaphorically from the start and that these metaphors survived in later historical periods, through popular literature including the Epic of Gilgameš and the Enuma Eliš. The author's research shows that from the earliest times Near Eastern kings and their scribes adapted these metaphors to promote royal legitimacy in accordance with legendary exempla that highlighted the role of the king as the establisher of order and civilization. As another Gilgameš and, later, as a pious servant of Marduk, the king renewed divine favour for his subjects, enabling them to share the'Garden of the Gods'. Seleucus and Antiochus found these cultural ideas, as they had evolved in the first millennium BCE, extremely useful in their efforts to establish their dynasty at Babylon. Far from playing down cultural differences, the book considers the ideological agendas of ancient Near Eastern empires as having been shaped mainly by class — rather than race-minded elites.

This book represents the first attempt to analyze historical and cultural developments in late medieval and early modern southeastern Europe as a set of mutually intertwined regional histories, burdened by the strong dichotomy between the almighty center—Constantinople—and the periphery that is rarely visible in both contemporary sources and modern scholarship. This mosaic of original studies is devoted to various regions of the Byzantine Balkans and their historical, artistic, and ideological idiosyncrasies, mirroring the complex character and composite and fragmented structure of this vast region. The focal points of the book are the two captures of Constantinople in 1204 and 1453, and the contributors analyze the significance of these catastrophic events on the political destiny of medieval Balkan societies, the mechanisms of adapting to the new political order, and the ever-present interconnectedness of a lower, regional elite across southeastern Europe that had remained strong even after the Ottoman conquest.

The Saljuq period of the eleventh and twelfth centuries saw the arrival in Iran of Türkmen nomads from Central Asia and the beginning of Turkish rule. Through the example of the city of Isfahan, the book analyses the internal evolution of Iranian society in this period and the interaction of the Iranian elites and Turkish rulers.Drawing on an analysis of a wide range of sources, including poetic and epistolary material, this study fills an historiographical gap and casts new light on the two centuries prior to the Mongol invasion. This comprehensive analytical study provides a new contribution to the understanding of many crucial issues: the cultural divide between Western and Eastern Iran; the military potential of city-dwellers; the attitude of the Turkish rulers toward cities and city life; the action of the famous vizier Nizam al-Mulk; the meaning of the Ismaili uprising; and above all the structure of the local elite, organized into rival networks and largely autonomous vis-à-vis state powers. The study is enhanced by a variety of additional features, including extensive genealogical tables, Arabic script and maps. Providing a new understanding of the cultural identity of Iran, this book is an important contribution to the study of the history of Iran and the Medieval period.