The Oxford handbook of the Hellenistic and Roman Near East

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[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]

This impressive collection of essays brings together a wide range of scholarship dealing with the Near East under Hellenistic and Roman rule, from Alexander’s death in 323 BCE into the eighth century CE. Its overarching aim, in the editor’s words, is to apply “both local as well as global lenses” to bring “new perspectives on this central region” (abstract). In fifty chapters covering 940 pages, Rubina Raja and her contributors do indeed deliver a breath-taking overview of topics in sectors as diverse as geography, climate, economy, religion, politics, and culture.

The contributions are divided across four sections that respectively introduce (1) the state of the art and current methodologies; (2) art historical approaches to the visual arts including coinage; (3) meso- and macro-histories based on textual and archaeological evidence; and (4) the most important regions, cities, and sites of the period under consideration. The choice to place the visual arts first rather than last is impactful, providing the reader with a visual frame of reference for what follows.

The list of contributors to the volume ranges similarly widely and includes art historians, historians, philologists, and archaeologists most of whom have a background in or focus on Classics and the Ancient Mediterranean. Most chapters take a descriptive tone and provide overviews of sources (textual, visual, material) or narrates historical episodes (often strongly based on classical accounts). Few chapters offer analyses or real conclusions, but this befits the genre of the handbook, offering ways into the study of the subject. More than anything, this book highlights how much work remains to be done to integrate the Hellenistic and Roman periods into a longue durée history of the Near East. The timeliness of the volume is also indicated by the appearance of the Blackwell Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East (ed. Kaizer, 2022), which this handbook intends to complement rather than substitute (as stated on p. 5).

I come to this book as a scholar of the Ancient Near East, and Assyriology more specifically, by which I mean to say that my perspective is inherently that of someone working from within the region itself. As such, reading this book I was confronted with a question: where lies the difference between studying how the Hellenistic and Roman empires were present in the Near East and how Near Eastern societies and cultures existed under Graeco-Roman rule? Or differently put, what do we see when we take our gaze away from political events and direct reactions to those, and start looking instead at the transformations and continuities happening on the ground? How would such a perspective shape a history of the Hellenistic and Roman Near East? Several contributions, which I single out below, exemplify how we can move beyond the colonial narrative of a western hegemonic power overwriting a local culture, and even beyond postcolonial framings of survival, hybridity, and resistance. Instead, they analyze how empire was experienced, negotiated, and reshaped on the ground, weaving in threads of a deeper past.

Kim Czajkowski’s chapter (Chapter 18) on the Jewish Wars reframes revolt not simply as resistance to Roman rule, and Roman policy in the Near East as not per se unified across the region. Instead, she traces how the local social dynamics of the civil wars effected new imperial policies and gave the “backwater of the Roman Empire” (p. 313) a central importance in imperial ideology. Czajkowski thus offers a finely balanced account of local causation and global impact on the socio-political level. Lucinda Dirven’s study of Parthian Hatra (Chapter 34) destabilizes unitary models of cultural influence by showing how artistic forms circulated across political boundaries while being selectively reworked to articulate local identities and affiliations. Focusing on the sculptural monuments at Hatra, she reviews how they fit into a Syrian-Mesopotamian koinè, but are simultaneously distinct from it in their much earlier and more pervasive adoption of Roman prototypes. Thus, she demonstrates that while imperial boundaries did not limit cultural interaction, they did create cultural differentiation.

Corinne Bonnet (Chapter 44) offers a synthesis that foregrounds Phoenicia as a “middle ground”, where imperial rule amplified rather than erased local micro-identities, resulting in long-lasting institutional and religious continuities. She explores the “cultural game” (p. 760) that Phoenicians played in the reshaping of their religious landscape under Hellenistic and Roman rule, which allowed for the maintenance of local beliefs and customs while the imperial footprint on the territory materialized. Finally, Julien Aliquot’s reconstruction of the cultic topography on Mount Hermon (Chapter 46) reveals how deeply local sacred traditions were articulated through imperial languages and idiom. He discusses the Hermonian sanctuaries built by local villagers in adapted Hellenistic and Roman styles, and thus demonstrates how communities at the edges of empire actively positioned themselves within the wider Mediterranean world.

Each of these chapters showcases how empire was shaped by a continuous back-and-forth between local communities and imperial structures, be it on a social, cultural, religious, or material level. Shifting the analytical lens from imperial impact to local transformation, they move decidedly beyond linear models of Hellenization or Romanization. Processes of local transformation can best be traced from within, and to do so, there is no documentation as rich as the thousands of cuneiform texts from Hellenistic Babylonia. Unfortunately, in this collection only one chapter is dedicated to the cuneiform world, despite its deep and continuous influence on the region for more than three millennia by the time of Alexander’s death. In this chapter (Chapter 12), John MacGinnis queries to which degree Babylonia became Hellenized, and traces imprints of Roman presence in Assyria. However, recent scholarship in Late Assyriology has made tremendous efforts to show how Hellenistic Babylonia was more than a stage on which Seleucid politics played out, and how cuneiform sources do more than corroborate or contradict the accounts of Classical historians. Above all, our documentation offers a nuanced picture of the ways in which cuneiform culture continued and transformed under foreign imperial rule, decidedly bringing us beyond the “Hellenism versus cuneiform culture” dichotomy.

As is also true in MacGinnis’s contribution, the final centuries BCE are often considered periods of cuneiform culture’s demise, effected by the arrival of foreign imperial rule. Most books on Mesopotamian history end with Alexander’s death, thus suggesting that this event created a tabula rasa upon which subsequent history was written. With the choice to begin its survey in 323 BCE, this handbook implicitly affirms this idea. It is true that by the Hellenistic period cuneiform culture came to be confined to a handful of traditional Babylonian temple institutions. Yet, cuneiform writing was in use until 75 CE and cultural and religious practices were maintained far beyond that. In fact, cuneiform culture was not simply maintained but remained very much alive and productive. The huge advances made in mathematical astronomy alone stand witness to this. Another example are the Graeco-Babyloniaca tablets, which are not so much proof of cultural decline as showcases of the inventiveness of cuneiform scribes in maintaining tradition while also adopting change.[1] Hence, I would argue that the continued vitality of cuneiform culture lay in its transformational power and in the ways in which it shapeshifted to meet the challenges posed by Hellenistic rule.

Writing a history of the Hellenistic Near East from within flips the script from narratives of local decline and colonial prowess, from change versus continuity, to stories of interaction, vitality, and transformation, to change and continuity. This handbook raises questions about how we can truly decolonize the histories we write. One way is to extend the temporal and geographical frame, for example by including the Sasanian and Ummayad period (Chapter 10 by Anne Hunell Chen and Chapter 11 by Nadia Ali), Iran and Central Asia (Chapter 33 by Leonardo Gregoratti), and the Arabian Peninsula (Chapter 49 by R. A. Carter and Chapter 50 by Stephan G. Schmid and Zbigniew T. Fiema). Another option is to diversify the human subjects under study, by shifting the focus from kings and dynasties to nomads (Chapter 27 by Gideon Avni and Steven A. Rosen), religious communities (Chapter 24 by Nathanael Andrade and Chapter 25 by Volker Menze), or soldiers (Chapter 15 by Julien Aliquot and Chapter 16 by Michael A. Speidel). Finally, it also requires paying attention to the ways in which a deeper past was brought into the Hellenistic and Roman present and how this in turn defined the shape these empires could take in the Near East. The death of Alexander did not wipe the slate clean; Greece and Rome did not enter the Near East as an empty scene upon which they could perform empire. They themselves had to change and adapt to the world they encountered; a world they would continue to define long after their own defeat.

The Oxford Handbook of the Hellenistic and Roman Near East provides all the necessary materials for moving toward a more integrated history of the Near East under Hellenistic and Roman rule.  The tremendous effort put into bringing this book into existence deserves immense credit. My hope is that it will prompt more conversation between scholars of the Classical world and the Near East to truly integrate these periods into Near Eastern history itself.

Authors and Titles

BACKGROUND CHAPTERS

1. The Hellenistic and Roman Near East: An Introduction – Rubina Raja
2. The Hellenistic Near East: A Dynamic Canvas – David Engels
3. Embedding Global Diversity in the Hellenistic and Roman Near East: Setting the Agenda – Miguel John Versluys
4. The Hellenistic and Roman Near East: Geography and Climate – Eivind Heldaas Seland

VISUAL ARTS AND COINAGE FROM THE REGION

5. Art in Hellenistic Syria – Achim Lichtenberger
6. Coinage in Hellenistic Syria – Oliver D. Hoover
7. Roman Art in the Near East – Olympia Bobou and Rubina Raja
8. Coinage in Roman Syria – Kristina Neumann
9. Parthian Art and Coinage – Olympia Bobou
10. The Sasanian Empire and Its Art – Anne Hunnell Chen
11. The Visual Arts of Umayyad Syria – Nadia Ali

ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL SOURCES

12. Hellenistic Rule and Roman Operations in Babylonia and Assyria – John MacGinnis
13. Pompey and the Near East – Nathanael Andrade and Rubina Raja
14. The Impact of Rome in the Near East after the Battle of Actium and the Rise of Herod: Politics and Art Intertwined – Olympia Bobou and Rubina Raja
15. Roman Colonies in the Near East – Julien Aliquot
16. The Roman Army in Syria: Size, Mission, Deployment, and Interactions – Michael A. Speidel
17. Road and Transport Networks in Hellenistic and Roman Syria – Adam Pažout
18. The Jewish Wars, the Roman Emperors, and Their Impact – Kimberley Czajkowski
19. Divus Traianus Parthicus and the Middle East – Karl Strobel
20. Hadrian in the East – Mary T. Boatwright
21. The Severans: A Near Eastern Roman Empire? – Julia Hoffmann-Salz
22. The Parthians: An Empire on the Rise – Peter Edwell
23. The Roman Near East in the Time of the Tetrarchy and Constantine I (AD 284-337) – Volker Menze
24. Religious Life in the Near East: Plurality, Variation, and Innovation – Nathanael Andrade
25. The Christian Near East in Late Antiquity – Volker Menze

REGIONS AND PLACES

26. Urbanization and Cities in the Hellenistic and Roman Near East – Olympia Bobou and Rubina Raja
27. Nomads in the Classical and Byzantine Near East – Gideon Avni and Steven A Rosen
28. Commagene – Matthew P. Canepa
29. Edessa (4th Century BC to the 8th Century AD) – Hartmut Leppin
30. The Hellenistic Forts on the Euphrates in Syria and Jebel Khalid – Graeme Clarke
31. Europos-Dura (ca. 300 BC-AD 256) – Pierre Leriche
32. The Cities of Persia – Henry P. Colburn
33. Parthian Sites in Iran and Central Asia – Leonardo Gregoratti
34. Parthian Hatra and the Artistic koinè in the Figurative Arts of the Syrian-Mesopotamian Steppe – Lucinda Dirven
35. Palmyra – Olympia Bobou
36. Hellenistic and Roman Hauran: A Well-Connected Near Eastern Region with a Local Style – Anna-Katharina Rieger
37. Damascus and the Region: Fourth Century BC-Eighth Century AD – Ross Burns
38. Temples, Tombs, and Villages: The Limestone Massif in North Syria – Michael Blömer
39. Hierapolis and Doliche: Two Cities of Ancient North Syria and their Cults – Michael Blömer
40. The Tetrapolis Region: Cities and Culture – Catherine Saliou
41. Antioch on the Orontes: The Urban Image – Andrea U. De Giorgi
42. Apamea on the Orontes – Janine Balty and Jean-Charles Balty
43. The Decapolis – Olympia Bobou and Rubina Raja
44. Hellenistic and Roman Phoenicia – Corinne Bonnet
45. Hellenistic and Roman Baalbek and the Bekaa – Simone Eid Paturel
46. Mount Hermon – Julien Aliquot
47. Iudaea/Palaestina – Avner Ecker
48. Petra during the Nabataean, Roman, and Byzantine Periods – Laurent Tholbecq
49. Eastern Arabia and the Persian Gulf in the Hellenistic and Late Antique Period – R. A. Carter
50. Arabia from the Hellenistic to the Late Roman/Byzantine Period – Stephan G. Schmid and Zbigniew T. Fiema

Notes

[1] Gregson, Ben. forthcoming. “Brave New Scriptworld: Transliteration, Medium, and Renaissance in Late Babylonian Culture.” Journal of World Literature 11:4.