A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East. Группа авторов

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CHAPTER 1 Introduction

       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.

In the last decennia of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first, a number of influential syntheses have opened up the field and brought the subject area toward the mainstream of ancient history: Glen Bowersock’s authoritative study on the royal lands of Nabataea turned provincia Arabia (Bowersock 1983; cf. id. 1994 for collected essays); Benjamin Isaac’s groundbreaking study of the nature and function of the Near Eastern limes (Isaac 1992; cf. id. 1998, 2017 for collected essays); Fergus Millar’s magnum opus, unquestionably the main catalyst thanks to which the field of Roman Near Eastern studies has come of age (Millar 1993; cf. id. 2006 for collected essays; the book inspired many excellent reviews of which Kennedy 1999 deserves to be singled out); Maurice Sartre’s massive volume which was the first to include both the Hellenistic and the Roman periods (Sartre 2001; cf. id. 2005 for the English translation of the Roman half; id. 1991 for an earlier study which also included Egypt; id. 2014 for collected essays); Warwick Balls’s provocative study of the region that takes direct aim at Millar’s approach, is based on an interpretation of architectural remains and postulates strong Near Eastern influences on the Roman Empire as a whole (Ball 2000; id. 2016 for a new edition; cf. Millar 2000 for a critical though fair and balanced response); Kevin Butcher’s study of the region which goes up to the early Islamic period and adds a more archaeological perspective (Butcher 2003a; cf. Sommer 2005b for an instructive review); Michael Sommer’s analysis of the steppe frontier as a zone of cultural exchange in which he deeply engages with theory (Sommer 2005a; id. 2018 for a new edition; cf. Yon 2006 for a constructive review); and Nathanael Andrade’s essential contribution to the debate on how to analyse the multifarious expressions of “Greekness” in the Near East (Andrade 2013). Within the field of Hellenistic and, notably, Roman Near Eastern studies thus created, an avalanche of scholarship has appeared which is reflected in the bibliographies on which the chapters in this book are based. These manifold and diverse publications have allowed the Hellenistic and Roman Near East to be identified as a valid subject for undergraduate teaching in Classics and Ancient History Departments. But the civilizations of the Levantine region in the six centuries between Alexander the Great and the beginning of Late Antiquity have not, until now, made it into a series of handbooks or companions on the ancient world. The individual chapters in this volume go to show just how badly needed they are and it is to be hoped that they will further facilitate the integration of the Hellenistic and Roman Near East into the teaching canon.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ