The prologue provides an introduction to the history of Ichijōdani, as well as an overview of the three primary methodological interventions of the book. It reviews the scholarly literature on medieval urban life in Japan and explains this study’s distinctive contributions. The chapter also provides details on the theoretical literature in material culture studies and their articulations in this book. The Prologue ends with a discussion of ruins and the emphasis this study places on the violent destruction of Ichijōdani as a central and defining feature of the site.

This chapter examines the layout of the city, its neighborhoods, its interior and exterior, and its relationship to the natural environment that framed and constrained its growth. The chapter also provides an overview of the layout of the Asakura palace, the key neighborhoods, the doctor's residence, and the active neighborhoods found outside the city gates that help us to understand the larger hybrid function of the city.

This chapter is mainly concerned with the political ideology, norms and behaviour associated with the Byzantine monarchy. It focuses on how the ceremonial and hierarchies of power played out in Constantinople, assessing contemporary expectations of the role and conduct of the emperor. Such expectations were often revealed most clearly in time of instability, as contemporary accounts of coups indicate. The chapter outlines the ceremonial life of the court and discusses the sacred and secular topography of Constantinople as the stage for the continuous display of elite power. The visual and non-verbal qualities to Byzantine ceremonial culture are stressed, as is the centrality of law to imperial authority, political office and spatial organisation. The principal imperial hierarchies of power (military, civil and clerical) and the relationship of the emperor and patriarch are explored, with women and eunuchs seen as integral to the workings of official hierarchies. Alternative concepts of power began to emerge in the later period, when the empire’s territorial integrity was eroding, yet the long-term resilience of traditional ideology, ceremonies and hierarchies is noteworthy.

The chapter describes how the Chinese imperial urban civilization emerged. The urban system developed from a loosely linked collection of cities into an imperial network with the main capital, Chang’an, as the political, economic, and cultural centre. Roads and waterways allowed goods and people to move around the empire, and trading routes to the west linked China to central Asia and beyond. From their origins as small settlements with earthen walls, Chinese cities developed according to prescribed plans that linked imperial power on earth with divine power in heaven. These were set out in the Record of Investigation of Crafts (Kaogongji), an ancient Chinese text. Chinese cities became nodes in an imperial bureaucracy, and although there was no autonomous municipal government, in Chang’an and other capital cities, officials were responsible for urban management. Chinese cities had an urban culture. Kings and emperors lived in their palaces, only emerging to conduct rituals such as sacrifices to ancestors and gods. An imperial administrative elite ran the empire, and merchants, shopkeepers, and artisans traded goods and set up businesses in markets in Chang’an and other cities, which were described in poems that reflected on urban life.

Rhetorical education – specifically, the advent of the progymnasmata, or preliminary rhetorical exercises – taught students how to be Greek, and it appears to have been the root of many Hellenistic innovations in both art and literature. The wealthy and elite backgrounds of some Greek artists enabled them to be well educated, and their intellectualism aided their adult pursuits in oratory, teaching, and scholarship, not to mention art. Kings and courtiers, too, received Greek rhetorical educations, which allowed them to appreciate the rhetorically informed art in the courts. The courts also played a role in Hellenistic artistic production by drawing Greek artists around the ancient Mediterranean. The result of all this seems to be a standardization of Greek art that is analogous to a linguistic koine.

Today Hellenistic art is celebrated for its innovation. To get a sense of how it differs from the Greek art of previous eras, we only need to compare two well-known artworks that are separated by centuries but united in medium: the Classical frieze from the Parthenon in Athens (Fig. 1.1) and the Hellenistic Telephos Frieze from the Great Altar at Pergamon (Fig. 1.2).

The modern spectator’s first contact with Sosos’s now lost Unswept Room mosaic whets her appetite. Many handbooks illustrate it with a detail of a mosaic in the Vatican’s collections (Pl. I). Decontextualized, this close-up looks like a distinct composition, and it seems divorced from the rest of the mosaic in the Vatican Museums (Pl. II); from its ancient context in a Roman house; and from the lost mosaic in Pergamon on which the whole Vatican mosaic is based. What is more, this close-up contains modern restorations and additions – including its most famous and memorable feature, a mouse nibbling on a cracked nut. Yet it is intriguing. Here, the spectator sees hyperrealistic representations of all manner of discarded scraps from the table, complete with the shadows that they cast: a lobster shell, a crab leg, grapes, grape stalks, chicken bones, sea shells, nuts, and a fig. This small excerpt, then, leaves her hungry for more.

Chapter 3 assesses the built archaeological remains of the Third Intermediate Period and establishes the locations of preserved Third Intermediate Period domestic settlement remains to assess the different regional built environments of settlements and the way in which settlements developed spatially over time. The settlements are further analysed to define the way in which Late Period urban policies affected the development and preservation of Third Intermediate Period urban topography within the archaeological record. The maintenance of or changes in urban topography of the Third Intermediate Period are discussed in the light of the top-down policies of a new political regime in a re-unified government and state in Late Period Egypt. The chapter assesses whether the settlements in the Third Intermediate Period developed as independent entities within specific regions or if there was a general pattern of settlement policy across different political boundaries and geographical regions. It also assesses characteristics of new ideologies, both political and religious, and the economic limitations of different regions through the construction of monumental architecture (walls, temples, and palaces), the nucleation of domestic architecture around monumental constructions, the development of architectural design in both administrative, religious, and domestic architecture, and the self-sufficient nature of local populations.