My project, supervised by Prof. Nino Luraghi, is a history of naval power in the Achaemenid Persian empire (530 to 330 BC). It aims to bring together a disparate, multicultural range of literary, documentary, and archaeological evidence for the naval activity of the Persians, encompassing all maritime and riverine spaces of the empire: the eastern Mediterranean and Aegean of course, but also the Black Sea, Caspian Sea, Persian Gulf, and Red Sea. This includes a contained history of the Persian fleet(s), as well as the role of naval power in non-military areas of Achaemenid history, such as geopolitics, the political economy, subject-ruler relations, imperial rhetoric, and cultural attitudes to seafaring and the sea. In the spirit of longue durée cultural history, I also look at Near Eastern precedents and later evidence from the Hellenistic period and beyond.
Broadly speaking, I am interested in Achaemenid and Greek history, culture, and geopolitics, particularly the interactions and entanglements between the two. I also enjoy epigraphy, comparative approaches to empires, studies in group identity and ethnogenesis, geographical and periplographic literature, oral epic, and South American archaeology and history.
I am grateful to the Oxford-Pearson Graduate Scholarship at Trinity College for supporting my research.
