the lands of the Near East came to form one of 12 new dioceses under the name “Oriens” (which also included Egypt and Libya), the region had undeniably grown into an integral part also of the Greco-Roman world. With the main enemy on its eastern frontier (see the collections of sources in Dodgeon and Lieu 1994; Dignas and Winter 2007), Rome concentrated many of its forces in the region and the percentage of legions stationed in the Near East grew substantially over the course of the principate (Isaac 1992; Kennedy 1996a; Gebhardt 2002; Mitford 2018). The army played a major role in processes of state formation and both legionaries and soldiers from the auxiliary cohorts often found themselves deeply engrained in the local societies in the vicinity of their camps (Pollard 2000; Stoll 2001; see Haynes 2013 on the auxilia; James 2019 for a case study of the best-known base of any garrison in the Near East). Emperors, and with them the imperial court, spent more and more time in the Levantine provinces, also when not campaigning against the Parthians or later the neo-Persians. And perhaps most significantly in the long run, the Near East is the region that formed the cradle of the three great monotheistic world religions of today.
Indigenous vs Classical Culture
The most important debate about the nature of Near Eastern civilization in the classical period hinges on the question of whether, and to what degree, there was a continuation with the preceding centuries. Millar famously discussed this in terms of an “amnesia” (forgetfulness) of the region: with the exception of the Jews (see also the discussion by Rajak 2000) and to a lesser degree the inhabitants of the Phoenician coast, there was said to have been no “sense of a common past uniting the contemporary populations of the region and identifying them with the life of the cities of the ancient Orient” (Millar 1993: 6). Others have preferred to make more of the undeniable glimpses of continuation – such as the enduring popularity of the sanctuary of the old Phoenician healing god Eshmun, situated to the north of Sidon, which Strabo (16.2.22) referred to as the “grove of Asklēpios.” Similarly, discussion has focused on how the two halves of the period covered in this volume contrast with each other: whereas Millar famously argued that, in contrast to the Near East under the principate, “the preceding Hellenistic period has left us almost nothing which can count as the expression of a regional or a local pagan culture” (Millar 1993: 22 – the so-called “problem of Hellenistic Syria”; see id. 1987), Sartre (2001) insisted on studying the Roman evidence explicitly in the context of what there was in the Hellenistic period.
It is, in any case, only in the early Roman period that the density in the spread of the available evidence truly became a factor, and that the impact of what we call “classical culture” on the local and indigenous cultures of the region came to the fore and gained in visibility. The multifaceted processes of interaction between the cultures of Greece and Rome and those of the non-classical world have been vigorously debated over the years. Making the case against the old, oversimplified paradigm of a linear process by which Greek features gradually replaced non-Greek ones, Glen Bowersock proposed to drop “Hellenization” from our investigations and to focus instead on “Hellenism,” as a concept known already in antiquity itself (Hellēnismos, meaning “Greek culture”). He argued that the classical culture in the Near East in the late Hellenistic and Roman period functioned as a channel through which local indigenous cultures could be manifested: “In language, myth, and image it provided the means for a more articulate and a more universally comprehensible expression of local traditions” (Bowersock 1990: 9). As such, Bowersock emphasized “the remarkable role of Hellenism in strengthening and even transforming local worship without eradicating its local character” (ibid.: 21). In a later study, Bowersock argued that “Hellenism in the Roman Near East was … by no means what it was to become later in the Byzantine Near East” and that the “dominance of Greek form and design in a unified world of Aramaic culture seems … a quite different kind of Hellenism from what comes later” (Bowersock 2008: 22). Or rather: “When Greek became the unifying culture of the region, it was no longer the Roman Near East” (ibid.: 23). In his own study of “the nature of Syrian Hellenism,” Maurice Sartre made the astute observation that “there are extremely varied modes of appropriation of Hellenism, according to the individual and the region” (Sartre 2008: 37). He further stated that “Syrian Hellenism carried with it, via the multicultural, multireligious, and polyethnic framework in which it developed, an obligation of openness” which, however, “does not authorize us to imagine a society of universal tolerance and harmony” (ibid.: 48), concluding that Greek culture throughout the Roman Near East “remains a criterion of social differentiation whose prestige seems virtually untarnished” (ibid.: 49). Nathanael Andrade, in what is now widely acknowledged as the single most important contribution to the scholarly debate on how to analyse the multifarious expressions of what he called “Greekness” in the Near East, warned how this concept “cannot be attached to a stable, unchanging set of materials, idioms, and practices … cannot be framed by universally applicable definitions [and] cannot be reckoned as simply a manifestation of culture, for what constituted Greek or Syrian culture was shaped and reshaped by civic affiliations and networks” (Andrade 2013: 343). Our subject therefore seems to change as quickly and easily as a kaleidoscope: cultural elements that entered a local society at the beginning of the Hellenistic or Roman period may not necessarily have been considered similarly “new” hundreds of years later. Over time, manifestations of “Hellenism,” or reflections of different degrees of “Greekness,” underwent continuous renegotiation and could themselves come to be considered part of the package of local traditions. Admittedly, this is not easily caught in the often conservative source material (Kaizer 2000a).
Variety
What 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