Die Sicht auf die Welt zwischen Ost und West (750 v. Chr.-550 n. Chr.).

• Author: Burstein, Stanley M.

Die Sicht auf die Welt zwischen Ost und West (750 v. Chr.-550 n. Chr.). Edited by ROBERT ROLL1NGER. Classica et Orientalia, vol. 12. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2017. Pp. x + 231 + 119, map in pocket. [euro]79.

Die Sicht auf die Welt zwischen Ost und West (750 v. Chr.-550 n. Chr.) is the twelfth volume in the series Classica et Orientalia, which focuses on Greek and Roman sources on the ancient Near and Middle East. Like most of the other volumes in the series, it contains the papers delivered at a conference, in this case, a conference entitled "World View and World Conception between East and West," held at the Universitatszentrum Obergurgl from June 19 to June 22, 2013 in honor of the retirement of the distinguished Herodotean scholar Reinhold Bichler. The volume is divided into two parts, the first containing ten papers delivered at the conference and the second a remarkable monograph by Wido Sieberer reconstructing Herodotus's image of the world.

The papers in the first half of the volume are not organized thematically but are set out in alphabetic order. Nevertheless, reflecting Professor Bichler's well-known interest in the cross-cultural intellectual context of the works of Herodotus and other Greek historians, they are unified by their common concern with the image and conception of the world in classical and Near Eastern texts.

Appropriately, the first paper is a tour de force by Reinhold Bichler and Robert Rollinger in which the authors trace the geographical conception of world empires as territories bounded by "oceans" from its origin in third millennium BCE Mesopotamia to the end of antiquity, its conflict with the political reality that no empire was truly universal, and the practice of "world rulers" to set up monuments to mark the limits of their rule. Particularly interesting in this connection is their discussion of Herodotus's critique of the Persian manifestation of this ideology.

The next three papers treat questions concerning classical historical and geographical texts. Jiirgen Degen exhaustively analyzes the function of Herodotus's description of palaces in the Histories, demonstrating that he treats the rich royal residences of the Near Eastern kingdoms as symbolic of tyranny, as in the case of the exaggeratedly rich residence he ascribes to Polycrates, the sixth-century BCE tyrant of Samos. In the next paper Klaus Geus convincingly argues that the lost Chorographia oikoumenike of the fourth-century CE...