Naoíse Mac Sweeney | “The Birth of the Ancient Greek World: Migration, Urbanisation, and the Emergence of Greekness?”

Annual UCLA Joan Palevsky Lecture Professor

Naoíse Mac Sweeney, University of Vienna

“The Birth of the Ancient Greek World: Migration, Urbanisation, and the Emergence of Greekness?”

Lecture summary:  By the start of the classical period, the Greek world stretched from Spain to Cyprus, and from Libya to the Crimea, and was comprised of over 1,000 autonomous polities. In this lecture, I will consider how this geographically dispersed and politically fragmented Greek world came into being over the course of the 11th to sixth centuries BCE, focusing in particular on new data from archaeological surveys designed to uncover processes of urbanisation and migration at varying scales. This new data suggests divergent pathways to Greekness in different parts of the Greek world, with the adoption of Greek lifestyles and cultural traits happening at radically different times and in response to different local contexts. If, as this evidence suggests, the Greek world was forged in a more piecemeal and uneven manner than previously thought, does this have implications for what we assume the Greek world fundamentally was?

About the speaker: Naoíse Mac Sweeney, professor of Greek archaeology at the University of Vienna, is the author of books including “Community Identity and Archaeology” (2011), “Foundation Myths and Politics in Ancient Ionia” (2013), “Troy: Myth, City, Icon” (2018) and, most recently, “The West: A New History of an Old Idea” (2023).

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