Brickwork Patterns in Church E at Sardis: Structure and Meaning

The Classical Review 62.2: 627-9, 2012

2011

Kubaba, 2017

2022

The map of Iron Age Anatolia (ca. 1200-550 BCE, Turkey) is dotted by territorial kingdoms that rose and were subsumed into larger political entities throughout its history. Current archaeological narratives commonly place Lydia into this scene quite late in the Iron Age with the rise of its Mermnad elite in the seventh century BCE. Their power is well attested by the rapid expansion of their influence in Anatolia, as well as by their ambitious buildings programs that monumentalized their capital city Sardis. Among these programs, monumental urban terrace platforms hold a unique position, for they regularized the rugged topography of a naturally elevated district at the heart of Sardis, converting it into a visibly dominant promontory to house the Lydian palace. Until recently there were no precedents for these enormous man-made investments, hence the narrative of the Mermnad elite’s late and fast emergence and the reconstruction of Sardis as an agglomeration of small sites before their time. The fresh discovery of a long sequence of large-scale constructions (2000-700 BCE) in the city’s elite precinct now casts doubt on this narrative. In this dissertation, I study these early monumental constructions along with the later terraces to investigate the course of Lydian elite placemaking and their wider implications for Lydia’s place in Iron Age Anatolia. This research is multi-scalar, expanding out from a detailed study of architecture, to the place of terraces within the socio-spatial fabric of diachronic settlements at Sardis, and finally to wider regional Anatolian context. I begin with the examination of the corpus of urban terrace constructions in Sardis and their architectural design principles and dating evidence. Next, I compare the terraces to constructions from domestic neighborhoods as well as other Mermnad elite structures. Their scalar facets—large size, costly materials, and large labor requirements—mark them as monumental in each building episode. I consider symbolic and experiential facets using a variety of theoretical frameworks—memory, social submission, performance, and domination—to demonstrate how these terraces shaped their socio-spatial environments through ongoing claims of an old central precinct. This was achieved by introducing architectural novelties as well as more formality and regularity, employing transformative labor as a means of public spectacle and creating built representations of spatial control and domination. At the same time, I show the extent to which these practices foreshadow Mermnad elite placemaking ideologies. Thus, this research marks Lydian constructions in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE as productions of a previously unregistered early Lydian elite. I conclude by contextualizing early Lydian placemaking practices within Anatolia’s broader socio-political spheres. This study reveals terracing to demarcate elite space as a Lydian mode of placemaking and that in timing and ideology it followed the culture-political trajectories of Anatolia—by peer-polity competition—more so than those of the Aegean. As a result, I acknowledge the deeper history of the ruling elite in Lydia, one that reverses the narrative of a sudden, late, and rapid development fostered by the Mermnads. This study, thus, makes a place for Lydia in the Iron Age maps of Anatolia two centuries earlier than has been previously believed.

H. Bru-G. Labarre (edd.), L’Anatolie des peuples, des cites et des cultures (IIe millénaire av. J.-C. – Ve siècle ap. J.-C.), Colloque international de Besançon – 26-27 Novembre 2010, Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté, Besançon 2013, 189-195.

Archeologia dell‘Architettura, 2023

The paper aims to shed light on building site procedures linked to the construction of ecclesiastical complexes in the early Byzantine Mediterranean (4th-7th c. AD). Archaeological, epigraphic, and literary sources are reassessed to get novel insights into logistical customs and recurrent dynamics in relation to several aspects of the preparatory and executive phases of ecclesiastical construction sites, focusing on buildings from capital cities (Constantinople, Ravenna) and minor provincial sites as well. Special attention is paid to evidence of project strategies, such as modularity and design traces, as well as to material features of stone artefacts useful to boost our knowledge about workmanship procedures adopted by workshops both to improve and speed up production. In the final section, an architectural energetic approach, rarely deployed in late antique studies, is adopted to further advance the analysis about the impact of stone production and related craftsmanship on the logistics, times, and costs of the construction site. Such a novel and holistic approach turns out to be crucial to get a thorough understanding of a great array of phenomena traditionally claimed in literature, such as technological development, mass production, and rough export of marble elements. Overall, the contribution intends to show the heuristic potential of an integrated approach to ancient constructions in order to unveil their key role in driving both economic and social growth in the relevant contexts.

Mud-bricks are the most common architectural media in Syrian Jezireh and throughout Mesopotamia since Neolithic time. Their use persist in the countryside untill the present day almost in unchanged way (Fig. 1). In upper Mesopotamian plain are atested since Prepottery Neolithic A/B (10 000-8700 BC). According to the environmental features we can presume their origin and employment evolved independently of the oldest settlements in middle Anatolia and southern Mesopotamia. Cultural centres with monumental sacral and palatial architecture provided– via such information channels as rivers Euphrates and Khabur - innovation techniqes since the 2nd millenium BC

2017

Tendency to show beauty and majesty in the human, arises from the beginning of artifact build ornate and beautiful. It covers Islamic architecture and decorative buildings. Decorative Islamic art, is one of the most important and effective component. The aim of this study was to investigate decorative brickwork at a number of sites in the central plateau of Iran's in Safavid period. In this article, we describe the decorative brickwork then dissolution of the decorations in the Safavid caravanserai in the central plateau, such as "Sheikh Ali", "Madarshah", "Moorchekhort" in "Isfahan" "Kenargard" in Tehran, caravanserai of "Ahovan" in "Semnan", caravanserai of "Sadrabad" in "Qom" and the caravanserai of "Shah Abbas" in Karaj will be discussed. This research is descriptive-analytic. Research tools is athletics and library. Finally, by examining the structures and the tables of compa...

Levant 32, 135-54, 2000

The massive retaining walls of the Haram aI-Sharif in Jerusalem with their highly distinctive drafted-margin ashlars represent the most impressive remnant of Herod:Js Temple complex. Similar decorative drafted-margin masonry survives in the monumental Herodian enclosures at Hebron and Mamre. This study traces the development of the decorative drafted-margin style of masonry from pre-Classical Ionia through the East Greek world>to its apogee in the early Roman Empire. It is shown that the application of this decorative treatment to the walls of Herod's sacred enclosures was in keeping with the fashion of the period but certain of its features appear to indicate that Herod's builders employed it as a deliberate archaising device to recall the splendour of the ancient Israelite Temple.