Xosé L. Hermoso-Buxán

Political Strategies and Universal Empires: Insights from the Space Syntax Analysis of Palatial Buildings in the Ancient Near East

From the eighth century BCE, with the emergence of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, a new form of political and social organisation characterised by increasing political cohesion and long-lived empires became dominant in the Ancient Near East (ANE). This resulted in greater interaction and commonality between distant regions, which had as an effect, among others, the spread of common languages, universal religions and governments and the hybridisation of material culture. This trend towards convergence has been described by Altaweel and Squitieri (2018) as the result of a phenomenon known as ‘universalism’ which, in contrast to globalisation, considers large-scale movement of population over a sustained period of time to be the main driver and a pre-requisite for change.     

Palaces, being a form of material culture present in the ANE since at least the Early Bronze Age, are a good proxy to test the applicability of these theories and to track the impact of these changes on the deeper levels of how societies view and organise their world, namely, the configuration of space, ideology and governance. To this end, using Space Syntax Analysis (Hillier and Hanson 1984) as a methodological tool, in my PhD I explore data from over two hundred palatial buildings located in five different regions: the Levant, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, the South Caucasus and Iran and the East. Concurrently, my research aims to provide new data as to the characterisation of palaces, beyond traditional art historical and morphological approaches to the analysis of architecture. 

References:

Altaweel, M. & A. Squitieri. 2018. Revolutionizing a World: From Small States to Universalism in the Pre-Islamic Near East. London: UCL Press.

Hillier, B. & J. Hanson. 1984. The Social Logic of Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Education

• MA Archaeology of the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East (Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 2014)
• BA Archaeology and Anthropology (Trinity College, University of Cambridge, 2011)
• MA+BA ('Licenciatura') English Studies (University of Santiago de Compostela, 2008)

Stevens, R.E., Hermoso-Buxán, X.L., Marín-Arroyo, A.B., González-Morales, M.R. and Straus, L.G. 2014. Investigation of Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Palaeoenvironmental Change at El Mirón Cave (Cantabria, Spain): Insights from Carbon and Nitrogen Isotope Analyses of Red Deer. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 414: 46-60