Marco Santini *21

I was trained at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa (2011-2016) and at the University of Pisa (2011-2016), where I earned a BA (July 2014) and an MA in Classics (July 2016). I came to Princeton, where I joined the Program in the Ancient World, in the fall of 2016. During my doctoral career, I also benefited from exchange programs with other institutions: I participated in the Exchange Scholar Program with the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania (2016/17 and 2017/18), and joined the Inter-University Consortium program with the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World of New York University (Fall 2018). In 2019/2020 I held a Donald and Mary Hyde Academic-Year Fellowship for Research Abroad in the Humanities, which I spent at the Historisches Seminar of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität of Munich.

My main research interests include cultural exchange and interaction between Greece, Anatolia, and the wider Near East between the Second and First Millennia BCE, ethnic identity, cultural memory, ancient political thought and practice, ancient trade and economy, and the languages of the ancient Mediterranean (especially Anatolian and Semitic). Over the last few years, I have devoted a substantial part of my research to the Hellenistic epigraphical poem known as ‘The Pride of Halikarnassos’, trying to set its mythological and cultural significance in the historical background of Halikarnassos and emphasizing its role in the shaping of the city’s identity. Some of the results of this work have been condensed into two articles: “A Multi-Ethnic City Shapes Its Past: The ‘Pride of Halikarnassos’ and the Memory of Salmakis”, ASNP s. V, 8/1 (2016), 3-35, and “Bellerophontes, Pegasos and the Foundation of Halikarnassos. Contributions to the Study of the Salmakis Inscription”, SCO 63 (2017), 109-143. My last piece on the cultural history of Halikarnassos, entitled “A Rhetoric of Accumulation: The Multi-Ethnic Identity of Halikarnassos in the Antiquarian and Public Discourse”, is forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Ascona 2018 International Conference Beyond All Boundaries: Anatolia in the 1st Millennium BC, edited by A. Payne, Š. Velhartická, and J. Wintjes. Another forthcoming article, entitled Languages, Peoples, and Power: Some Near Eastern Perspectives, examines Near Eastern views of multilingualism and linguistic diversity in the First Millennium BCE.

I also collaborated on the Scuola Normale project for a new online database of “Greek Economic Inscriptions” (GEI), and participated in the international project “Material Entanglements in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond”, funded by the Getty Foundation and hosted by The Johns Hopkins University and the National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens, with a special focus on Anatolian multilingual epigraphy. At Princeton, I served as an Assistant in Instruction (Preceptor) for the lecture courses CLA 216 “Archaic and Classical Greece” (Prof. Marc Domingo Gygax, Fall 2018), and HUM 245 “Creation Stories: Babylonian, Biblical and Greek Cosmogonies Compared” (Prof. Johannes Haubold, Spring 2019).

My dissertation focuses on the emergence of new forms of rulership in the Eastern Mediterranean after the crisis of the Late Bronze Age palatial societies, with a special attention to Greece, Anatolia, and the Levant.