The metaphor of the palimpsest has been increasingly invoked to conceptualise cities with deep, living pasts. This volume seeks to think through, and beyond, the logic of the palimpsest, asking whether this fashionable trope slyly forces us to see contradiction where local inhabitants saw (and see) none, to impose distinctions that satisfy our own assumptions about historical periodisation and cultural practice, but which bear little relation to the experience of ancient, medieval or early modern persons.
Spanning the period from Constantine’s foundation of a New Rome in the fourth century to the contemporary aftermath of the Lebanese civil war, this book integrates perspectives from scholars typically separated by the disciplinary boundaries of late antique, Islamic, medieval, Byzantine, Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern studies, but whose work is united by their study of a region characterised by resilience rather than rupture. The volume includes an introduction and eighteen contributions from historians, archaeologists and art historians who explore the historical and cultural complexity of eastern Mediterranean cities. The authors highlight the effects of the multiple antiquities imagined and experienced by persons and groups who for generations made these cities home, and also by travellers and other observers who passed through them. The independent case studies are bound together by a shared concern to understand the many ways in which the cities’ pasts live on in their presents.

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction
  • 1. Historical distance, physical presence and the living past of cities
• Accumulation and juxtaposition
  • 2. Between wars and peace: Some archaeological and historiographical aspects to studying urban transformations in Jerusalem
  • 3. Visualising Constantinople as a palimpsest
  • 4. Transcultural encounters in medieval Anatolia: The Sungur Ağa Mosque in Niğde
  • 5. The water of life, the vanity of mortal existence and a penalty of 2,500 denarii: Thoughts on the reuse of classical and Byzantine remains in Seljuk cities
  • 6. Echoes of late antique Esbus in Mamluk Ḥisbān (Jordan)
• Erasure and selective memory
  • 7. Constantinople’s medieval antiquarians of the future
  • 8. William of Tyre and the cities of the Levant
  • 9. Portraits of Ottoman Athens from Martin Crusius to Strategos Makriyannis
  • 10. Perceptions, histories and urban realities of Thessaloniki’s layered past
• The new and the old
  • 11. From Byzantion to Constantinople
  • 12. Looking in two directions: Urban (re)building in sixth-century Asia Minor
  • 13. Byzantine urban imagination: Idealisation and political thinking (eighth to fifteenth centuries)
  • 14. Ottoman urbanism and capital cities before the conquest of Constantinople (1453)
  • 15. New history for old Istanbul: Late Ottoman encounters with Constantinople in the urban landscape
• Whose past?
  • 16. Medieval Arabic archaeologies of the ancient cities of Syria
  • 17. (Re)constructing Jarash: History, historiography and the making of the ancient city
  • 18. Constantinople in the sixteenth-century Maghribī imaginary: The travelogue of ʿAlī al-Tamgrūtī
  • 19. Beirut as a palimpsest: Conflicting present pasts, materiality and interpretation