Location: Old Library
The first lecture provides the historical and scholarly background for the entire lecture series. It first outlines the main characteristics of Late Bronze Age socio-political infrastructures, describing their collapse after the crisis of 1200 BC, and identifying general patterns in the reorganization of societies across Greece, Anatolia, and the Levant during the Iron Age. It then revises the models currently adopted to study and classify Iron Age Eastern Mediterranean political systems and asks whether they provide valid heuristic tools for an overarching interpretation of shared structural dynamics in socio-political development. The lecture concludes that the investigation should focus on the protagonists of political action and on the strategies they adopted in practice to foster social cohesion in their communities. It finally introduces the case studies that will constitute the core of the lecture series.
