Frontiers of the Greek World

The people we commonly call the Ancient Greeks were, in fact, not very Greek at all. Early modern romantic ideals and European imperialism and colonialism have heavily influenced popular and even many scholarly ideas about the Ancient Greek World. In reality, the boundaries of the Ancient Greek world stretched far beyond contemporary Greece and reached the Etruscans, Scythians and other native populations in the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Moreover, rather than being a fixed physical boundary, “Greekness” in Antiquity was a changing and malleable concept. The Ancient Greek World was diverse and distinctly multi-cultural. This subject introduces students to the geographical and conceptual “Frontiers of the Greek World” by looking at figurative art, architecture, archaeological evidence of daily life and texts that shed light on human mobility, cultural interaction and identity formation.

探索古希腊文明的地理与文化边界。

• 1Inspect changing concepts of "Greekness" and the Ancient Greek World in ancient and modern times
• 2Discuss processes of human mobility, settlement and identity formation in the Ancient Mediterranean and Black Sea
• 3Critically apply current theoretical approaches to mobility, identity and cultural change to the study of the past
• 4Analyse ancient texts and artefacts in terms of cultural interaction and identity formation.