Archaeology of Imperial Encounters in the Southern Levant during theSecond and First Millennia BCE

The Religionswissenschaftliches Seminar of the University of Zurich is pleased to announce an international symposium on the archaeology of imperial encounters in the southern Levant.
The symposium will deal with both diachronic and comparative perspectives from the Egyptian hegemony of the Late Bronze Age to the eve of the Roman Period. The Levant, which was exposed to external political and economic hegemony from the time of Thutmose III’s campaigns in the 15th century BCE and throughout most of its documented history, is a prominent candidate for a discussion focusing on imperial encounters. As the most intensely archaeologically explored region of the Near East, the southern Levant provides numerous possibilities for discussion and comparison of case studies. A glimpse at previous scholarship attests to the discussions dealing mainly with literary echoes of cultural identity in the making, religious developments and other issues; archaeological reflections of social transformations due to imperial encounter have been addressed only occasionally. This stands in marked contrast to the plethora of scholarship dealing with the archaeology of imperial-indigenous discourses in other regions across the globe, ancient and modern alike.
Accordingly, we wish to bring together in this symposium recent developments in the theoretical discussion on the archaeology of empires and colonial encounters on the one hand, with the abundance of information on the archaeology of the southern Levant during the second and first millennium BCE on the other.

University of Zurich, Rämistrasse 59, 8001 Zürich, Room RAA G‐01 (Aula)

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