John K. Davies

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John Kenyon Davies FBA FSA (born September 19, 1937 in Cardiff ) is a British ancient historian , archaeologist and Egyptologist . His broad work focuses on the society and economy of ancient Greece as well as questions of state formation, the administrative and cult history of Greece and the economic significance of the Greek cults.

Life

After studying at Oxford University and spending time in the USA, Davies received his doctorate in 1966 and then worked at Oxford and at the University of St Andrews . From 1977 to 2003 he held the Rathbone Endowed Professorship in Ancient History and Classical Archeology at Liverpool University . From 1995 to 2000 he was also a research professor at the Leverhulme Foundation . Since 2000 he has been a corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute . He also continued his work as an emeritus .

Davies was married twice, first to Anna Morpurgo , and has two children.

plant

Davies advocates, among other things, the assumption that before the Persian Wars one could not speak of an ethnically uniform “Greece”. To analyze the early history of the Greek states, he falls back on the cultural contact hypothesis. He criticizes both the Herodotus- influenced focus of research on the history of Athens and Sparta , which led to the overestimation of the role of Sparta, as well as the anachronistic interpretation of the history of the Greek polis in the light of modern political theories. The Greek polis does not embody a unique development, but is a typical Iron Age phenomenon. In his work Davies also reflects the growing influence of literary criticism on the interpretation of ancient historical sources, which make them appear more clearly than before as literary texts. The Greek history is different from the Roman or that of the European modern times without a uniform "red thread", namely passed on in the form of many simultaneous micro-narratives , which allowed a variety of possible combinations, but also contained many gaps.

Fonts (selection)

  • Athenian propertied families, 600-300 BC Oxford University Press 1971. Revised edition entitled: Wealth and the Power of Wealth in Classical Athens. Arno Press 1981.
  • Democracy and Classical Greece. 2nd edition, Harvard University Press 1993.
  • Ed. (With John J. Wilkes ): Epigraphy and the Historical Sciences. Oxford University Press 2012.
  • Edited by the Journal of Hellenic Studies (1973–1977).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ JK Davies: The Historiography of Archaic Greece. In: Kurt A. Raaflaub , Hans van Wees: A Companion to Archaic Greece. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester 2013, pp. 3-21.
personal data
SURNAME Davies, John K.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Davies, John Kenyon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British ancient historian and archaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH September 19, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Cardiff