Unforgettable Landscapes
Unforgettable Landscapes: Attachments to the Past in Hellenistic Armenia Lori Khatchadourian Historical cartographers are quintessential memory specialists. Given the task of determining the relative importance of one hamlet, village, town, or city from another, those who map the past exercise the right to erase the memory of a place itself, along with the memories of the peoples, histories, and monuments through which that place was constituted. As reviewers of the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World recently wrote, “all maps—in one way or another, aggressively or unconsciously—‘lie’ to us” (Alcock, Dey and Parker 2001, 458). This discriminating duty of the cartographer, when paired with the narrow approach of traditional classical scholarship on the Near East during the Hellenistic era (ca. 323-31 BC), has resulted in rather peculiar maps of the period: undiscovered places that are mentioned in Greek and Roman sources are marked, while archaeological sites whose names do not appear in this particular body of literature are not. The dominant narrative concerning the Hellenistic Near East has radically privileged cities thought to have been havens of Hellenism, due to the celebrated works of Greek art their inhabitants produced. For the student of classical archaeology, the likely impression of the Near East in the enigmatic period between the collapse of the Persian Empire and the rise of the Roman Empire is like that of a photograph with well-focused, fore grounded, Hellenized hubs—such as Pergamon, Antioch, Ephasos—set against a soft-focused, hazy background of 1 places that were perhaps touched by the ripple effects of Hellenism, or stagnantly persisted as vestigially Persian.
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