“And the Stone Fell by Reason of Its Great Weight”
A Chat in Ancient Marketplaces
Prof. Dr. Oğuz Tekin

Online Talk

December 13, 2022 / 18.00

The Art of Weights and Measures exhibition, organized by Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Pera Museum with a selection from the Anatolian Weights and Measures Collection, aims to explore the economy, culture, intercultural system relations, the dynamics of public trust and the journey of standardization of units, anchored around weights and measuring instruments, through the eyes of civilizations, gods, merchants, masters and apprentices, from the 2nd millennium BC to the present, and sheds light on the transformations and continuities. Expert speakers in the talk series titled “And the Stone Fell by Reason of Its Great Weight”, with inspiration from a verse in Homer's Iliad, will put a magnifying glass over the shopping, trade, weight and measurement systems used in the periods the exhibition covers, namely the of the Assyrian Trade Colony Period, the Hittite Empire, the Hellenistic Period, as well as the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire. 

The last and interactive part of the online series will explore answers to questions regarding ancient marketplaces with Prof. Dr. Oğuz Tekin, moderated by Yavuz Selim Güler. The discussions will focus on the marketplaces in the city-states of Anatolia, which were the prominent locations of trade or daily shopping during the Classical, Hellenistic and the Roman Imperial period, and offer a closer look at the goods, scales, weights and coins used in these marketplaces.

The talk will be broadcast live on Pera Museum’s YouTube channel. The language of the event is Turkish.

Prof. Dr. Oğuz Tekin
Oğuz Tekin has been teaching at Koç University since 2017. Oğuz Tekin is the director of the Suna and İnan Kıraç Research Center for Mediterranean Civilizations and is the manager of the Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum Turkey and Corpus Ponderum Antiquorum et Islamicorum projects.

Yavuz Selim Güler
Yavuz Selim Güler studied Archeology and Art History at Koç University. Between 2018 and 2020, he was the teaching assistant of the Ancient Greek, Latin and Ancient History courses at Koç University. In 2020, he completed his master's thesis on “Roman Merchants and Bankers in the Province of Asia”. After working in the field of museum education for a while, he has been serving as the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation Pera Museum’s Anatolian Weights and Measures Collection Supervisor since 2021.

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