Overview

Historians constantly wrestle with uncertainty, never more so than when attempting quantification, yet the field has given little attention to the nature of uncertainty and strategies for managing it. This volume proposes a powerful new approach to uncertainty in ancient history, drawing on techniques widely used in the social and natural sciences. It shows how probability-based techniques used to manage uncertainty about the future or the present can be applied to uncertainty about the past. A substantial introduction explains the use of probability to represent uncertainty. The chapters that follow showcase how the technique can offer leverage on a wide range of problems in ancient history, from the incidence of expropriation in the Classical Greek world to the money supply of the Roman empire.

Full Product Details

Author:   Myles Lavan (University of St Andrews, Scotland) ,  Daniel Jew (National University of Singapore) ,  Bart Danon (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 17.60cm , Height: 2.00cm , Length: 25.20cm
Weight:   0.730kg
ISBN:  

9781009100656

ISBN 10:   1009100653
Pages:   348
Publication Date:   01 December 2022
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

1. Probabilistic modelling in ancient history Daniel Jew and Myles Lavan; Part I. Uncertainty: 2. Assessing the scale of property confiscation in the ancient Greek world Emily Mackil; 3. Senators and senatorial wealth at Pompeii: reconstructing the local wealth distribution Bart Danon; 4. The Roman coinage under the Antonines revisited: an economy of silver, not gold Gilles Bransbourg; Part II. Variability and Missing Data: 5. Children and their impact on family finances in Roman Egypt Paul V. Kelly; 6. The financial sustainability of grain funds: a model-based approach using Monte Carlo simulation N. Solonakis, A. Toure and M. Elhouderi; 7. New approaches to the urban population and urbanization rate of the Roman Empire, AD 1 to 200 J. W. Hanson; 8. Afterword Bart Danon, Daniel Jew and Myles Lavan.

Reviews

'... the volume as a whole is to be commended, and I recommend it both to historians of the ancient Mediterranean ... as well as to economic and social historians from other areas ... The editors make a compelling and clear argument (directly and through their contributors) that probabilistic methods deserve further use, and are more accessible than one may initially think: I can't help but find myself agreeing.' Thomas Laver

Author Information

Myles Lavan is Reader in Ancient History at the University of St. Andrews. He is the author of Slaves to Rome: Paradigms of Empire in Roman Culture (Cambridge, 2013) and co-editor of Roman and Local Citizenship in the Long Second Century CE (2021) and Cosmopolitanism and Empire: Universal Rulers, Local Elites and Cultural Integration in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean (2016). Daniel Jew is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, and Director of Studies at the College of Alice & Peter Tan, within the National University of Singapore. He is co-editor of M. I. Finley: An Ancient Historian and his Impact (Cambridge, 2016) and author of several papers on agriculture, craft, women and slaves in the ancient Greek economy. He is writing a monograph on carrying capacity in Athens. Bart Danon is Assistant Professor in Ancient History at Groningen University. He works on the social and economic history of the Roman Empire, with a focus on inequality, the political economy, urbanisation and slavery.

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