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

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The snapshots of evidence from within that “world between empires” illustrate a number of notable themes which help to reveal the peculiarities of the wider region. The steppe frontier (“Steppengrenze” in the title of Sommer 2005a, 2018), with its urban centers – many of which were Hellenistic foundations – spread around the region, was simultaneously a “world of villages” (thus Millar 1993), though perhaps rather a “world of villages” which “may in fact have been peculiar to specific places and/or times” (Kennedy 1999: 99; cf. MacAdam 2002 for some important studies on the rural settlements in the region; now Mazzilli 2018 on rural cult centers in the Hauran). But its mosaic of landscapes also included more arid territories for the nomads to roam (see the collection of authoritative articles by Macdonald 2009a on issues related to literacy and identity among the nomadic population; cf. Fisher 2015 on the “Arabs”). These “desert-dwellers” formed a vital partner for those in control of the long-distance trade whose networks depended on safe transit along routes through barren lands and on access to water resources (see now Seland 2016). But even in the case of the Near Eastern “caravan city” par excellence, Palmyra, the societal and economic patterns were not one-dimensional and included an agriculture-based sector (see the classic paper by Matthews 1984; now also the interesting hypothesis put forward by Hoffmann-Salz 2015).