Browsing by Subject "Athens"

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Open Access
Cities, ancient, and daily life
(Academic Press, 2008) Gates, Charles; Pearsall, D. M.
By the fourth millennium BC, developed cities had appeared in the Near East, the earliest cities in the world. This article focuses on daily life in selected cities in this and neighboring regions, with one New World example for comparison. Evidence for daily life in ancient cities comes from two sources: archaeology and, for historical periods, ancient texts. Archaeological evidence is variously preserved, depending on climatic, geological, and cultural conditions. Moreover, archaeologists weigh the evidence differently, depending on the questions they seek to answer. Daily life itself comprises many elements, but a basic distinction can be drawn between private and public. Private life centers around the house, its appearance and furnishings, its occupants (males and females of different ages), and household functions. Public life concerns such aspects as social relationships outside the family, political organization, the maintenance of order, economic matters, and religious practices. Such activities take place in a physical setting, both natural and built; understanding daily life in ancient cities includes analysis of what these elements looked like, individually and in relation with others. To explore these themes, five case studies are presented. The first Old World example is Pompeii, a Roman city destroyed in AD 79 by the eruption of the volcano, Vesuvius. Well preserved under the volcanic pumice and ash, Pompeii has yielded an immense amount of information about daily life. The second example is the Agora, or city center of Athens. Here, archaeological excavations combined with textual sources have illuminated the political, commercial, and religious concerns of this ancient Greek city. The third example is Amarna, or Akhetaten, the short-lived capital city of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten (ruled c. 1353-1337 BC). The final Old World case is Ur, a Sumerian city, and a good example of a Near Eastern 'tell,' an artificial mound consisting of accumulated remains of centuries of occupation. The article concludes with a contrasting New World example: Teotihuacan, the large city in the Valley of Mexico that flourished c. AD 150-600.
Open Access
Lived citizenship experiences of highly-skilled migrants in Budapest and Athens : the emergence of patriotic cosmopolitan citizens
(Bilkent University, 2024-11) Gioftsios, Pınar Dilan Sönmez
This study explores the lived citizenship experiences of highly-skilled migrants through the analysis of 62 semi-structured interviews and an online questionnaire (N=177) conducted in Budapest and Athens between October 2022 and February 2024. The study aims to understand and explain how citizenship is understood and appropriated by highly skilled migrants who develop multi-layered attachments as highly mobile individuals, reflecting on their everyday transnational lives in the urban setting of Budapest and Athens. The study suggests that migrants' understanding of citizenship is shaped based on an amalgamation of legal-political status laden with rights and duties, and an identity and multi-layered sense of belonging derived from their lived socio-economic, socio-cultural, and emotional experiences. This study defines lived citizenship as a sum of the relational process involving experiences of belonging and coexistence that individuals undergo in everyday life within and beyond states, in both public and private realms. The research argues that highly skilled migrants’ experiences and narratives demonstrate a distinct understanding of citizenship, which is conceptualized in this study as patriotic cosmopolitan citizenship, turning them into hybrid citizens. The study advances the analytical framework and thinking on the foundation, manifestations, and operationalization of citizenship from below, underlining the significance of affective and subject-defining aspects. This empirical research goes beyond the existing studies which focus on policy-oriented, macro-level analyses of highly-skilled migration, presenting a unique contribution to the production of knowledge on highly skilled migrants in Budapest and Athens.