The concept of leadership has not received much attention in Assyriology as it was overshadowed by the concept of kingship and its omnipresence in ancient Mesopotamia. As the available sources mostly are written from the perspective of the leader – in the case of ancient Mesopotamia this is the king or the city ruler – also Assyriologists mostly took this standpoint and wrote ‘history from above’. Much scholarly effort was invested in the study of various aspects of kingship. Because of the scarceness of sources discussing the experience of the ruler’s leadership and the abundance of royal inscriptions, we usually do not take the perspective – to use a widespread political metaphor – of the sheep, but only that of the shepherd. Nevertheless, there are some texts that critic the leadership of kings. These texts are mostly of literary nature but they allow us at least a partial ‘view from below’, as they describe the problems of people living under a powerful king.

A prevalent idea in scholarship on Athenian politics of the classical period is the assumption, based on figures like Pericles and Demosthenes, that political leadership depended on the ability to give good advice and communicate well with fellow citizens in the Council and Assembly. Without necessarily challenging this assumption, the present chapter focuses on a mechanism for attaining political leadership that has received less attention: gift-giving to both individual citizens and the entire community. Athenians with political ambitions built networks of followers (clients) through private gifts, but the phenomenon has not been fully appreciated because of the supposition that nothing comparable to the Roman patron/client relationship existed in the Greek polis. This chapter focuses on the case of Demosthenes.

Chapter 3 focuses on the animal dimension of these changes, which has so far been little explored. I discuss how the hybrid, one-humped “Turcoman” camel transformed the way trade and transport operated in the region. I argue that the camel was a visible yet often underestimated actor in the emergence of a symbiotic relationship between city and country and the incorporation of Western Anatolia into global markets.

Cinema as a mirror of postrevolutionary cultural negotiations. After the revolution, Iranian cinema becomes a shared format for national self-representation. Despite censorship and practical constraints, filmmaking developed a coded but locally recognizable language to explore tensions around class, region, gender, history, and politics. Acquiescing to censorship requirement that women actors never unveil, even when represented in private alone or with other women, filmmakers and audiences found themselves undermining the dramatic artifice of the cinematic fourth wall, the convention of invisible, passive dramatic observation taken for granted in modern filmmaking. Instead, audiences became collaborators of cultural meaning, acknowledging cinematic artifice and the possibilities of symbolic representation. Canny directors involved their viewers as conscious partners in a community of interpretation, pushing the limits of cultural critique. These self-reflexive Iranian films provide the most accurate format for reflecting on postrevolutionary national and political developments, making postrevolutionary Iranian cinema a mirror for national subjectivity and society.

A theoretical intervention into the challenge of thinking through the complexities of life, in Iran or elsewhere. Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault offer us a model of thinking as a practice. Each attempted one project in which they were thinking systematically about ongoing events, and offering that thinking as a contribution to public understanding. Arendt traveled to Jerusalem to observe the Adolf Eichmann trial, and her contemporaneous writing was published in The New Yorker magazine. Foucault traveled to Iran to observe the early stages of the revolution, and his contemporaneous writing was published (mostly) in the Corriere della Sera newspaper. These two projects have commonly been regarded as their author’s most controversial and have often been ignored or used to denigrate the writer’s entire theoretical oeuvre. Yet they offer compelling models of thinking as a practice that critically links the self and the world. Rescuing theory from the confines of academic specialization restores it, and us, to the possibility of thinking as a practice of freedom, and freedom as the daily possibility of beginning anew.

This chapter focuses on the way the Livian conception of political leadership reflects the corresponding Ciceronian theory. Although Livy does not seem to use any specific term for ‘leadership’, the latter is given a prominent role in his theory regarding the progress and the decline of the res publica: in his much-commented-on passage of his preface (praef. 9), both the relaxation of disciplina and the role of the leaders (uiri) are elucidated by reference to Cicero’s theory and terminology of leadership. Disciplina should then be defined as a way of moral and political life transmitted from one generation to the other, which is essentially based on the principle of obedience to an ‘enlightened’ political leadership. The characteristics of efficient leadership are expressed by Livy in various comments or speeches throughout the work. The role attributed to the people and the leaders in Livy’s scheme also reveals a close affinity with Cicero’s theory of the ideal leader as a moderator rei publicae, especially in the De re publica. Livy also promotes some leaders of the Roman past as exempla which have incarnated the Ciceronian ideal of leader.

In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, Izmir transformed more rapidly than at any other time in its long history and became indelibly linked to its hinterland. In this period, much of the urban and rural landscape people inhabited today in Western Anatolia was created: a large port city with modern facilities, remarkably fertile farmlands, and the major transportation linkages that connect the city with the interior. This book employs the “gateway city” model to understand how Izmir grew and prospered in tandem with Western Anatolia in the late Ottoman Empire.

Chapter 2 chronicles migration to Western Anatolia and the immigrant and refugee experience with local natural resources therein. It examines how newcomers viewed, understood, and interacted with the natural environment and the significance of their skills, know-how, experience, and ideas in understanding economic and socio-ecological changes in Izmir and its surroundings in the late Ottoman Empire.

Once women’s appearance in public space is accepted, the tensions concern how they appear. Self-representations of gender identity are performed in part through differences in hejab (required modest clothing) and bodily comportment, varying from women in chadors moving through the traditional local spaces of the bazaar to secular cosmopolitan women styling their own performance of transnational independence. But women asserting their presence in public face harassment and the threat of violence, especially when stepping into the street, using public transportation, and asserting their right to social and spatial mobility. Vigilantes (the serial killer Saeed Hanaei, the “Spider Killer”) and gangs (the “Black Vultures” and the “Wolves”) targeting women can defend their attacks as morally justifiable, while the government has initiated programs of “social security” that primarily have sought to control deviations from approved forms of hejab. Nonetheless, women insist on their right to the city and their freedom to be fully present as women in public, whether by negotiating their personal space in a taxi or challenging the arguments of their attackers face to face.

The author provides an account of the cultural evolution of a new concept of leadership for both emperors and the church in the Christianising society based in the eastern Roman capital of Constantinople. The focus is the pivotal period from the establishment of Constantine the Great’s one-man rule through Byzantine rule over the eastern and western empires in the sixth and seventh centuries, ending with the rule of Irene as sole empress (797–802) and Charlemagne’s coronation in 800. Letters exemplify the late Roman transformation from a model of one-man (or one-family) rule to a more complex system of power sharing between religious authorities, which was under constant renegotiation, from the highest levels of governance under emperors and bishops to the lowest level of the parish led by local clergy. Increasing opportunities for women to exercise power, hand in hand with the episcopal leaders of the new church, also shaped imperial leadership ideals in new ways.

This book has illuminated the development trajectory of late Ottoman Izmir, whose growth and prosperity depended on its interactions with its immediate and distant hinterland(s). It has analyzed the city and its hinterland with their surrounding hills and valleys, railroads, trails, bridges, cotton fields, fig gardens, vineyards, flour mills, oil presses, warehouses, and quays, but also with their merchants, dealers, wholesalers, seasonal workers, immigrants, refugees, farmers, producers, and nomads. To provide a picture of how both people and the environment transformed Izmir into a new kind of city, far different at the end of the nineteenth century than what it was at the beginning, Gateway to the Mediterranean has centered the integral actors and agents that played a vital role in the intensified interactions yet have been neglected so far. It has addressed local, regional, and global dynamics that involved the city and the country.

After underlining the importance and currency of the topic of leadership, the introduction of the volume sets out to explain the content and merits of the present volume. The chapters of the volume make significant contributions to the following topics: (a) the vocabulary of ancient leadership: the authors study terms and concepts related to leadership in several ancient civilisations (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Iran, Israel, China, Greece, Rome, and the Late Roman Empire), providing clarifications as to their different nuances; (b) the diverse forms of leadership: the essays of the volume deal with good and bad leaders, intellectual and political leaders, imperial and local, thus highlighting the complexity of the phenomenon of leadership in antiquity; (c) theoretical reflections on leadership: the analysis proposed enables readers to trace elements of leadership theory in ancient civilisations. The merits of this investigation consist in encouraging a comparative reflection on ancient civilisations and in triggering also a critical reflection on modern leadership issues.

As is commonly known, both Ptolemaic and Seleucid rulers in the wake of Alexander the Great claimed divine worship. This phenomenon was also reflected in ancient Jewish literature. In the first part, this chapter aims at describing the time of Antiochus IV (175–164 bc) as the historical framework in which a specific confrontation with the Hellenistic ruler ideology is evident. In the second part, the chapter uses 2 Macc 9 (‘the death of Antiochus IV’) and the Book of Judith as examples as to how selected deuterocanonical writings (e.g. 2 Maccabees and Judith) have dealt with the encounter with the Hellenic ruler cult in a narrative discourse. Both cases demonstrate God’s help and power, which becomes obvious through the cruel death of the ruler who claimed for himself divinity.

A closer look at changes in women’s education, age of marriage, employment, and the reasons for the enduring value of women’s skilled domestic work. Women’s postrevolutionary legal position as second-class citizens exists in tandem with gains in women’s social status indicators: improvements in women’s literacy, later and more egalitarian age of marriage, lower fertility rates, and improved indicators of basic household consumption. Women’s stubbornly low contemporary participation rate in formal employment is complicated by the prerevolutionary prevalence of child labor, and postrevolutionary improvements in girls’ school attendance. Low rates of formal employment also mask women’s crucial contributions to household economies through social labor. Local food culture and the premium attached to women’s skilled home cooking provide the basis for social and economic networks that bypass state control. The common value of local food culture provides a foundation for social identity and a recognizable form of capital that offsets the frustrations associated with limited the opportunities of the formal market.