The Lives of Ancient Villages

A ground-breaking historical ethnography of kinship, religion, and village society in a remote rural backwater of the Roman world.

This is the first detailed ethnographic analysis of the kinship structure, religious life, culture and ethics of an ancient rural community. It will be essential reading for all historians of the Greco-Roman world, and will also be of interest to anthropologists interested in kinship and pre-modern rural societies.Our conception of the culture and values of the ancient Greco-Roman world is largely based on texts and material evidence left behind by a small and atypical group of city-dwellers. The people of the deep Mediterranean countryside seldom appear in the historical record from antiquity, and almost never as historical actors. This book is the first extended historical ethnography of an ancient village society, based on an extraordinarily rich body of funerary and propitiatory inscriptions from a remote upland region of Roman Asia Minor. Rural kinship structures and household forms are analysed in detail, as are the region's demography, religious life, gender relations, class structure, normative standards and values. Roman north-east Lydia is perhaps the only non-urban society in the Greco-Roman world whose culture can be described at so fine-grained a level of detail: a world of tight-knit families, egalitarian values, hard agricultural labour, village solidarity, honour, piety and love.