Читать книгу A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East онлайн

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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).