Tag: Merchants

Articles

Painting the wine-dark sea: traveling Aegean fresco artists in the Middle and late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean

By examining the fresco fragments themselves I establish that the motifs represented and the style of manufacture are in fact Aegean. Textual evidence from the Near East and Egyptian tomb paintings suggest that the Aegean was well-known for its artistic accomplishments and that Aegean goods and the artisans that produced them were treated as elite commodities.

Articles

The collapse and regeneration of complex society in Greece, 1500-500 BC

Greece between 1500 and 500 BC is one of the best known examples of the phenomenon of the regeneration of complex society after a collapse. I review 10 core dimensions of this process (urbanism, tax and rent, monuments, elite power, information- recording systems, trade, crafts, military power, scale, and standards of living), and suggest that punctuated equilibrium models accommodate the data better than gradualist interpretations.