The Kariye Camii remains one of the most important and best-known monuments of the Byzantine world. Rebuilt and decorated in the early fourteenth century by the statesman and scholar Theodore Metochites, the Kariye Camii played a key role in the development of Late Byzantine art. Robert Ousterhout presents a detailed structural history and architectural analysis of this important building, and shows that the Kariye Camii was equally important in the development of Late Byzantine architecture.

Based on four seasons of fieldwork, this book presents the results of the first systematic site survey of a region rich in material remains. From architecture to fresco painting, Cappadocia represents a previously untapped resource for the study of material culture and the settings of daily life within the Byzantine Empire.

Following its initial publication in 2005, A Byzantine Settlement in Cappadocia has become a seminal work in interpreting the rich material remains of Byzantine Cappadocia. In the first systematic site survey from the region, at the settlement known as Çanlı Kilise in Western Cappadocia, the careful mapping and documentation of rock-cut and masonry architecture and its decoration led to a complete reexamination of the place of Cappadocia within the larger framework of Byzantine social and cultural developments. This revised edition builds upon its predecessor with an updated preface, a new bibliography, and a new master map of the Çanlı Kilise site.

Based on four seasons of fieldwork, Ousterhout challenges the commonly accepted notion that the rock-cut settlements of Cappadocia were primarily monastic. He proposes instead that the settlement at Çanlı Kilise was a town, replete with mansions, hovels, barns, stables, storerooms, cisterns, dovecotes, wine presses, fortifications, places of refuge, churches, chapels, cemeteries, and a few monasteries—that is, features common to most Byzantine communities. A Byzantine Settlement in Cappadocia has led to a rethinking of such sites and to a view of Cappadocia as an untapped resource for the study of material culture and daily life within the Byzantine Empire.

Founded in 1941, the annual journal Dumbarton Oaks Papers is dedicated to the publication of articles relating to late antique, early medieval, and Byzantine civilization in the fields of art and architecture, history, archaeology, literature, theology, law, and auxiliary disciplines.

In this issue: Alexander Sarantis, “War and Diplomacy in Pannonia and the Northwest Balkans during the Reign of Justinian: The Gepid Threat and Imperial Responses”; Peter Hatlie, “Images of Motherhood and Self in Byzantine Literature”; Maria Evangelatou, “Liturgy and the Illustration of the Ninth-Century Marginal Psalters”; Henry Maguire, “Ivories as Pilgrimage Art: A New Frame for the ‘Frame Group’”; Vasileios Marinis, “Tombs and Burials in the Monastery tou Libos in Constantinople”; and three fieldwork reports: “Second Report on the Excavation in the Monastery of Apa Shenute (Dayr Anba Shinuda) at Suhag,” by Peter Grossman, Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom, and Saad Mohamad Mohamad Osman, with a contribution by Hans-Christoph Noeske; “To Live and Die in a Turbulent Era: Bioarchaeological Analysis of the Early Byzantine (6th–7th Centuries AD) Population from Sourtara Galaniou Kozanis (Northern Greece),” by Chryssi Bourbou; and “Study and Restoration of the Zeyrek Camii in Istanbul: Second Report, 2001–2005,” by Robert Ousterhout, Zeynep Ahunbay, and Metin Ahunbay.

Founded by Constantine the Great, rebuilt by Justinian, and redecorated in the ninth, tenth, and twelfth centuries, the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople was the mausoleum of emperors, patriarchs, and saints. It was also a key station in the ceremonies of the city, the site of an important school, a major inspiration for apostolic literature, and briefly the home of the patriarch. Despite its significance, the church no longer exists, replaced by the mosque of Mehmet II after the fall of the city to the Ottomans. Today the church is remembered primarily from two important middle Byzantine ekphraseis, which celebrate its beauty and prominence, as well as from architectural copies and manuscript illustrations.

Scholars have long puzzled over the appearance of the church, as well as its importance to the Byzantines. Anxious to reconstruct the building and its place in the empire, an early collaborative project of Dumbarton Oaks brought together a philologist, an art historian, and an architectural historian in the 1940s and 1950s to reconstruct their own version of the Holy Apostles. Never fully realized, their efforts remained unpublished. The essays in this volume reconsider their project from a variety of vantage points, while illuminating differences of approach seventy years later, to arrive at a twenty-first-century synthesis.

This volume contains selected papers from a December 2006 Dumbarton Oaks symposium that complemented an exhibition of early Bible manuscripts at the Freer Gallery and Sackler Gallery of Art titled "In the Beginning: Bibles before the Year 1000." Speakers were invited to examine the use of the Greek Old Testament as a text, social practice, and cultural experience in the Byzantine Empire. Not only are reminiscences of the Old Testament ubiquitous in Byzantine literature and art, but the Byzantine people also revered and identified with Old Testament role models. The Old Testament connected Byzantium not only with its Christian neighbors but with Jewish and Muslim peoples as well. This widespread phenomenon has never received systematic investigation. The Old Testament in Byzantium considers the manifestations of the holy books in Byzantine manuscript illustration, architecture, and government, as well as in Jewish Bible translations and the construction of Muhammad's character.

Cappadocia, a picturesque volcanic region of central Anatolia, preserves the best evidence of daily life in the Byzantine Empire and yet remains remarkably understudied, better known to tourists than to scholars. The area preserves an abundance of physical remains: at least a thousand rock-cut churches or chapels, of which more than one-third retain significant elements of their painted decoration, as well as monasteries, houses, entire towns and villages, underground refuges, agricultural installations, storage facilities, hydrological interventions, and countless other examples of non-ecclesiastical architecture. In dramatic contrast to its dearth of textual evidence, Cappadocia is unrivaled in the Byzantine world for its material culture.

Based upon the close analysis of material and visual residues, Visualizing Community offers a critical reassessment of the story and historiography of Byzantine Cappadocia, with chapters devoted to its architecture and painting, as well as to its secular and spiritual landscapes. In the absence of a written record, it may never be possible to write a traditional history of the region, but, as Robert Ousterhout shows, it is possible to visualize the kinds of communities that once formed the living landscape of Cappadocia.