This chapter explores the pre-war Jewish leadership, pre-war attributes, and political compositions of the three cities: Warsaw, Lodz and Krakow. It examines how the wartime Jewish leadership of these cities were selected shortly after the German invasion from the remaining pre-war prominent community members., the challenges they faced during the early occupation, and the changes in their roles after the creation of the ghettos. This chapter discusses the abuse and violence suffered by the Jewish communal leadership from German authorities while simultaneously enduring an erosion of power to protect their communities. This chapter also examines the creation and closing of each of the ghettos.

The shape and form of boundary walls around and within Greek sanctuaries, and the impact those boundaries had on the experience of the ritual happening within, have attracted little scholarly attention, especially in comparison to work on the powerful impacts of other elements of sanctuary architecture, and architecture more widely. This article, using the case study of the high temenos walls and those of the Telesterion temple structure of the sanctuary of Demeter and Kore at Eleusis, explores the active impact these walls had on particularly the sight- and sound-scapes engaged with by participants. As such it argues for the crucial importance of these walls at Eleusis in creating the intensity, emotion, power, and conviction of the ritual experience of the Mysteries for participants.

Chapter 2 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet discusses the crucial role of cities in building empires, defined as states that conquer and rule multiple cities and their hinterlands. It also argues that empires decisively influenced the size and shape of cities. While it acknowledges that camp- and village-dwelling peoples could conquer large empires, it argues that imperial regimes always required capital cities to administer empires over long periods. It illustrates these arguments with references to cities throughout the world: imperial capitals, administrative and monumental structures of many kinds, city walls, provincial capitals, armies and army camps, roads, canals, settler cities, and the infrastructure of imperial borders, including the Great Wall of China and the limes of the Roman Empire.

With the territorial markings of the ancient Chinese state more zonal than lineal, discussions of sovereign borders must rely upon an analysis of the breadth of applied politico-legal or military force. But the representation of such is not inevitably secular; indeed, it requires a keen appreciation of ritualized markers and activities that effectively claim an area as part of a sovereign domain. The topography of the ancient state was no disenchanted breadth; sovereign possession was sanctified. Ritualized actions of its inhabitants were that which reinforced, or weakened, the sovereign’s claims. Abstract representations of borders and boundaries, maps were assertions of interest in the area. However, given the zonal conceptualization of early Chinese space, their lines are somewhat deceptive. Indeed, if work on early Roman cartographic thinking is any indication, it’s not clear how consistently three-dimensional exploratory visualizations were. Rather, the maps seem more driven by two-dimensional, directional frameworks. A variable, moving perspective appeared to have influenced the whole conceptualization of lived, and thus possessed, space. Passing beyond any sovereign boundary had ritualized signifiers. These boundaries, however, should not be conflated with militarized structures, such as walls.

A wall is a sonic medium. It gathers, reflects, amplifies (or sometimes attenuates), and otherwise processes sound; it thereby creates strata of sensory memory and history. Rethinking the notion of teichoscopy (the use of walls to enhance vision), I propose an analogous concept of teichoacoustics in the Greek and Roman worlds –using walls as a technical means of sounding and hearing; that is, transmitting and receiving auditory sensation. I focus on four cities and their walls: Babylon in the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe (via Ovid, Shakespeare, and the Beatles); Troy during the Trojan War, especially Helen’s visit to the city walls in Iliad 3; Thebes, from the creation of its walls through music to its depiction in tragedy; and finally Delphi and the musical inscriptions on the external walls of buildings there. While the particular media functions of sound vary at each of these different sets of walls, these examples demonstrate a number of productive relations between sound and walls, and suggest possibilities for a practice of listening to architecture – both figuratively and literally – as a way of excavating cultural memory in and about antiquity.

Examines the explosion of building activity and patronage associated with Pope Hadrian I (772–95), who sees off the final Lombard threat and forges a strong alliance with Charlemagne. Churches such as Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Santa Maria Antiqua (where his portrait was included), and Sant’ Adriano are examined for what their decorations reveal about the continuity of ‘Byzantine’ cultural influence and practice. Attention is then given to his repairs to Rome’s walls and water supply. The exceptional wealth of the papacy in this era permitted an unprecedented degree of generosity in terms of gifts of precious materials to the city’s churches (silk textiles, gold and silver metalwork, marble furnishings).