sehepunkte 25 (2025), Nr. 10

Touraj Daryaee / Robert Rollinger / Matthew P. Canepa (eds.): Iran and the Transformation of Ancient Near Eastern History: the Seleucids (ca. 312-150 BCE)

This volume, the proceedings of the Third Payravi Conference on Ancient Iranian History, held at UC Irvine in early 2020, "attempts to evaluate the effect of Seleucid rule over the Iranian Plateau and Mesopotamia, not in the context of Seleucid imperial history, but rather primarily in the context of ancient Iranian history" (2). If I understand this claim to realignment correctly, it is an attempt to pivot from the "horizontal" pan-imperial perspective of a Hellenistic great power to a regional-studies approach attuned to "vertical" long-term developments, specifically Iranian historical dynamics, and the insertion of the Seleucids amidst the succession of more obviously Iranian imperial powers.

Rolf Strootman's opening chapter, "How Iranian was the Seleucid Empire?", persuasively makes the case for the empire's reliance on Iranian military resources, the co-option of regional stakeholders, and, of course, the matriarchal role of Apame. The arguments are stimulating: that the same question could be productively asked of other regions/ethnicities with similarly significant, if differently-oriented results - how Syrian, or Babylonian, or Anatolian, or, of course, Macedonian - is itself revealing of the Seleucid imperial character.

Four papers address the Seleucid presence in Mesopotamia, two archaeological, two literary. Two explore the degree to which Seleucia-on-the-Tigris should be understood as a rupture with the region's traditions of urbanism and kingship: Vito Messina tests the city's urbanism and material culture against Stanley and Joffe's model of the "disembedded capital", and finds instead a deliberate rooting of Seleucia within local Babylonian traditions; Julian Degen, in turn, considers the city's foundation legend, preserved in Appian's Syriaca, against older Mesopotamian concepts of conquest and city-foundation.

Johannes Haubold offers a subtle reading of the Babylonian priesthood's narrativization of its relations to the east, first by Berossus, in the Seleucid empire's pioneering phase, with a particular focus on Nebuchadnezzar's Median queen Amytis and her hanging gardens in the Babyloniaca, and then by the authors of the Astronomical Diaries a century later, in the decades of Parthian take-over, with Elamite invasions reactivating a paradigmatic historical trauma, and Arsacids marginalizing Babylon once again.

The Seleucid countryside remains little known. Rocco Palermo's analysis of the changing landscape of the Erbil plain captures simultaneously the ongoing post-Assyrian ruralization of the region - a low-density, interstitial backwater at least until the Adiabenian monarchy - and the interventions of Seleucid colonial practices, with the site of Tell Abu Shita tentatively identified with Demetrias-on-the-Tigris but certainly promising future insight.

Rising into the Zagros, Omar Coloru's cautious analysis of Seleucid presence in Media pivots around the empire's loss of its easternmost provinces in the mid-third century, and the consequent transformation of Media from something of an imperial core region to a frontier province. Attention is given to questions of administration, colonization, and imperial religion, though it is of course to be regretted that our data are so exiguous.

Christoph Schäfer offers a somewhat schematic but still helpful comparison of the Seleucids' naval capacities in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf ("for the Persian Gulf - low investment, low risk, high gain; for the Mediterranean - high investment, high risk, low gain") without really addressing what it meant for the Seleucid identity, policy, and practices to be a land-bridge empire, connecting these two maritime worlds.

Laurianne Martinez-Sève's investigation of Seleucid religious architecture at Aï Khanoum makes the very interesting suggestion that the city's sanctuaries rose much higher than previously modeled, even to 15 meters, and so displayed, alongside an interior plan of long-recognized Babylonian inspiration, an external affinity to Achaemenid (and earlier Syrian) tower temples. In addition to productively reimagining the cityscape of Aï Khanoum, the argument re-confirms a model of Seleucid imperial architecture as a strategically eclectic combination of regional traditions.

Sören Stark offers a methodologically judicious and up-to-date assessment of the Seleucids' early northeastern frontier, moving from a quick survey of Parthia-Hyrcania, on either side of the Kopet Dagh, to Sogdiana and the Zeravshan delta. He argues (correctly, in my opinion) against the possibility of a Seleucid "closed-door" policy towards the steppe.

Matthew Canepa's outstanding closing chapter, the book's highlight, draws out and even refines several contributions. His claim that "the Seleucids presided over one of the most pivotal and transformatively creative periods of Iranian history" (305) is well supported, most apparent in the conceptual, spatial, and ideational regimes of the empire, the marginalization of old centers, expansion of urbanism, development of monumentalized temples, and so forth.

(Note that certain papers, among them some of the strongest in the volume, have nothing directly to do with the volume's declared topic and have not been discussed: Stanley Burstein's excellent chapter on the consequences of the Fifth Syrian War for wider Eurasian/Indian Ocean trade; Sara Cole's study of the increasing prominence of royal women in official Seleucid iconography; and Kai Ruffing's survey of recent scholarly treatments of the Seleucid economy.)

A miscellany is, in some sense, to be expected of a gathering of conference papers - which the volume does not press beyond despite Canepa's admirable work, as are weaker and stronger contributions. But I was left wondering what the claimed turn to an ancient Iranian context had achieved. A much-invoked scholarly target - the opposition of West and East, an essentialized binary of Greek and Persian identities, "a rigid orthodoxy" of absolute enmity - has faded from respectable scholarship and is something of a straw man. The relationship of Mesopotamia to Iran - a key historical problem already thematized in antiquity, as Haubold's contribution shows - remains under-modeled; perhaps "Upper Satrapies", even with its Mediterranean-centric gaze, is a more appropriate category. But the book's strengths are evident: a reckoning with the history of scholarship in several papers was welcome; the gathering of scattered or unfamiliar evidence is helpful; and, once again, one is reminded that in this region new archaeology offers the best hope of fresh insight.