ICAEM 2025: Mobility in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean: Movements of People, Objects and Ideas

13–14 June 2025

Tartu, Estonia

Call for papers

The workshop is planned as an onsite event in Tartu, Estonia, but sessions will also be streamed via Zoom, to give access to a wider audience. To submit a paper, please send a title together with a proposal abstract (around 150–200 words). We will not consider submissions without abstracts. Submissions are welcome from both experienced academics as well as postgraduates and doctoral students.  Please send your submission to the email address caemc@ut.ee. Closing date for submissions is 1 March 2025. There is no conference fee.

Confirmed keynote:

Professor Ian Rutherford (University of Reading)

Conference description

The Ancient Near East and Mediterranean was a vast area of constant movement and communication between different groups of people, both those close to each other geographically, ethnically, linguistically and those separated by greater distances. The crossing of such distances might have meant either sea voyages, navigating or crossing rivers or travelling on difficult mountain or desert routes and sometimes all of them. The travels might have served different purposes: commerce, piracy, adventure, diplomacy, military campaigns, maintaining aristocratic connections, creating colonies, visiting religious sites, competitions and festivals, escaping situations of crises etc. Moving around in the ancient world could be undertaken by large groups, by individuals and it could be either voluntary or involuntary, refugees, forcibly deported populations and slaves belonging to the latter category of travellers.

All these different movements of people brought with them movements of material objects, for sale, as gifts, for personal use. Contacts between people also initiated contacts between ideas, songs and stories, thus both ideas and objects were travelling on in new directions, further from the first point of contact, and changing on their way. Skills and technologies were also moving with people, in many directions and sometimes dominantly from one culture to the other.

This conference aims to explore these different types of movement – that of individual travellers, larger groups, material objects, songs, stories, skills and ideas – in the Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean world, from Iran, Mesopotamia and Egypt to the western Mediterranean, from the emergence of civilisations to late antiquity. We are interested in papers with different approaches, focusing on different aspects of the theme of mobility: from the distribution of pottery types to the spreading of languages and writing systems; from the motif of travel in mythology, epic and specific works of literature to the travelling of myths and stories between different cultures; from religious pilgrimages by individuals to the movements of armies, of the displaced and the enslaved; from the mythical travels of gods and heroes to the practical problems faced by human travellers; from travelling to the neighbouring city to journeys to the end of the known world.