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The continuously shifting borders of the subsequent and overlapping imperial powers notwithstanding, the Near Eastern lands (at least in part) formed the heartland of the realms of the Seleucids and the Arsacids, and the latter’s successors the Sasanians. As for the Romans, in the centuries forming the prelude to the rearrangements under the tetrarchy, when 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.