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

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СКАЧАТЬ and Thapsacus on the north Euphrates with updated latitudes for each city (Nicolet 1991: 62). Strabo (2.1.36) criticized Hipparchus’s geometrical method, declaring it too rigid, for example when Hipparchus disputes Eratosthenes’s distance from Thapsacus to Babylon after he had explicitly stated that it followed the course of the Euphrates and was not a straight line.

      An ongoing dispute among geographers concerned the Caspian Sea. Herodotus (1.203; cf. Aristotle de Meteor. 362b11 for later agreement) said it was landlocked, because he preferred the evidence of explorers’ reports over Milesian theories of the encircling Ocean (Romm 1992: 34–35). Strabo, being a staunch Stoic, prioritized Homeric veracity and so argued for the older view: that the Caspian connected to Ocean (2.5.31, 11.1.5, 6.1–2 and 11.6.3: Homer and Hesiod better than Ctesias, Herodotus, and Hellanicus; cf. Romm 1992: 42–43, 192). Thus he could describe sea trade between India, Babylon, and the Caspian (11.5.8), even though the entrance to this northern “gulf” lay in the uninhabited world (11.6.1–2). This theory had the advantage of a neat geometry with the other three gulfs, which were also long with narrow entrances – the Mediterranean, Red Sea, and Persian Gulf – having a nice symmetric balance with the Persian Gulf (Strabo 2.5.18; cf. Roseman 2005: 36).

      Geographical discrepancies also arose from the use of source material dating to different periods, and the descriptions of Phoenicia and neighboring regions inland are one important example. The Greeks called the inland area north of Judaea and south of the Libanus (Lebanon) mountains Koile Syria, or “Hollow Syria.” Ctesias (FGrH 688 F1b), Pseudo-Skylax (§104.3 (Shipley)), and Hecataeus of Abdera (FGrH 264 F25) used the term, which, as Strabo (16.2.21) explains, refers specifically to the valley between the Libanus and Anti-Libanus mountains (cf. Murphy 2004: 152 on Pliny HN 5.77). Yet Koile Syria’s borders changed when it was contested by the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms, and for Polybius (5.80.3) it stretched as far south as Raphia (cf. Strabo 16.2.21 for the larger borders; cf. also Pomponius Mela §62 for variable names). Political changes generated shifts in geography, and texts such as Strabo’s (16.2.2) record the Hellenistic and Roman geographical situations over time, showing how borders and city names changed (Safrai 2005). Sartre has even argued that Koile Syria existed only in geographers’ imaginations and not the real world (1988). Strabo’s description of the Syrian region (16.2.4–10) is a chronological and ethnological hotch-potch of foundation legends, local verdure and riverine traffic, Hellenistic royal affairs, tales of robbers and rebels, and Parthian and Roman encounters.

       The Place of Ethnography

The place of historical change within geography, to the extent that many periods may be merged in one source, means that geographical sources provide historical information for the Near East and its many political changes. Regional geographies also show continuity of traditional descriptions or tropes about certain Near Eastern places and peoples. For the Greeks and Romans, foreign lands were identified by their inhabitants, and those peoples were distinguished by memorable facts and cultural curiosities.¹⁵ The bematists included ethnographies in their itineraries, and Athenaeus (10.59) only quotes Baiton and Amyntas because they described the Tapuroi of Aria as very fond of wine, and Ctesias had earlier reported the same (FGrH 688 F54 = Ath. 10.59). Strabo (11.9.1) mentions that “historians,” perhaps the bematists, reported that the Tapuroi customarily surrendered their wives to other men.¹⁶ Commentary on food consumption and marital habits appears in Agatharchides’s chorography of the Red Sea, in which he describes (fr. 31a, 34b, 37a, b (Burstein)) the cooking methods, procreative customs, and capacity for drink among the Fish-eaters of the Arabian Gulf. Aelius Gallus ventured deeper into Arabia than Gaius Caesar and Juba had managed and so reported back that the tribes there produced date wine, sesame oil, and honey and accumulated great wealth from their frankincense forests, converting distant ethnic goods into Roman luxuries (Pliny NH 6.160–162; Murphy 2004: 99–104). Therefore ethnography was also part of mapping the oikoumenē, defined as much by the borders of civilization with other peoples as by the physical landscape (Murphy 2004: 78–79; Dueck 2010: 243–245).

      Concluding Remarks

      Geographical sources for the Near East represent centuries’ worth of exploration, philosophical development, and geopolitical change. Many geographers were preoccupied with mapping the whole world or tracing its edges, and the Near East itself, being the oldest portion of the oikoumenē known to the Greeks, is often less of the focus, except when specific expeditions were sent through it. The interest in Near Eastern empires – Persian, Hellenistic, and Parthian – however, gives the geographical sources a strong geopolitical element, both as evidence for local situations at given periods (depending on the source material used by each author) and in terms of the broader philosophical trends for explaining and operating under dominant states. The sources’ descriptions run the gamut from topography to ethnography, providing travelogues, myths, natural histories, and political narratives for cities and regions in the Near East. They show how the Near East fitted into the evolution of geography as a discipline and influenced Greco-Roman conceptions of the inhabited world and human history.

      FURTHER READING

A few practical geographies are accessible in translation and with commentaries, including Agatharchides (Burstein 1989), Pseudo-Scylax (Shipley 2011), and the Periplus Maris Erythraei (Casson 1989). Talbert’s examination of the Peutinger Table (2010) is quite illuminating. Isidorus of Charax’s work is the subject of some recent studies which argue how we should see him as a truly Hellenistic geographer and explorer and more than just a surveyor for Roman invasion: Schuol, Hartmann, Hauser, and Schmitt (all 2017). Considerable scholarship focuses on the philosophical geographies, and their cultural and historical contexts. For example, Clarke 1999 and Nicolet 1991 are both essential reading on the junction of Hellenistic and imperial Roman geographies, and Cameron 2019 examines the Roman encounter with Parthian geography. There are several important studies of Strabo’s aims and methods, including Dueck 2010 and Roseman 2005. Roller’s work on Eratosthenes (2010) is a useful reconstruction of his vast geographical project. Stevens 2016 offers an intriguing analysis of Theophrastus’s plant-based geography of the Near East.

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      Thanks are owed to Graham Shipley for his helpful comments, bibliographical suggestions, and provision of publications. Any errors are the author’s own.

      NOTES

      1 1 Agathemerus §1 says that Anaximander “first attempted to draw the world on a table” (πρῶτος ἀπετόλμησε τὴν οἰκουμένην ἐν πίνακι γράψαι).

      2 2 See Xenophon’s Anabasis and Ctesias, FGrH 688 T1–2. Ctesias gives an account of the battle of Cunaxa in which his patron defeated Cyrus’s army, FGrH 688 F16 §§64–65.

      3 3 FGrH 1; Strabo 1.1.11; Agathemerus §1: Hecataeus was “widely travelled” (πολυπλανής); Dilke 1985: 56.

      4 4 Hdt. 4.44; Aristotle Pol. 1332b; FGrH 709. See Panchenko 2003: 274ff for Scylax’s later reception and 289ff for the argument that Scylax explored the Ganges. See Tuplin 1991: 242 and 271 for possible quotations of Scylax by Herodotus, Hecataeus, Ephorus, and others.

      5 5 Periplus Maris Erythraei 19: 6.28–29 (on Malichus II), 57: 19.2–5 (on Hippalos); see Casson 1989: 6–8; Parker 2001: СКАЧАТЬ