To mark the first anniversary of the Academia Europaea Bucharest Knowledge Hub (established on 9 May 2025 on the basis of an agreement between the Academia Europaea and the Romanian Academy), the first edition of the Hub Days is organized. Two public interdisciplinary conferences are convened on 7-8 May: AI: Beyond Humanity, and The Emporion Road: From the West to the East.

On this occasion, the creation of the Hub’s Cantemir Medal and Ioan Petru Culianu Prize will be announced. The two distinctions are endorsed by the Board of the Academia Europaea.

The event is generously sponsored by the Romanian Academy and Banca Transilvania, and supported by numerous partners.

Videos of the event will be streamed, then archived on the Hub’s homepage) and YouTube Channel (Academia Europaea Bucharest Hub – YouTube).

Join Zoom Meeting
Meeting ID: 853 5513 9883
Passcode: 876241

Conference Aims and Conceptual Framework#

The conference seeks to advance scholarly understanding of long-term West–East cultural interaction, emphasizing not only trade routes but the transfer of ideas, technologies, symbolic systems, and methods of knowledge production from prehistory through later antiquity.

While the Silk Road has long dominated narratives of East–West connectivity, this conference foregrounds earlier and parallel interaction networks—maritime, overland, and hybrid—that linked the Aegean, Anatolia, the Near East, the Black Sea, the Steppe corridors, Central Asia, and beyond. These networks functioned as dynamic systems of exchange, facilitating the circulation of scientific practices, artistic styles, religious concepts, educational traditions, and philosophical thought, as well as goods.

A core objective is to move beyond diffusionist or unilateral models and instead examine reciprocal influence, hybridity, and cultural translation. The conference emphasizes evidence-based reconstruction, integrating archaeological datasets, textual sources, linguistics, scientific methods, digital tools, and comparative cultural analysis to better understand how knowledge was transmitted, adapted, and transformed across cultural frontiers.

Special attention will be given to:

• Mechanisms of interaction (emporia, itinerant specialists, merchants, diplomats, scholars).
• Media of transmission (material culture, language, education, ritual practice).
• Archaeological and scientific witnesses as data carriers of intercultural exchange.
• Methodological innovation, including digital humanities, archaeometry, network analysis, and AI-assisted data synthesis.

The conference aims to produce a step forward in interdisciplinary knowledge integration, offering new models for understanding early globalization, intercultural consciousness, and the foundations of later East–West intellectual encounters.

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