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The distinctiveness of the wider region, and the diversity of its constituent parts, found expression perhaps most clearly in the religious culture and in art, where aniconism has traditionally been treated as the stereotypical Near Eastern way of representing the divine (for a famous example, see Fowlkes-Childs and Seymour 2019: 62–63, no.38; and above all the sophisticated discussions by Gaifman 2008 and Stewart 2008) and where the popular scholarly misnomer “Parthian art” hides a large assortment of local idiosyncrasies in which classical and Oriental elements interact in a myriad of ways (see the important collection of articles on the “sculptural environment” of the region in Eliav et al. 2008; cf. Weber 2006, which is the first installment of a collection of all classical sculptures from the National Museum in Damascus). Recent years have seen the publication of studies on the religious life of individual sites or sub-regions, including Lucinda Dirven on Palmyra and Dura-Europos (Dirven 1999), Marie-Emmanuelle Duchâteau on Dura-Europos (Duchâteau 2013), Jane Lightfoot on Hierapolis (Lightfoot 2003), Nicole Belayche on Judaea (Belayche 2001), Achim Lichtenberger on the Decapolis (Lichtenberger 2003), Corinne Bonnet on Hellenistic Phoenicia (Bonnet 2015), Julien Aliquot on the Roman Lebanon (Aliquot 2009), Simone Paturel on the Beqaa valley (Paturel 2019), John Healey and Peter Alpass on Nabataea (Healey 2001; Alpass 2013), and Rubina Raja and myself on Palmyra (Kaizer 2002; Raja 2019a). As regards the religious architecture, this ranged from Mesopotamian temple types to Parthian-style vaulted structures commonly known as “iwans” and from indigenous models sometimes referred to in modern literature as “kalybe” to the monumental sanctuaries combining a classical appearance with “Oriental” features such as niches and parapets (for studies of the various architectural fashions, see Downey 1988 on the Mesopotamian and Parthian traditions; McKenzie 1990 on the architecture of Petra; Freyberger 1998 on the sanctuaries of the wider region which he prefers – sometimes controversially – to date to the early imperial period; Thomas 2007 on the monumental classical buildings of the high empire; Segal 2013a who divides the Near Eastern temples into Vitruvian and non-Vitruvian categories).