Understanding Rome beyond the boundaries of its Empire The transformations of the City of Rome in the Context of the Globalizing World of Ancient Afro-Eurasia

The application of the theory of globalization to the ancient world created dramatic changes in our approach to the research of cultures, nations, cities, and empires of Ancient Afro-Eurasia and beyond. Its contributions in archaeological theory promote strongly the ideas of constant interaction and interconnectedness, and multidirectional flow of ideas and materials throughout wider areas of the ancient world. Rejecting the traditional and pervasive concept of “cultural containers”, this emerging methodological model provides unique critique and promising alternatives to various previously proposed or dominant models of approach, such as: imperialism, colonization, acculturation, resistance, or hybridization.

This contribution utilizes the globalization theory and recent advances in archaeological theory and practice that reveal the multidirectional wide-scale flow of materials, ideas, knowledge, and technological know-how in the last millennia BC. It also reconstructs an ancient oikumene of interconnectedness that extended through and related communities, urban centers, and wider areas from the Indian to the Atlantic Ocean.
In such context, I suggest a new understanding of the urban growth and living and the cultural, demographic, and social transformations of the city of Rome through a wider comparative matrix of the urban developments of the globalizing world of Ancient Afro-Eurasia. I hypothesize three phases of the development and transformation of the city of Rome during the Roman imperial times. The first phase of the development of the city from the reign of Augustus to the reign of the Flavians is analyzed through the lenses of “building of a new post-Hellenistic dynastic center”. The analyses of the second phase, track the process of “becoming critical center of the post-Hellenistic globalizing world”, and extend throughout the second century AD. Finally, the third phase of the hypotheses, exposes a marginalized urban core on the fringes of the globalized post-Hellenistic world as early as the third century AD.