History in the Mediterranean region is characterised by economic, political, cultural, religious and social interactions. People are constantly confronted with new identities, social groups or states. A number of research projects are focussing on the challenges and opportunities of these historical interdependencies.
The research group ‘Xenocracy on the ground. Administration and Cultural Interdependence in the Pre-Modern Era’ is a cooperation between the Universities of Münster, Cologne and Freiburg and has been funded by the German Research Foundation since 2023. The aim of the research group is to develop a perspective on the phenomenon of foreign rule tailored to the pre-modern period.
The following sub-projects are led by GKM members:
The DFG Programme ‘Entangled Africa: Inner African Relations between the Rainforest and the Mediterranean, ca. 6,000 - 500 years before present’ (SPP 2143) was established in April 2017 for a period of 6 years.
The Institute of Egyptology (Prof Dr Angelika Lohwasser, Jana Richter, Tim Karberg) is participating with the project ‘InterLINK. Interregional Linkage Investigations in Northern Kordofan’. They are investigating the relationships between the ancient and medieval cultures of the Nubian Nile Valley and the contemporaneous, primarily iron-working cultures of the Chad Basin and the rest of the Sahel region by studying an East-West contact zone that has been little researched to date. In particular, the role of North Kordofan as a cultural-historical contact zone is clarified - both from a small-scale perspective and in relation to larger areas.
After the revolt against Xerxes in 484 BC, however, the power and influence of this priestly elite was severely curtailed, at least in northern Babylonia. After a gap in the tradition, we see elites again in the late Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods, including priestly elites. The research question of this project is how these elites differed from one another and how they behaved: Did they also strive for social demarcation, or were they more open to other social classes and new cultural influences? The method of social network analysis will be used to map and visualise the numerous individual pieces of information from the texts in order to subsequently provide a socio-historical evaluation.
The project aims at discussing the Amyklaion’s role as a central hub in Lakonia on two distinct but interrelated levels: we seek to understand the relation of the Amyklaion with its immediate surroundings; and we examine Amyklai as a node of communications between the Eurotas Valley and the Argolic Gulf via the Parnon area, placing the site in its regional context.
The Early Roman Republic has experienced a flurry of activity and lively debates in the last decade. Organized by Hans Beck and Marian Helm in collaboration with Jeremy Armstrong (University of Auckland) and Simon Lentzsch (Université de Fribourg), “Debating Early Rome” engages in these debates and aims to bring together different perspectives, approaches, and academic cultures in a joint group to broaden the discussion and mutual exchange on this fascinating period.
A first focus in the project is on the problem of Christian anti-Judaism in dealing with the Old Testament, another on the reception of the Hebrew Bible by selected contemporary philosophers, and a third line pursues the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in the "melee" of social or political movements.
The Hellenistic period is of particular interest for gender-related research, as it seems to have been the first time that an explicit gender discourse developed.
The research project "Gender Relations in Hellenistic Judaism" deals with the spectrum of questions that arise from feminist or gender/gender-related approaches.
Christian monotheistic rhetoric of demarcation from pagan conceptions of God
The aim of the project is, by challenging the dichotomy poly-/monotheism, which is a linguistic construct in specific contexts with specific intentions, to open up divisions, demarcations, and classifications of different concepts of God (and associated carrier groups) that are more appropriate to the complex constellations of the controversial late antique debates in the diverse situations than simplifying antitheses, without thereby creating a new system of categories.
