Overview
Talia Prussin is a historian of ancient Western and Central Asia. She focuses on questions of colonization and land use in ancient empires specializes during the Hellenistic period (323-31 BCE), specializing in the Seleucid empire. She is also interested in new digital approaches to the analysis and imaging of documentary texts from the ancient world. Prior to coming to Cornell, she taught in the Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies at the University of British Columbia.
Her first book, Empire Under New Management: Land, Colonization, and Regime Change in Western Asia, 500-150 BCE, looks at the administration of land across the transition between the Achaemenid and Seleucid empires. Although Achaemenid and Seleucid institutions for land management had superficial similarities, they reflected divergent imperial problems and priorities. While the Achaemenid empire’s institutions for land management were designed to prevent the entrenchment of wealth and political power outside of the Achaemenid king’s influence, the Seleucids sought to tether powerful local political actors, such as the cities of Western Asia Minor and the Babylonian temples, to their own political and economic fortunes through distributions of land. The Seleucids, divested of their homeland of Macedonia in northern Greece and reliant on claims of conquest to their territory, had to reimagine imperial institutions to support a far more extensive program of colonization. Through this institutional lens, the book argues that land policy was an area of sharp discontinuity between the Achaemenid and Seleucid states.
Research Focus
- Hellenistic history
- Economics of empire
- Greek epigraphy
- Intercultural interaction in the ancient world
Publications
Empire Under New Management: Land, Colonization, and Regime Change in Western Asia, 500-150 BCE