Negotiating identity: Greek emporia in the Archaic and Classical Mediterranean

"Negotiating Identity: Greek Emporia in the Archaic and Classical Mediterranean," uses literary, epigraphic, and archaeological sources to explore identity construction and preservation in diverse communities of traders, from the seventh to the fourth centuries BCE. Emporia were commercial settlements that had the specific purpose of facilitating cross-cultural trade. Located usually on the coast, each emporion presupposed both extensive interactions with its hinterland and the existence of a series of ports. Moreover, emporia were often multiethnic settlements or situated in foreign lands, thereby encouraging interactions among groups of varied cultural backgrounds. As such, emporia functioned not only as stopping points along a route, but also as active agents in the exchange of goods, people, and ideas. More specifically, I examine the negotiation of identity in five different Greek emporia located in geographically diverse areas---Emporion in Iberia, Gravisca in Etruria, Pistiros in Thrace, Naukratis in Egypt, and Peiraieus in Attica.; I argue that most of the groups inhabiting the Mediterranean, including Greeks, Phoenicians, Etruscans, and Iberians, had a shared Mediterranean culture: they had similar political systems based around small city-states ( poleis), similar religious systems (polytheism) that were easily translatable among different groups, artifacts and styles that comprised a common material culture, and a common maritime perspective. The different groups used this shared Mediterranean culture to mediate and facilitate relations among themselves. In this context, religion, politics, and law served to regulate interactions between Greeks and non-Greeks, and among different Greek groups. In turn, these interactions led to the expression of different levels of collective identity, such as civic, regional and pan-Hellenic. I argue that in the archaic period Greeks employed these cultural phenomena, rather than notions of common descent, to construct their identities. I also reevaluate the current classification of new foundations into mutually exclusive categories, such as trading posts (emporia), colonies (apoikiai), and poleis. I propose instead that the relationship between a settlement's main function and its political status was flexible. This study of interethnic relations in coastal commercial settlements provides a comprehensive view of the negotiation of identity in the Mediterranean basin as a whole.