Lic - Theoretical and comparative approaches to Early Islamic urbanism

The focus of this course will be archaeological urbanism, and our case study will be early Islamic cities in a wider comparative context. We will look at urban complexes as dynamic, fluid phenomena that emerge, develop, transform, adapt, and decline. Our aim will be to study contemporary approaches to archaeological urbanism and use them critically in the analysis of cities of the Early Islamic world—both those that arose in the fabric of earlier settlements of the Byzantine and Sasanian worlds and those that were newly established. The first part of the course will thus be dedicated to theoretical concepts such as energised crowding (Smith), settlement persistence (Crawford et al., 2023), and extended urbanisation (Jervis, 2025). We will also consider the classical concepts of early Islamic urbanisation, such as the adaptation of late antique cities to the needs of Islamic communities (Kennedy 1985) and contiguity between mosques and churches in urban spaces (Guidetti, 2013). In the second part of the course, we will analyse examples of key cities of the early Islamic world, such as al-Hira, ʿAnjar, Fustat, Damascus, Jerash, Basra, Samarra, Baghdad, and Merv, as well as comparative examples from other traditions: the Sasanian Ctesiphon/Al-Mada'in, Byzantine Constantinople, and Tang Chang’an. Finally, we will examine how the application of theoretical concepts can advance our understanding of early Islamic cities.