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isbn: 9781119037422
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       Ted Kaizer

      The lands of the Near East – including Syria and the Lebanon, Eastern Turkey, Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Jordan and parts of Saudi Arabia – can no longer be considered by ancient historians as some sort of exotic “appendix” to the classical world. Their exploration, gathering speed throughout the last century, is continuing to produce major results. The findings of the legendary missions from what is now long ago will forever form the foundations of our current research: the excavations and surveys conducted under the French Mandate (Gelin 2002), by leading names such as Daniel Schlumberger, Henri Seyrig, or the Russian-born Georges Tchalenko; the evocative campaigns by German scholars (Wilhelm 1998) such as Walter Andrae, Otto Puchstein, or Theodor Wiegand; the Princeton archaeological expeditions to Syria of 1904–1905 and 1909; and the discoveries made at Dura-Europos by the joint mission of Yale University and the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris, under the scientific co-directorship of Franz Cumont and, especially, Mikhaïl Rostovtzeff. As one of the longest running series of annual campaigns special mention may also be made of the Polish mission at Palmyra, commenced by Kazimierz Michałowski in the late 1950s and led by Michał Gawlikowski from 1973 until the outbreak of the recent civil war.

      According to its nature, Blackwell’s Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East will function as a reference work which cannot of course claim comprehensiveness. Neither does it aim at definitiveness; it rather makes clear the state of knowledge at present, pays attention to the imbalance in spread of evidence in general and to the nature of the sources bearing on specific questions and issues in particular, and points toward possible directions for further exploration. No doubt other editors would have chosen to lay accents slightly differently in their choice of chapters, but the current division of this volume adheres to general usefulness and accessibility in terms of the teaching of the subject matter, while also responding to some of the most exciting developments in the study of the Hellenistic and Roman Near East. Following this introduction and a historical overview (Chapter 2), there are three parts, subdivided into thirty-six chapters: part I treats the main textual and a variety of non-textual sources; part II deals with selected regions, places, and peoples; part III is thematically subdivided. Some overlap has, quite naturally, been unavoidable, but rather than being mere repetitiveness this takes the form of variegated approaches to the relevant sources, places, and themes. Some chapters focus more on the earlier period, others more on the later centuries. Some places (e.g. Hierapolis) or regions (e.g. the Hauran) will be touched upon in chapters in parts I or III rather than having a chapter devoted to them in part II.

      The Hellenistic and Roman Near East

      Geographically defined, the Near East comprised of the lands situated between the Mediterranean in the west (bordered by the Phoenician and Palestinian coastal strips), the Taurus mountains in the north (with the hill countries of Commagene and Osrhoene opening up into the northern sections of Syria and Mesopotamia), the “land between the rivers” Euphrates and Tigris in the east, and the more sparsely populated steppe zone stretching into the Arabian peninsula in the south. Intersected by the great rivers and their tributaries, the various sub-regions were very different from each other as far as topography and geology are concerned.

      Taken as a whole, these lands had always been – as already emphasized by the great Russian scholar Mikhaïl Rostovtzeff in a classic paper (1935a; see id. 1941b) – a transit region, a meeting-place for the three great civilizations of the ancient world: the Mesopotamian, the Egyptian, and the Aegean. At the same time, the enormous zone beyond Anatolia and the Mediterranean Sea was a region of great geographical and cultural diversity (see now Cameron 2019 on the relevant writings by the ancient geographers). Even if the geographical (and environmental) divisions cannot explain all the cultural variety, the fact that all sub-regions had their own, quite specific geological characteristics will have had some bearing on the cultural developments within them (for helpful overviews see the relevant chapters in different volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History , by Musti 1984; Kennedy 1996b; Sartre 2000, 2005b; and also the overview article by Rey-Coquais 1978).

      The continuously shifting borders of the subsequent and overlapping imperial powers notwithstanding, the Near Eastern lands (at least in part) formed the heartland of the realms of the Seleucids and the