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

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СКАЧАТЬ the source material does reveal, however, is the sheer variety of ways in which the various places and sub-regions expressed their own specific local identities. This is reflected most vividly in the rich archaeological remains of monumental buildings and sculptures, juxtaposing finds from the various archaeological sites in the southwestern Arabian and Nabataean worlds (most notably Petra with its rock-cut façades), the Phoenician coastal cities (including Tyre, Byblos, and the first Near Eastern colonia Berytus) with the monumental remains of the temple complex at Baalbek-Heliopolis inland (Figure 21.1), the coastal strip further to the south with the harbor at Caesarea Maritima constructed under Herod the Great, Gerasa and the Decapolis cities in Transjordan, the “desert cities” of Palmyra in Syria and Hatra in northern Mesopotamia, and the Euphrates small town of Dura-Europos (see, above all, the discussion of the various regions in Millar 1993: 223–488; for a classic study of the different local cultures of three of the key sites, see Drijvers 1977; cf. the contributions in Kaizer 2008 on religious variety). This undeniable variety is now perhaps best visible, or at least most easily accessible, in the magnificent catalog of the recent exhibition on “The World between Empires” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Fowlkes-Childs and Seymour 2019). If the selection of documentation and imagery will give the impression of merely being snapshots from the available evidence, this is quite fitting, since the evidence represents six centuries of snapshots from antiquity.

The snapshots of evidence from within that “world between empires” illustrate a number of notable themes which help to reveal the peculiarities of the wider region. The steppe frontier (“Steppengrenze” in the title of Sommer 2005a, 2018), with its urban centers – many of which were Hellenistic foundations – spread around the region, was simultaneously a “world of villages” (thus Millar 1993), though perhaps rather a “world of villages” which “may in fact have been peculiar to specific places and/or times” (Kennedy 1999: 99; cf. MacAdam 2002 for some important studies on the rural settlements in the region; now Mazzilli 2018 on rural cult centers in the Hauran). But its mosaic of landscapes also included more arid territories for the nomads to roam (see the collection of authoritative articles by Macdonald 2009a on issues related to literacy and identity among the nomadic population; cf. Fisher 2015 on the “Arabs”). These “desert-dwellers” formed a vital partner for those in control of the long-distance trade whose networks depended on safe transit along routes through barren lands and on access to water resources (see now Seland 2016). But even in the case of the Near Eastern “caravan city” par excellence, Palmyra, the societal and economic patterns were not one-dimensional and included an agriculture-based sector (see the classic paper by Matthews 1984; now also the interesting hypothesis put forward by Hoffmann-Salz 2015).

      The distinctiveness of the wider region, and the diversity of its constituent parts, found expression perhaps most clearly in the religious culture and in art, where aniconism has traditionally been treated as the stereotypical Near Eastern way of representing the divine (for a famous example, see Fowlkes-Childs and Seymour 2019: 62–63, no.38; and above all the sophisticated discussions by Gaifman 2008 and Stewart 2008) and where the popular scholarly misnomer “Parthian art” hides a large assortment of local idiosyncrasies in which classical and Oriental elements interact in a myriad of ways (see the important collection of articles on the “sculptural environment” of the region in Eliav et al. 2008; cf. Weber 2006, which is the first installment of a collection of all classical sculptures from the National Museum in Damascus). Recent years have seen the publication of studies on the religious life of individual sites or sub-regions, including Lucinda Dirven on Palmyra and Dura-Europos (Dirven 1999), Marie-Emmanuelle Duchâteau on Dura-Europos (Duchâteau 2013), Jane Lightfoot on Hierapolis (Lightfoot 2003), Nicole Belayche on Judaea (Belayche 2001), Achim Lichtenberger on the Decapolis (Lichtenberger 2003), Corinne Bonnet on Hellenistic Phoenicia (Bonnet 2015), Julien Aliquot on the Roman Lebanon (Aliquot 2009), Simone Paturel on the Beqaa valley (Paturel 2019), John Healey and Peter Alpass on Nabataea (Healey 2001; Alpass 2013), and Rubina Raja and myself on Palmyra (Kaizer 2002; Raja 2019a). As regards the religious architecture, this ranged from Mesopotamian temple types to Parthian-style vaulted structures commonly known as “iwans” and from indigenous models sometimes referred to in modern literature as “kalybe” to the monumental sanctuaries combining a classical appearance with “Oriental” features such as niches and parapets (for studies of the various architectural fashions, see Downey 1988 on the Mesopotamian and Parthian traditions; McKenzie 1990 on the architecture of Petra; Freyberger 1998 on the sanctuaries of the wider region which he prefers – sometimes controversially – to date to the early imperial period; Thomas 2007 on the monumental classical buildings of the high empire; Segal 2013a who divides the Near Eastern temples into Vitruvian and non-Vitruvian categories).

      The key defining element of the variety of the Near Eastern lands may well be the presence of a range of Semitic and other non-classical languages, in use (in varying degrees) alongside the koinē that was Greek (Latin, though never absent, played a more modest role in the region’s linguistic situation). Great progress has been made in recent years with regard to the publication of different corpora, including (to give but two examples) Laïla Nehmé’s archaeological and epigraphic atlas of Petra (Nehmé 2012a) and Marco Moriggi and Ilaria Bucci’s publication of the Aramaic graffiti from the archives of the Italian Archaeological Mission to Hatra by the University of Turin, which was spearheaded by Roberta Venco Ricciardi (Moriggi and Bucci 2019). Comparative study of the different Aramaic vernaculars in use in places such as Palmyra – “the only publicly bilingual city in the Roman Near East” (thus Millar 1993: 470; cf. Kaizer 2017: 87–94) – Hatra, Edessa, and Petra is greatly facilitated by the fourth installment, by John Healey, of the Textbook of Syrian Semitic Inscriptions (Healey 2009).

As for onomastics, no region in the ancient world has revealed such integration of personal names from so many regions and cultural spheres of influence (cf. Sartre 2007; and now above all the monumental volume by Yon 2018a. For a recent investigation of the nomenclature attested at Dura-Europos see Grassi 2012, and for Hatrene names see Marcato 2018. Ilan 2002–2012 is a lexicon of Jewish names in four volumes.). Near the Roman colony of Berytus, a dedication in Latin was set up by a lady called Flavia Nicolais Saddane, sporting Roman, Greek, and Semitic elements in her name (CIL III, 6680; cf. Kaizer 2005). From elsewhere in the Lebanon comes the funerary “Qartaba column” depicting two couples whose personal names combine classical and Arabic roots (Fowlkes-Childs and Seymour 2019: 138–139, no.98). Though it remains highly problematic to establish a person’s ethnicity on the basis of nomenclature, studies of onomastics may serve to reveal the persistence of indigenous layers below classical surfaces which can otherwise be hard to pin down. The material brought together in the forthcoming Volume VI of the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names on Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine, and beyond, prepared by the Oxford-based LGPN team directed by Rober Parker, in collaboration with Jean-Baptiste Yon, will therefore be of enormous assistance in the discussion of issues of cultural interaction in the wider region (see also Kaizer et al. forthcoming, emanating from the conference on “Greek Onomastics East of the Mediterranean: Naming and Culture in the Roman Near East and the Greek Far East,” which took place in 2019 around the material that is being prepared for LGPN VI).

      The Future of the Hellenistic and Roman Near East

      Since this project was first conceived, the political situation in the Middle East has been dramatically and drastically altered, and with it the future of scholarship on the Hellenistic and Roman Near East. That is not to say that heritage at risk is a totally new problem. The protection of ancient sites and monuments fell within the remit of the famous explorer Gertrude Bell when she was appointed Director of the Department of Antiquities in Iraq in 1923. In the 1990s and again in 2000 large international rescue operations were undertaken in Zeugma when the ancient town at the Euphrates crossing was threatened to be submerged due to the construction of a modern dam (Kennedy 1998b; Aylward 2013). But needless to say, when it comes to the archaeological remains from the world of the Hellenistic and Roman Near East, the past years have seen more, and more serious, destruction than ever before. As a result, new projects have been set up by various academic teams in order to address the manifold issues that are at stake. The EAMENA (Endangered СКАЧАТЬ