What makes a person Turkish or Greek? Is it the land where they were born? The language they speak? The religion they practice? The state of which they are a citizen? Or the community to which they feel they belong? From today's perspective, many people might regard these as questions with straightforward answers. Yet, for many people living during the final century of the Ottoman Empire, categories such as territory, language, religion, citizenship, and communal belonging we

Best known as the birthplace of Herodotus, Halicarnassus also produced, nearly five centuries later, another historian whose contribution to classical scholarship has long remained overshadowed by that of his illustrious predecessor. Yet if Herodotus sought to explain the emergence and conduct of imperial power, Dionysius of Halicarnassus sought to answer a different question: why had Rome become the rightful ruler of the Mediterranean? This distinction is fundamental. Dionys

Walking through ancient cities with my books and notes in hand has given me some of the most rewarding moments of my life. Anatolia offers an extraordinary opportunity to observe the many cultural layers of history. To contemplate the Hittites, Carians, Lycians, Phrygians, Ionians, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, Seljuks, and Ottomans within the same geography is to witness that history advances not in a linear fashion but through accumulation. The fact that Anatolia has been h

The First Scientist-Explorer Pytheas of Massalia (fl. late 4th century BCE) stands as one of antiquity’s most enigmatic figures, an explorer, astronomer, and geographer whose reach extended far beyond the intellectual and geographic boundaries of his time. At a moment when most Greek thinkers conceived of the Earth as a narrow, temperate band of civilization surrounded by impassable extremes, Pytheas undertook a voyage that radically expanded the Greek worldview. Sailing f