Citizenship and Urban States in the First-Millennium-bce Mediterranean

The paper aims to contribute to questions of citizenship and the relation between citizenship, community and urbanism. By comparing and contrasting two first-millennium- bce Mediterranean regions, southern Tyrrhenian Etruria and south-eastern Iberia, where urban societies grew into distinctly different socio-political communities, we see comparable developments towards cohesion and participation. One specific development concerns religion as a privileged locus for the latter, thus demonstrating the heuristic potential of comparativism across the Greco-Roman and non-Greco-Roman world of the first-millennium-bce Mediterranean. This potential can only be realised, however, by developing a theoretical and interpretive framework that enables us to exploit different strands of evidence in regions where the documentary base is almost exclusively archaeological, and that can then be applied elsewhere.