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Article

Alexander the Great, reception of  

Diana Spencer

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 November 2019
Subjects:
  1. Christianity
  2. Greek History and Historiography
  3. Late Antiquity
  4. Near East
  5. Reception
  6. Roman History and Historiography
What makes Alexander Great? His story has captured the imagination of authors, artists, philosophers, and politicians across more than two millennia. He has provided a point of convergence for religious and spiritual thinkers, he has been co-opted as a champion for gender and sexual openness, he represents a paradigm for would-be charismatic dictators (and their opponents), he gives us scientific imperialism and justification for conquistadorial dreaming, and he exemplifies the risks of cultural appropriation. To understand why Alexander resonates so widely across so many different fields of study, interest groups, and media, is an exercise in reception. This Alexander who has captured the imagination is triumphantly equivocal and it is in the plurality of traditions through which this complexity is expressed that his enduring “greatness” lies. The imaginary quality of Alexander is unsurprising because more profoundly than for any comparable individual from classical antiquity, his history is a product of reception from the start: every encounter with Alexander the Great is part of a conversation that depends substantially on accounts and narrative evidence from long after his death, and at the least at one remove from the historians who first and contemporaneously chronicled his life and achievements.

Article

Arbela  

John MacGinnis and David Michelmore

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
27 February 2024
Subjects:
  1. Christianity
  2. Greek History and Historiography
  3. Jewish Studies
  4. Late Antiquity
  5. Near East
  6. Roman History and Historiography
The history of Arbela (cuneiform Urbilum/Urbel/Arbail, modern Erbil) is documented in archaeological and textual sources. From the point when it first entered history in the middle of the 3rd millennium, the city’s fortunes alternated between periods of independence and incorporation within the super-regional states of Mesopotamia, including the Ur III kingdom and, more briefly, the Upper Mesopotamian empire of Shamshi-Adad I. In the later 2nd millennium the city was incorporated within the Assyrian Empire, rising to become a regional capital of major importance. Following the fall of Assyria, the city was incorporated within the Achaemenid, Seleucid, Arsacid, and Sasanian empires. A period of independence as an emirate in the early mediaeval period was a golden age. This came to an end with the city’s submission to the Mongols, after which it came under the control of the Black Sheep and White Sheep Turcomans and the Safavid and Ottoman empires.Arbela—modern Erbil—is a city in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq with a documented history going back more than four thousand years. It is situated in the trans-Tigris region at the interface of the Zagros Mountains and the fertile plains of .

Article

Belus/Marduk  

Mary Frazer

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Greek History and Historiography
  2. Near East
  3. Roman History and Historiography
Belus (or Bēlos or Bēlias) is the Latin or Greek rendering of the names of two important Near Eastern gods: Bēl-Marduk, the tutelar deity of the city of Babylon and the head of the Babylonian pantheon from c. 1200 bce; and Baal, a Canaanite god attested in New Kingdom Egypt, the Levant, and at Ugarit. In Greco-Roman literature, Belus is often treated as an ancestor of various mythological dynasties of the Near East or as the founder of Babylon and Babylonian astronomy.In matters concerning Babylon, Belus refers simply to Bēl-Marduk, the tutelary deity of Babylon. In Herodotus’ description of Babylon for example, references to “Zeus-Belus” and “Zeus” (Hdt. 1.181.2; 1.181.3) clearly denote Bēl-Marduk, who replaced Enlil as the god at the head of the Babylonian pantheon c.1200bce and was therefore equated by Greeks with Zeus.1 The “Belus Gate” (Hdt. 3.155.6; 3.158.1) is simply the Greek translation of the Babylonian for “Marduk Gate,” one of eight gates of Babylon’s inner city-wall (.

Article

Cos  

William Allison Laidlaw and Susan Mary Sherwin-White

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek History and Historiography
  2. Near East
  3. Roman History and Historiography
A fertile island of the Sporades, situated in the SE Aegean, on the north–south trading route along the coast of Turkey and onwards to Cyprus, Syria, and Egypt. After Mycenaean occupation, the island was colonized, in the ‘Dark Ages,’ by *Dorians, perhaps from *Epidaurus, whose arrival may be identified with the establishment of the settlement attested by the cemeteries at the Seraglio (c.1050–c.750 bce). It was a member of the Dorian Hexapolis. The Doric dialect continued to be used into late antiquity (e.g. POxy. 2771: ce 323).In the late Archaic period the island was subject initially to Persia and to the Lygdamid (see artemisia(1)) dynasty of *Halicarnassus, which faced Cos across the straits between the island and Turkey, and then to Athens. Cos is not attested as a member of the *Second Athenian Confederacy (founded 378 bce) and perhaps did not join.

Article

inequality  

John Weisweiler

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
20 June 2022
Subjects:
  1. Ancient Economy
  2. Greek History and Historiography
  3. Late Antiquity
  4. Near East
  5. Roman History and Historiography

The just distribution of social goods was fiercely debated in the ancient Mediterranean and the ideologies of egalitarianism and inegalitarianism developed in Rome and Athens shaped Euro-American political thought from the Enlightenment onward. By contrast, the study of actual income and wealth distributions in ancient societies is a more recent development. Only in the early 21st century have scholars begun to make systematic attempts to quantify levels of inequality in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Since we lack the documentary sources on which the study of inequality in contemporary economies is based, most of these reconstructions rely on a combination of modelling and the interpretation of isolated figures found in literary texts. This fragmentary evidence suggests that in the best-attested regions of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East inequality was considerable. In particular, the formation of large territorial states—most notably the empires of Babylon, Persia, and Rome—facilitated the concentration of wealth into fewer hands. But it is unclear whether inequality increased over time. At least, there is no unambiguous evidence that wealth and income were more unequally distributed in late antiquity than in earlier periods of Roman history.

Article

Ptolemy(1), name of the Macedonian kings of Egypt  

Dorothy J. Thompson, Albert Brian Bosworth, Theodore John Cadoux, and Ernst Badian

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek History and Historiography
  2. Near East
  3. Roman History and Historiography
The name of all the Macedonian kings of Egypt.(‘Saviour’) (c. 367–282 bce) son of Lagus and Arsinoë, served *Alexander (3) the Great of Macedon as an experienced general and childhood friend. At Susa in 324 he married Artacama (also called Apame), daughter of *Artabazus, whom he later divorced. He later married the Macedonian Eurydice (6 children) and subsequently *Berenice (1) I, mother of the dynastic line. After Alexander's death (323) he hijacked the conqueror's embalmed corpse and, taking it to Memphis in Egypt, established himself as satrap in place of *Cleomenes (3). In the following year he took Cyrene and in 321 repulsed the invasion of *Perdiccas (3). In the complex struggles of Alexander's successors he was not at first particularly successful. In 295 however he recovered Cyprus, lost in 306 to *Demetrius (4) Poliorcetes, and from 291 he increasingly controlled the Aegean League of Islanders (.