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

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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.