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

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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.