The Cities of Seleukid Syria.

AuthorAstour, Michael S.

By John D. Grainger. Oxford: 1990. Pp. xi + 253. $52.

This book, based on the author's Ph.D. thesis, aims at presenting the history of cities in a restricted part of the Seleucid Empire for its own sake and not simply as a facet of dynastic history. The area to which the term "Syria" is applied in the study is defined in the introduction as "bounded by the Taurus mountains on the north, the Euphrates river and the sea to the east and west, and the Eleutheros river on the south" (p. 2). In fact, the territory covered by the study does not reach the Taurus; it excludes Commagene, except for Doliche and Zeugma which were transferred to it only by the Romans. Conversely, it includes Laodicea ad Libanum, which is located south of the latitude of the Eleutherus. But it is true that the area thus circumscribed comprised the most important Hellenistic cities of Syria and remained the longest under Seleucid rule after the rest of the empire had been lost. The book is divided into two parts: "Seleukos Nikator" (three chapters) and "After Seleukos" (four chapters), plus appendices, bibliography, six sketch maps, and eight city plans, showing only their outlines and locations of acropolises and drawn to the same scale.

The general impression the book makes is favorable. The author has extracted every possible bit of information from the scanty classical sources on Syria, of which very few items actually come from the Seleucid period. He also utilized a great deal of secondary literature, including the monographs on Antioch by Glanville L. Downey (A History of Antioch in Syria: From Seleucus to the Arab Conquest [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961!) and on Arados by Jean-Paul Rey-Coquais (Arados et sa piree aux epoques grecque, romaine et byzantine [Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1974]), as well as, with lesser effect, numerous archaeological reports. It would be difficult to bring out much new in this field with its limited documentation that has been investigated for generations, and, as we shall see below, many of Grainger's own premises and interpretations are debatable. But his exposition is clear, well organized, and annotated, and his descriptions of the sites immediately suggest, even if he had not mentioned it in his preface, that he had personally visited them. All in all, with certain reservations, Grainger's book can serve as a useful survey of cities and urban development in Hellenistic Syria.

But there are reservations. When Grainger delves into the conditions of pre-Hellenistic Syria, he displays insufficient acquaintance with its history and archaeology. Hence the basic thesis of his book--that, as the result of the Assyrian destruction and deportations, Syria became a country with practically no cities; and the situation continued into the Persian period, when only Arados on the north Phoenician coast was a real city. "Myriandros and Bambyke and Thapsakos were equally local. The rest of the land was one of villages exclusively, inhabited by a peasantry taxed by the Persian governors" (p. 30). Nobody denies the cruelty of Assyrian conquests and reprisals, but, at least since the start of the systematic conquest and annexation of Syria under Tiglath-Pileser III, the Assyrians were interested in receiving from their new provinces as much in taxes and service obligations as possible. Therefore, far from having conquered territories "virtually emptied of people," as "Kommagene, for instance" (p. 23, n. 37, cf. p. 43, n. 67), the Assyrian kings replaced the deported fraction of the population by deportees from some other penalized area of the empire. In the case of Grainger's chosen example, Commagene-Kummuh, the exchange of populations took place with the Chaldean principality of Bit-Yakin. The 27,290 deportees from the province of Samaria (about 10% of its population) were replaced by Arab tribesmen. Instead of Hamathians deported to Assyria proper, Sargon II settled 6,300 "Assyrian malefactors." Thus the system of deportations, with all the human suffering it caused, had, at most, a very slight impact on the demography of Syria.

In the effort to sustain his affirmation that "by the time of the Macedonian conquest in 333-331 . . . there were . . . only faint sparks of urban life in Syria" (p. 23)...

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