Damascus: from the Fall of Persia to the Roman Conquest

Dead Sea Discoveries 25 (2018) 299–318

brill.com/dsd

Damascus: From the Fall of Persia to the Roman Conquest

Paul J. Kosmin Harvard University [email protected]

Abstract

This contribution aims to provide an outline of the political dynamics, cultural developments, and, ultimately, historical semantics of the city of Damascus for the circle(s) of its eponymous Document.

Keywords

Damascus – Seleucid empire – Ptolemaic empire – Damascus Document – urbanism

1 Introduction

Damascus appears seven times in the Document that bears its name. “The land -is named as the dwelling of the “returners” or “con (ארץ דמשק) ”of Damascus ) from the land of Judah (CD 6:5). Fourשבי ישראל) verts” or “penitents” of Israel times, “the land of Damascus” is the site where a new covenant was established or entered into (CD 6:19, 8:21, 19:33‒34, and 20:12). Finally, Damascus appears with reference to two biblical passages: in allusion to Amos 5:26‒27a—“I will exile the tents of your king and the foundation of your images beyond the tents ;(as the destination of displacement (CD 7:15—”(מאהלי דמשק) of Damascus and in an interpretation of Numbers 24:17—“A star has left Jacob, a staff has risen from Israel”—the star is identified as “the Interpreter of the Law who will CD 7:18‒20). The latter use is also) ”(דורש התורה הבא דמשק) come to Damascus attested in the Qumran manuscript 4Q266 3 iii 20. Damascus is the only location outside Israel or Judah to be mentioned in this Document; no other such references to the city are found in the extant Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Syrian city’s prominence within this one text has been understood in various ways. On the basis of internal scriptural allusion, an influential strand of scholarship has taken the Document’s “Damascus” and “the land of Damascus” to be a cipher for Babylonia and the Babylonian exile.1 Others have identified “the land of Damascus” as a textual symbol for Qumran itself, on the basis of a tradition that interpreted Damascus as the site of God’s eschatological sanctuary.2 Indeed, it has also been claimed, implausibly, that “the land of Damascus” was employed as a geopolitical label for the Nabatean kingdom, and so a term that could at certain moments include Qumran and the shores of the Dead Sea.3 Finally, “Damascus” and “the land of Damascus” have been taken in their plain sense, with the Document recounting a real, historically- situated migration to and community formation within the ancient Syrian city and its chōra.4 With a text as allusive and polyvalent as the Damascus Document, it is not possible to determine finally whether “Damascus” stands for Babylon, Qumran, or, indeed, Damascus. Yet, the actual city and region of Damascus have been entirely missing from scholarly analysis. Damascus was a real place, a near neighbor to the north, that occupied a significant and increasingly urgent role in the political and cultural life of third- to first-century BCE Judea. Even if the

1 See, e.g., Stephen Hultgren, From the Damascus Covenant to the Covenant of the Community: Literary, Historical, and Theological Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls, STDJ 66 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 96–108; Philip Davies, The Damascus Covenant: An Interpretation of the “Damascus Document,” JSOTSS 25 (Sheffield: Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 1983), 122–23; Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, “The Essenes and their History,” RB 81 (1974): 215–44; Annie Jaubert, “Le pays de Damas,” RB 65 (1958): 214–48 (225–34); Isaac Rabinowitz, “A Reconsideration of ‘Damascus’ and ‘390 Years’ in the ‘Damascus’ (‘Zadokite’) Fragments,” JBL 73 (1954): 11–35. 2 See, e.g., Geza Vermes, Scripture and Tradition in Judaism: Haggadic Studies (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 43–49, and Jaubert, “Le pays,” 234–35. 3 Robert North, “The Damascus of Qumran Geography,” PEQ 86 (1955): 34–47. This is very unlikely: while it is true that the Nabatean king Aretas III briefly occupied Damascus, perhaps at the request of its citizens, this rule extended only from 83/2 to 72/1 BCE, with possible interruptions (see below); the city was not claimed again even when opportunity permitted with the retreat of Tigranes II. It is highly unlikely that the name of a city so briefly dominat- ed and at a political periphery transferred to all the territory of a long-established kingdom by now centered at Petra. 4 Joseph Baumgarten, Qumran Cave 4. XIII: The Damascus Document (4Q266–273), DJD 18 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 9–10; Samuel Iwry, “The Exegetical Method of the Damascus Document Reconsidered”, in Methods of Investigation of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Khirbet Qumran Site, ed. Michael Wise, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 722 (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1994), 329–38. See also Ben Zion Wacholder, The New Damascus Document: The Midrash on the Eschatological Torah of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Reconstruction, Translation, and Commentary, STDJ 56 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 10, 158–59, 229, 237–38, who considers “Damascus” as Damascus but the migration as a prediction.

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Document’s “Damascus” were but a fictional label or a future destination, the historical developments of the contemporary city gave the term a wider semantic force. This is in no way to dismiss the role of biblical and prophetic associa- tions; rather, it is to suggest an additional range of meanings and concerns that were present to the authors and audience of the Damascus Document, even as the total shipwreck of Hellenistic historiography and the disciplinary reflexes of biblical studies have led to their systematic overshadowing. Since the earliest copy of the Damascus Document (4Q266) (with mention at 3 iii 20) dates to the first half or the middle of the first century BCE,5 דמשק of I will examine the history of Damascus down to the Roman provincialization of Syria in 64/3 BCE. The following contribution aims to provide an outline of the political dynamics, cultural developments, and, ultimately, historical semantics of the city of Damascus for the circle(s) of its eponymous Document. It must be acknowledged that our evidence is extremely exiguous, amounting to not much more than a few brief references in classical texts, especially geog- raphers and historians paraphrasing now-lost Hellenistic histories, a couple of relevant papyri or inscriptions, and coins. The history of Damascus, from the fall of the Achaemenid empire to the Roman conquest, can be understood as the combined effect of two fundamental conditions, one geographical—oasis urbanism—and the other political— imperial conflict.

2 Oasis Urbanism

Much of the character and dynamics of Hellenistic, indeed, of pre-modern Damascus derive from its intersectional location between the Levantine coastal system and the Syrian desert (see Map 1). The Antilebanon mountain range, looming above Damascus to its west, cuts the city off from easy access to the Mediterranean Sea and the Phoenician littoral; Damascus would never enjoy substantial maritime interests nor a share in the developing cultural koinē of the Hellenized Phoenician world. Instead, the Barada river (Abana in the Bible, Chrysorhoas to the Greeks) channeled the mountain’s trapped rain and snowmelt eastward, down into the gentle plain of Damascus, making it the best-watered of all the inland Levantine cities. Significant investment in an irrigation infrastructure—canals, wells, and water-lifting technology—formed the

5 Baumgarten, The Damascus Document, 266.

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Map 1 The geographical setting of Damascus Adapted from Burns, Damascus, xvii, Fig. 0.2, by the Harvard Map Collection extensive, miraculously fertile Ghouta oasis to the city’s east.6 The Ghouta’s or- chards and gardens were famed across west Asia and the wider Mediterranean: the Peripatetic philosopher and botanist Theophrastus, for instance, noted that the Damascene terebinth was far taller and more handsome than that of Macedonia or the Troad;7 plums came to be called damaskēna in the Greek- speaking Mediterranean after the city’s favored fruit.8 All Damascene history takes place within this embrace of agricultural abundance, a hypertrophy celebrated most brilliantly in the paradisiacal visions of the Umayyad mosque’s mosaic facade. An Imperial-period inscription from Harran el-Awamid, some forty kilometers east of the city, commemorates local aristocrats hunting

6 Thomas Weber, “‘Damaskòs Pólis Epísēmos’: Hellenistische, römische und byzantinische Bauwerke in Damaskus aus der Sicht griechischer und lateinischer Schriftquellen,” Damaszener Mitteilungen 7 (1993): 135–76 (139–44). 7 Theophrastus, Hist. pl. 3.15.3. 8 Athenaeus, 1.49d–e, with Thomas Weber, “ΔΑΜΑΣΚΗΝΑ: Landwirtschaftliche Produkte aus der Oase von Damaskus im Spiegel griechisher und lateinischer Schriftquellen,” ZDPV 105 (1989): 151–65 (155–62).

Dead Sea DiscoveriesDownloaded 25 from (2018) Brill.com10/04/2021 299–318 07:59:49AM via free access Damascus: From the Fall of Persia to the Roman Conquest 303 gazelles at the oasis’ edge,9 an activity also celebrated by the later Arab court. Sadly, the nature of the relationship between the city and oasis is little known for the Hellenistic and Roman periods: it remains unclear, for instance, where village settlements clustered, to what extent they functioned as autonomous administrative units, how irrigation was organized and maintained, and in what ways modes of exploitation and land ownership changed. With its back to the Antilebanon, the Damascus oasis opened toward the Syrian desert and its non-urban populations. Indeed, the region’s tectonics guided overland routes toward the city, by the converging ridges to the north and the narrowing basalt flats, between the Trachonitis and Antilebanon, to the south. The city’s nodal place in west Asian trade was long-established— its name in Neo-Assyrian sources, Ša-emāru-šu, “land of the donkey,” possibly derives from this function.10 In the second century BCE it was the chosen market for Jonathan Maccabees’ sale of Nabatean cattle and captives11 and, as we shall see, in the first century BCE, protection of caravans was a recurring civic concern. The city’s constant interaction with nomadic or trading groups to the south and east was a necessity; in the period in question, the key interface was with the rising Nabatean kingdom. This “dimorphic” situation—a fertile oasis, between mountain and desert— underlay both the wealth and precariousness of Damascus. Late antique eulo- gia demonstrate that this contrast of landscapes, the fairly discrete boundary between green and brown, produced a broadly cultural as well as narrowly political opposition of the sown and the wilderness, an attitude that was no doubt also present much earlier.12 Such oasis urbanism has also rendered Damascus’s ancient history fairly unknowable: for the city has remained the green land’s primate urban center and on exactly the same site for thousands of years, a spatial fixity rather uncommon to riverine or coastal systems. Continual habi- tation of the same, small, 100-hectare area, reuse of older construction materi- als, and the horrors of modern conflict have made extensive and continuing archaeological work unfeasible. Moreover, for whatever reason, Damascus and its oasis have produced remarkably little epigraphy in any language. In

9 SEG 37 1438; Jean-Paul Rey-Coquais, “Des montagnes au désert: Baetocécé, le pagus Augustus de Niha, la Ghouta à l’est de Damas,” in Sociétés urbaines, sociétés rurales dans l’Asie Mineure et la Syrie hellénistiques et romaines, ed. Edmond Frézouls (Strasbourg: AECR, 1987), 191–216 (207). 10 Edward Lipiński, The Aramaeans: Their Ancient History, Culture, Religion (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 347. 11 Josephus, AJ 13.179. 12 Pierre-Louis Gatier, “Damas dans les texts de l’Antiquité,” Les Annales archéologiques Arabes syriennes 51–52 (2008–2009): 41–54 (41–42).

Dead Sea Discoveries 25 (2018) 299–318 Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 07:59:49AM via free access 304 Kosmin consequence, our understanding of the Achaemenid, Hellenistic, and early Roman city is limited and virtual: an exercise in inferring ancient urban organization from the outlines of modern city blocks and roadways, and then pinning onto this reconstruction a handful of notices, offered in passing, by ancient writers, mostly focused on other things. Our best hope for retrieving a sense of the city’s historical dynamics comes instead from understanding its place within the Levant’s wider geopolitics.

3 City and Empire

The Iron Age kingdom of Aram-Damascus fell to the Neo-Assyrian conqueror Tiglath-Pileser III in 732 BCE: Damascus was captured, its inhabitants deport- ed, and its king executed. Henceforth, and unlike its Phoenician, Judean, and Arab near neighbors, Damascus would never again be ruled by a local dynasty nor function as a major independent power. Even so, the city seems to have retained its regional centrality through the succession of Neo-Assyrian, Neo- Babylonian, Achaemenid, and Alexandrian conquests. By contrast, the history of Hellenistic Damascus is one of, first, a sudden marginalization under mostly Ptolemaic dominance in the third century BCE, then, a gradual recovery and re-urbanization under the Seleucid kings in the second century, and, finally, a re-emergence to regional centrality amidst the political chaos of the late second and first centuries.

3.1 Damascus from the Fifth to the Third Century BCE According to the Augustan-period geographer Strabo, Damascus was “in some respect the most illustrious city of the region at the time of the Persian empire” (σχεδόν τι καὶ ἐπιφανεστάτη τῶν ταύτῃ κατὰ τὰ Περσικά).13 It appears as the only Levantine city in a list of Achaemenid supra-provincial capitals, alongside Babylon, Susa, Ecbatana, Persepolis, Bactra, and Sardis, as a location for Artaxerxes II’s institution of an iconic Anahita cult.14 This nodal position on the roadways of the Persian empire is confirmed by one of the Aršāma letters, in which the steward Neḥtiḥōr returned from Arbela to Egypt via Damascus.15

13 Strabo 16.2.20. 14 Berossus BNJ 680 F11 = Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation 5.65.3. As noted by Pierre Briant, From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire, trans. Peter Daniels (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2002), 680, the omission of Memphis confirms the accuracy of the dating of the report. 15 Pierre Grelot, Documents araméens d’Égypte (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1972), 66–68 (#67); Godfrey Driver, Aramaic Documents of the Fifth Century BC (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

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We are told that the Persian kings had transplanted the Chalybonian wine to the Damascus region and drank only this wine;16 presumably, the fertile Ghouta also supported an imperial paradeisos. In fact, the very last days of Achaemenid rule in the Levant offer our best insight into Damascus’s pre- Hellenistic imperial infrastructure. The city was chosen by Darius III, crossing the Euphrates to ignominy at Issus on the Cilician coast, as the location for his family, money, and baggage;17 such a distance of dispatch, about 300 km, speaks to the city’s regional centrality, defensive confidence, and palatial facilities.18 It was also the destination of ambassadors to this last Great King from Athens, Sparta, and Thebes.19 After Alexander’s victory at Issus, these treasures and envoys were betrayed by the city’s Mardian governor to the Macedonian general Parmenion,20 whose famous “Letter to Alexander”, quoted in the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus of Naucratis, enumerated the enervating court luxuries he came across there—bakers, dancing girls, milk-cooks, and wine strainers.21 As was typical, the basic characteristics of Achaemenid political geography in this region were re-enunciated rather than replaced by Alexander’s conquests and their immediate aftermath. So, Damascus appears to have remained the satrapal center, continued to strike coins, with the mint mark ΔΑ, until about 320 BCE.22 It was a key destination for Alexander the Great’s funerary cortege, processing from Babylon,23 and a mustering point for the Successor Perdiccas’ invasion of Egypt24 and Demetrius Poliorcetes’ assault on Babylonia.25 But as the break-up of Alexander’s unitary empire settled irreversibly into place at the turn of the fourth–third centuries BCE, Damascus was reduced from a regional centrality to the disputed frontier of powers based elsewhere.

1957), 27–28 (#6), line 2. See also David Graf, “The Persian Royal Road System in Syria- Palestine,” Transeuphratène 6 (1993): 149–68 (152–56). 16 Posidonius F242 (Kidd) = Athenaeus 1.28d. 17 Arrian, Anab. 2.11.9–10; Quintus Curtius Rufus 3.8.12, 12.27–13.17; Diodorus Siculus 17.32.2–3. 18 A.B. Bosworth, A Historical Commentary on Arrian’s History of Alexander (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 218. 19 Arrian, Anab. 2.15.2; Quintus Curtius Rufus 3.13.15. 20 Quintus Curtius Rufus 3.12.27–13.17; Polyaenus, Strat. 4.5. 21 Athenaeus 13.607f. 22 Édouard Will, “Damas antique,” Syria 71 (1994): 1–43 (9); Edward Newell, Late Seleucid Mints in Ake-Ptolemais and Damascus, Numismatic Notes and Monographs 84 (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1939): 41. 23 Arrian FGrHist 156 F9.25; Diodorus Siculus 18.28.2–3; Strabo 17.1.8; Pausanias 1.6.3. 24 Arrian FGrHist 156 F9.28. 25 Diodorus Siculus 19.100.5.

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The fundamental political fact of the third century BCE was the division of the Levant between the Seleucid empire, centered in northern Syria and Babylonia, and the Ptolemaic empire, fixed in its new Egyptian capital, Alexandria. While the entire Levantine coast, with its wealthy Phoenician cities, had been awarded as a prize of war to Seleucus I in the aftermath the battle of Ipsus in 301 BCE, Ptolemy I had seized all lands from Egypt up to Aradus and the Eleutherus river (modern Nahr el-Kalb). The Seleucid kings’ inherited claim to these occupied territories resulted in a series of five “Syrian Wars”— 274‒271 BCE, c. 259‒253 BCE, 246‒241 BCE, 219‒217 BCE, and 202‒199 BCE—in which vast armies on either side, marching north or south, ravaged the land, seized its inhabitants, and established garrison exclaves. Damascus appears to have changed hands at least five times. A stratagem, included among the battlefield tricks collected by the second-century CE Macedonian rhetori- cian Polyaenus, tells of the Seleucid monarch Antiochus I gaining Damascus from its Ptolemaic commander Dion by a desert assault in the First Syrian War.26 A papyrus from the Ptolemaic Zenon archive lists a certain Dionysius of Damascus receiving fish rations, suggesting that the city was back in Ptolemaic possession by 259 BCE.27 Porphyry’s report of Ptolemy III’s siege of Damascus in the late 240s, as preserved in the Armenian version of Eusebius, indicates an earlier return to Seleucid hands.28 While the Syrian Wars can be reconstructed in outline as political and military affairs—tales of dynastic marriages, battlefield defeats, and intermittent peace agreements—it is harder to detect their effects on the urban communi- ties of the disputed region. Presumably, the recurring sieges and changes of regime were disruptive of civic and economic life and generative of such frontier pathologies as factional stasis, elite competition, and wartime betrayal.29 Certainly, we know that Seleucid-Ptolemaic fighting over Jerusalem in the Fifth

26 Polyaenus, Strat. 4.15. Since Johann Droysen, Geschichte des Hellenismus (Gotha: F.A. Perthes, 1877–1878), 3.256 n. 1, this episode has been placed in the First Syrian War; note however John Grainger, The Syrian Wars (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 86, proposing Antiochus III in the Fifth Syrian War. 27 P.Cairo.Zen. 1,59006; with Xavier Durand, Des Grecs en Palestine au IIIe siècle avant Jésus- Christ: Le dossier syrien des archives de Zénon de Caunos (261–252) (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1997), 94–100. 28 Porphyry BNJ 260 F32; on these events, see Cornelis den Hertog, “Erwägungen zur Territorialgeschichte Koilesyriens in frühhellenistischer Zeit,” ZDPV 111 (1995): 168–84 (170–76); Édouard Will, Histoire politique du monde héllenistique (Nancy: Berger-Levrault, 1966–1967), 127–29; and Ulrich Kahrstedt, Syrische Territorien in hellenistischer Zeit (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1926), 23–24. 29 See, e.g, Polybius 5.71, 86.10.

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Syrian War brought about the physical destruction of large parts of that city and the dispersal of its population.30 The century-long conflict over the Levant carried a further burden for Damascus. The dominant north-south trade route, the so-called “King’s Highway” that had passed without obstacle through the city for centuries, was now broken by an economic as well as political barrier. For the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires employed different coin weight and market measure systems, an incommensurability that can only have increased transaction costs and inhibited inter-imperial trade. Further, these Hellenistic kingdoms reordered the wider region’s centers of administration and routes of trade. The maritime character of the Ptolemaic state and its new Mediterranean capital privileged the Levant’s coastal cities, governing from its refounded regional center at Ptolemaïs-Ace. Similarly, Seleucus I’s big new colonies in northern Syria, the four cities of the Tetrapolis (Antioch-by-Daphne, Seleucia-in-Pieria, Apamea- on-the-Axios, and Laodicea-by-the-Sea), with their matrix of second-order foundations, formed the Seleucid empire’s new heartland and guided move- ment between Mesopotamia and Mediterranean up the Euphrates and to the newly dug harbors at Seleucia-in-Pieria and Laodicea-by-the-Sea. In each case, the inland and now frontier city of Damascus was pushed off center. We should take it as diagnostic that the city no longer housed a mint and was not visited by the Ptolemaic administrator Zenon in his tour of southern Syrian estates. Nothing at all is known of the city’s political, cultural, or economic institutions in this depressed third century.

3.2 Damascus in the Second Century BCE Damascus entered a new historical phase and the beginning of its recovery with the reunification of the entire Levant, a long-held Seleucid ambition, in the Fifth Syrian War, at the very opening of the second century BCE. The extension of a single, overarching political authority is seen in the attempts of Antiochus III, Seleucus IV, and Antiochus IV to normalize this formerly Ptolemaic region to Seleucid imperial practices by the foundation of new colonial settlements,31 a more rigorous employment of the Greek language,32 and various administrative reforms.33

30 Polybius 16.39.1–2; Josephus, AJ 12.138–140. 31 See Getzel Cohen, The Hellenistic Settlements in Syria, the Red Sea Basin, and North Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 199–302. 32 Avner Ecker, personal correspondence. 33 See, e.g., Sylvie Honigman, Tales of High Priests and Taxes: The Books of the Maccabees and the Judean Rebellion against Antiochus IV (Berkeley; University of California Press, 2014), 291–377.

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It seems that this incorporation into the expanded Seleucid empire resulted in a slow revival of the most significant trade routes for Damascus, both the King’s Highway running north-south and the east-west route across the Syrian desert to the Euphrates and Babylonia: it is significant that Damascus, Palmyra, and Dura-Europus, the three major nodes on this artery, witnessed a simulta- neous growth and expansion in the later second century BCE.34 In 138/7 BCE (175 SE), after almost two centuries, Antiochus VII reopened the city’s mint;35 its Attic-weight coins, dated by the year numbers of the Seleucid Era, were struck almost annually until the Roman conquest. At some point in the city’s Seleucid period, perhaps as early as the conquest of Antiochus III in the early second century, perhaps as late as the reign of Demetrius III in the early first century, Damascus was re-urbanized along Hellenistic lines.36 The outlines of the re-founded city’s residential, commercial, religious, agricultural, and military zones can be fixed with a certain amount of confidence (see Map 2). Scholars have identified traces of a regular grid-plan of insulae in the old city’s center, north of the so-called Straight Street. J. Sauvaget reconstructed the city blocks as standardized at 100 × 45 me- ters, with the longer dimension north-south:37 this shares the approximately 2:1 north-south, east-west ratio of most Seleucid colonial settlements, coming in at slightly smaller than those of the north Syrian Tetrapolis cities, but larger than the Euphratene colonies of Jebel Khalid, Dura-Europus, and Apamea-on- the-Euphrates.38 An inscribed dedication to the goddess Athena by the “am phodon of the Sawarenes” indicates that these new urban blocks, as elsewhere, were termed amphoda and were named after their (original?) inhabitants, in

34 Michael Rostovtzeff, Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 866–67, and idem, Caravan Trade, trans. D. and T. Talbot Rice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 95–96; Paul Kosmin, “The Foundation and Early Life of Dura-Europos,” in Dura-Europos: Crossroads of Antiquity, ed. Gail Hoffman and Lisa Brody (New Haven: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 150–76. See also the parallel development of Petra: Glen Bowersock, Roman Arabia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 16–27. 35 Arthur Houghton, Catharine Lorber, and Oliver Hoover, Seleucid Coins: A Comprehensive Catalogue. Part 2: Seleucus IV through Antiochus XIII (London: Classical Numismatic Group, 2008), 1.377–79; Newell, “Late Seleucid Mints,” 46–107. For a possible earlier strike at Damascus, for Antiochus III and Seleucus IV, see Houghton, Lorber, and Hoover, Seleucid Coins, 20–23, 691; note, though, that these so-called “wreath” coins have more frequently been attributed to Antioch-in-Ptolemaïs/Ake or Antioch-in-Mygdonia/Nisibis. 36 For a summary of the evidence, see Cohen, Hellenistic Settlements in Syria, 242–45. 37 J. Sauvaget, “Le plan antique de Damas,” Syria 3/4 (1949): 314–58 (355). 38 For details, see Paul Kosmin, The Land of the Elephant Kings: Space, Territory, and Ideology in the Seleucid Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 203.

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Map 2 Late Hellenistic and early Roman Damascus Adapted from Sack, Damaskus 12, Abb. 3, by the Harvard Map Collection this case, a population of Hauran Arabs.39 This new city quarter likely co-existed with the pre-Hellenistic, Aramean districts of Damascus, generating a new- town, old-town dyad:40 the cultural consequences will be discussed below. These new amphoda were situated between a large, rectangular agora in the city’s north-east and Damascus’s ancient temple of Hadad, presumably now identified with Zeus, in the north-west, linked to one another by a major east- west roadway.41 The first-century CE monumental rebuilding and expansion

39 SEG 2 839, with M. MacDonald, “Nomads and the Hawran in the Late Hellenistic and Roman Periods: A Reassessment of the Epigraphic Evidence,” Syria 70 1993: 303–403 (357); Maurice Sartre, “Tribus et clans dans le Hawrān antique,” Syria 59 (1982): 77–91 (82). The Σαουαρηνο[ι] are also attested in inscriptions from Busan (SEG 7 1089) and Tarba (Wadd 2203a). 40 Will, “Damas antique,” 29–32. 41 Ross Burns, Damascus: A History (London: Routledge, 2005), 35–42; Will, “Damas antique,” 24–29; Dorothée Sack, Damaskus. Entwicklung und Struktur einer orientalisch-islamischen Stadt (Mainz am Rhein: P. von Zabern, 1989), 9–11. For a possible later, early Roman dating of the open north-east market space, see Klaus Freyberger, “Im Zeichen des höchsten

Dead Sea Discoveries 25 (2018) 299–318 Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 07:59:49AM via free access 310 Kosmin of the temple and its later conversion into a Church and then a mosque have occluded its Hellenistic and earlier forms.42 Finally, the Diocletianic-Ayyubid citadel, at the north-west corner of the city, likely reaches back to this period— a commander of the akra appears in Josephus’ account of the late Seleucid city43—and, indeed, much earlier. Finally, the study of early aerial photographs has shown that the land to the north of Damascus, between this new grid and the artificial Tora canal, was divided into a regular mesh of rectangular agricultural parcels, approximately 145 × 95 m. These plots correspond closely to the new Hellenistic urban plan, at a 3:2 ratio, evidence of a contemporaneous re-organization of the prime agricultural lands for the city’s new settlers.44

3.3 Damascus in the Late Second and the First Century BCE Damascus’s closing Hellenistic phase is characterized by the slow collapse of Seleucid authority from the second half of the second century BCE and the challenges and opportunities that followed. The once expansive Seleucid realm was rolled back to Cilicia and the Levant: the Roman and Attalid victory at the battle of Magnesia had resulted in the Seleucid expulsion from cis-Tauric Asia Minor in 188 BCE, and the Parthian kingdom had conquered the empire’s Iranian and Mesopotamian territories by the late 140s BCE. This truncated imperial landscape, now deprived of its most productive regions, was riven by an almost continuous dynastic conflict that was manipulated by Rome, Parthia, Alexandria, and Pergamum and exploited by various of the remaining subject populations. To schematize the agonizing complexity of these intra-familial wars: the lines of Seleucus IV (Demetrius I, Demetrius II, Antiochus VII) and Antiochus IV (Antiochus V, Alexander I, Antiochus VI) fought one another between 163 and 125 BCE, those of Demetrius II (Seleucus V, Antiochus VIII) and Antiochus VII (Alexander II, Antiochus IX) between 125 and 96 BCE, and those of Antiochus VIII (Seleucus VI, Antiochus XI, Philip I, Demetrius III, Antiochus XII, Philip II) and Antiochus IX (Antiochus X, Antiochus XIII)

Gottes: Kulte und religiöses Leben in Damaskus in hellenistischer und römischer Zeit,” Polis 2 (2006): 157–70 (162–64). 42 Klaus Freyberger, “Untersuchungen zur Baugeschichte des Jupiter-Heiligtums in Damaskus,” Damaszener Mitteilungen 4 (1989): 61–86. 43 Josephus, AJ 13.151. 44 M. Dodinet, J. Leblanc, J.-P. Vallat, and F. Villeneuve, “Le paysage antique en Syrie: l’example de Damas,” Syria 67 (1990): 339–67 (342–50); Mathilde Gelin, “Aperçu de Damas antique, de l’époque hellénistique à Islam (333 av. J.-C.–635 apr.),” Les Annales ar- chéologiques Arabes syriennes 51–52 (2008–2009): 105–11 (106).

Dead Sea DiscoveriesDownloaded 25 from (2018) Brill.com10/04/2021 299–318 07:59:49AM via free access Damascus: From the Fall of Persia to the Roman Conquest 311 between 96 and 64 BCE.45 The multiplication of rival rulers within a shrunken landscape resulted in a mosaic of discontiguous, mutually hostile zones, centered on regional capitals: Antioch-by-Daphne and Seleucia-in-Pieria were the chosen political residences in northern Syria, Antioch-in-Ptolemaïs (the former Ptolemaic regional capital, Ptolemaïs-Ace) and, once again, Damascus for those controlling the southern Levant. Damascus’s re-emergence, for the first time since the Successor Wars, as a center of governance, military dominance, and kingship is evident already in the battle waged beneath its walls in 127/6 BCE by Demetrius II, recently released from his Parthian prison, and Alexander II Zabinas, his challenger and victor.46 The city’s coinage, dated by the sequential Seleucid Era (Macedonian), with its epoch of 312 BCE, rather than by the regnal years of kings, permits a year- by-year reconstruction of its mercurial politics:47 Alexander II’s dominance in Damascus was soon followed by that of Antiochus VIII Grypus (122/1‒114/3 BCE), of Antiochus IX Cyzicenus (113/2‒109/8 BCE), of Antiochus VIII Grypus again and then again (109/8‒108/7 BCE, 104/3‒99/8 BCE, with interruption), of Demetrius III “Eucaerus” (97/6‒88/7 BCE, with a possible interruption in 93/2 BCE), and of Antiochus XII Dionysus (87/6‒83/2 BCE). Notably, Demetrius III, who was installed in Damascus by Ptolemy IX Lathyrus in 97/6 BCE and ruled from the city for nine years, appears to have renamed it Demetrias. The onomastic change may mark the refoundation, poliadization, and division of agricultural lands, discussed above, though we may wonder if Demetrius III enjoyed sufficient resources or peace to permit this.48

45 For details, see Kay Ehling, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der späten Seleukiden (164–63 v. Chr.). Vom Tode des Antiochos IV. bis zur Einrichtung der Provinz Syria unter Pompeius (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2008). 46 BNJ 260 F32 = Eusebius, Chron. (Arm), with Justin, Epit. 39.1.7–8, Josephus, AJ 13.268, Appian, Syr. 68, Livy, Per. 60. 47 Houghton, Lorber, and Hoover, Seleucid Coins: #2096–2098, 2179–21847, 2248–2249, 2321–2325, 2381–2382, 2450–2458, 2471–2483; Oliver Hoover, Arthur Houghton, and Petr Veselý, “The Silver Mint of Damascus under Demetrius III and Antiochus XII (97/6 BC– 83/2 BC),” American Numismatic Society 20 (2008): 305–36; Oliver Hoover, “A Revised Chronology of the Late Seleucids at Antioch (121/0–64 BC),” Historia 56 (2007): 280–301; Arthur Houghton and Wilhelm Müseler, “The Reigns of Antiochus VIII and Antiochus IX at Damascus,” Schweizer Münzblatter 159 (1990): 57–62; Newell, “Late Seleucid Mints,” 41–107. 48 Ehling, Untersuchungen, 240; Cohen, Hellenistic Settlements in Syria, 242–43; Gelin, “Aperçu de Damas antique,” 106; Burns, Damascus, 43; Will, “Damas antique,” 10. It seems that he was briefly driven from the city in 93/2 BCE; see Hoover, Houghton, and Veselý, “Silver Mint of Damascus,” 2005; and Hoover, “A Revised Chronology,” 290. For coins with inscription ΔΗΜΗΤΡΙΕΩΝ ΤΗΣ ΙΕΡΑΣ, see Louis de Saulcy, Numismatique de la terra

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The complicated warfare of this period caught the cities of Syria between alliances of far neighbors and foreign kings against close neighbors and family rivals. Take, for instance, the interlocked Judean-Syrian-Egyptian conflict of 103‒101 BCE. This saw Antiochus VIII Grypus, who controlled most of Cilicia and northern Syria, join with the Judean ruler Alexander Jannaeus and the Egyptian mother-son alliance of Cleopatra III and Ptolemy X Alexander against his brother and cousin Antiochus IX Cyzicenus, dominant in Coele Syria and Phoenicia, who in turn was supported by Cleopatra III’s other son, Ptolemy IX Lathyrus, based in Cyprus but claiming Alexandria. The conflict is known from the historians Josephus and Justin as well as from the papyrus correspondence between groups of Egyptian soldiers from Pathyris.49 One letter, from a certain Panobchounis and dated to 27th September 103 BCE, speaks of an otherwise unknown assault on Damascus by Ptolemy X;50 we do not know whether this was to seize the city from the garrison of Antiochus IX Cyzicenus or to support a garrison of Antiochus VIII Grypus. It is difficult to get a sense of Damascus’s internal political dynamics amid this slow agony of Seleucid decline. Coin countermarks indicate the turnover of certain Damascene magistrates at each conquest and the flight to the city of loyal administrators from elsewhere.51 By comparison with the other major Syrian and Levantine urban centers, we should expect the pains of military siege and monetary exaction as well as the increased capacity to extend or withdraw support from a particular ruler. Our best evidence for the location of agency and exchangeability of monarchs at Damascus comes from an episode in Josephus dating to the mid-80s BCE. Following the Parthians’ capture and removal of Demetrius III, who had been besieging his brother Philip I Philadelphus at Beroea (Aleppo) in 88/7 BCE, his other brother Antiochus XII Dionysus had taken control of Damascus. At some later point, while Antiochus XII was absent on campaign against Arabs, Philip I marched on the city, which was betrayed to him by a certain Milesius, “commander of the akra and the Damascenes.” But when king Philip tried to make it seem as if he had taken

sainte: description des monnaies autonomes impériales de la Palestine et de l’Arabie Pétrée (Paris: J. Rothschild, 1874), 57–58. 49 Josephus, AJ 13.320–364; Justin, Epit. 39.4, with J. Whitehorne, “A Reassessment of Cleopatra III’s Syrian Campaign,” Chronique d’Egypte 70 (1995): 197–205; and E. van ’t Dack, W. Clarysse, G. Cohen, J. Quaegebeur, and J. Winnicki, The Judean-Syrian-Egyptian Conflict of 103–101 B.C. (Brussels: Publikatie van het Comité Klassieke Studies, 1989). 50 BM Pap. dem. inv. 69008 and Berlin, Staatl. Museen, Pap. dem. inv. 13381, with van ’t Dack, Clarysse, Cohen, Quaegebeur, and Winnicki, The Judean-Syrian-Egyptian Conflict, 50–61; see also Whitehorne, “Reassessment,” 202–3. 51 Houghton, Lorber, and Hoover, Seleucid Coins, 423, 476; Newell, “Late Seleucid Mints,” 53–54.

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Damascus by the fear he himself inspired, he became an immediate object of suspicion and was locked outside the walls during a visit to the hippodrome; Milesius then restored the city to Antiochus XII.52 Indeed, it is noteworthy that the coinage of Damascus’s last Seleucid rulers employed strictly local and non- royal imagery on the reverse of their precious metal coins minted in the city— not the imperial and Greek gods Apollo, Artemis, or Zeus, but the Syrian deity Atargatis for Demetrius III and the city’s tutelary divinity Hadad for Antiochus XII, each depicted in a non-Hellenistic, rigidly frontal iconography, arrayed with wheat or barley stalks and accompanied by sacred animals.53 These last Seleucid kings wished to be seen as kings of Damascus. In the absence of effective Seleucid monarchs, Damascus found itself in a kind of no-man’s-land between the grasping expansions of local indigenous powers, to east, south, west, and north. In the 80s and 70s BCE, Damascene territory and commercial caravans were threatened by Ptolemy, son of Mennaeus, leader of the Itureans of the Antilebanon and “a difficult neighbor” (ὃς βαρὺς ἦν πόλει γείτων) who was “always afflicting the city” (ἀεὶ θλίβων τὴν πόλιν).54 We know of several Maccabean/Hasmonean campaigns in the vi- cinity of Damascus, by Jonathan,55 possibly by Alexander Jannaeus,56 and by Aristobulus II, representing his mother Alexandra Salome.57 After the death of Antiochus XII Dionysus in battle, the city was taken over, perhaps at the request of its inhabitants, by the Nabatean king Aretas III, ruling from 83/2 to 72/1 BCE, with a possible interruption by Antiochus XIII Philometor and his mother Cleopatra Selene, successive wife of Ptolemy IX Alexander, Antiochus VIII Grypus, Antiochus IX Cyzicenus, and Antiochus X Eusebes.58 Aretas’s

52 Josephus, AJ 13.387–389. 53 Ehling, Untersuchungen, 106–7, 246–47; Freyberger, “Im Zeichen des höchsten Gottes,” 167–68; Newell, “Late Seleucid Mints,” 78–87. 54 Josephus, AJ 13.392; quotations from Josephus, AJ 13.418 and BJ 1.115; Strabo 16.2.18. On the Itureans and Damascus, see, e.g., Brent Shaw, “Lords of the Levant: The Borderlands of Syria and Phoenicia in the First Century,” Scripta Classica Israelica 33 (2014): 225–42 (233–38), Götz Smith, “Zum Königreich Chalkis,” ZDPV 98 (1982): 110–24, Willy Schottroff, “Die Ituräer,” ZDPV 98 (1982): 125–52, and Leon Marfoe, “The Integrative Transformation: Patterns of Sociopolitical Organization in Southern Syria,” BASOR 234 (1979): 1–42 (23–25). Such Iturean aggression against the city continued under Zenodorus, perhaps the grand- son of Ptolemaeus; see Josephus, AJ 15.344 and BJ 1.398. 55 1 Macc. 11:62, 12:31. 56 Suggested by Kenneth Atkinson, A History of the Hasmonean State: Josephus and Beyond (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 126–27, relating to Demetrius III’s possible expulsion from the city in 93/2 BCE. 57 Josephus, AJ 13.418, BJ 1.115, with Atkinson, Hasmonean State, 140–41. 58 Josephus, AJ 13.392, BJ 1.103; Ehling, Untersuchungen, 242–43; Lorber, Houghton, and Hoover 2008, Seleucid Coins, ##2484–2486; Oliver Hoover, “Dethroning Seleucus VII

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Damascene coinage, all dated by the Seleucid Era and with the king’s features modeled on the aquiline profile of Antiochus VIII and his descendants, demon- strates a desire to be depicted as a legitimate successor of the Seleucid kings in the city.59 With their control of the Hauran trade, the Nabateans would remain a dominating presence for decades,60 perhaps controlling the city during the mission and flight of Paul.61 Finally, between 72/1 and 70/69 BCE the city fell to the expansionist king of Armenia, the Artaxiad Tigranes II, whose Damascene coins continued the types of Aretas III.62 These emergent, post-Seleucid powers interacted over Damascus in complicated and mostly irrecoverable ways: the Damascenes twice called in a foreign ruler for help against the Itureans, first the Nabatean Aretas III, then Alexandra Salome of Judea, indicating both the extent of Iturean depradation and the exhausted city’s own incapacity;63 it has been proposed that Aretas III, Cleopatra Selene, and Alexandra Salome made an alliance against the Armenians.64 The Roman defeat of Mithridates, father-in-law of Tigranes II, soon put an end to this bewildering and brutally unpredictable period of regional collapse. With the Parthian threat in mind, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus deposed the last Seleucid king, Antiochus XIII Asiaticus, and provincialized Syria for the Roman Republic in 64 BCE. He was anticipated at Damascus by his legates L. Lollius, Q. Metellus Nepos, and M. Aemilius Scaurus; not long later, the great conqueror arrived. It was from Damascus, by now, once more, the natural center of the middle Levant, that Pompey organized the new province of Syria and attempted to settle affairs in Judea and Egypt.65 The period of Roman dominance falls beyond the scope of the Damascus Document’s composition, so we need only note that over the next centuries of imperial rule, and within a context of far greater security, a more distant imperial center, and the possibility of a certain political predictability, Damascus appears to have flourished. At some point, agricultural lands to the city’s south

Philometor (Cybiosactes): Epigraphical Arguments Against a Late Seleucid Monarch,” ZPE 151 (2005): 95–99. 59 Christian-Georges Schwentzel, “Les thèmes du monnayage royal nabatéen et le modèle monarchique hellénistique,” Syria 82 (2005): 149–66 (152); Ya’akov Meshorer, Nabataean Coins (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1975), 9, 12. 60 See, e.g., F. Peters, “The Nabateans in the Hawran,” JAOS 97 (1977): 263–77 (263–67). 61 2 Corinthians 11:32. 62 Y. Nercessian, Silver Coinage of the Artaxiad Dynasty of Armenia (Los Angeles: Armenian Numismatic Society, 2006), 80–82. 63 Josephus, AJ 13.392, 13.418, with Schottroff, “Die Ituräer,” 133–34. 64 Atkinson, Hasmonean State, 141. 65 Josephus, AJ 14.29, 33–34, 41–45, with Plutarch, Pomp. 39.2, Dio Cassius, 38.7a, Appian, Mithr. 106, Syr. 49, 70, Justin, Epit. 40.2.5, Eutropius 6.14.

Dead Sea DiscoveriesDownloaded 25 from (2018) Brill.com10/04/2021 299–318 07:59:49AM via free access Damascus: From the Fall of Persia to the Roman Conquest 315 and west were centuriated into 50 hectare squares, producing a different scale and morphology of division to the earlier Hellenistic matrix.66 Damascus re- ceived various civic amenities from Herod of Judea (see below). A massive building program, beginning in the reign of Augustus as dated by inscriptions, expanded the outer courtyards of the Hadad-Zeus-Jupiter temple to a scale (150 × 100 m and 385 × 305 m) comparable with Herod’s in Jerusalem.67

4 Cultural Developments

Damascus displays the hybridized identity typical of the old urban centers of the Hellenistic Levant. While only a few of the city’s built nodes and cultural institutions are known from before Pompey’s provincialization of Syria, the desultory reign of Antiochus XII Dionysus (87/6‒83/2 BCE) offers passing reference to a hippodrome outside the city’s walls and a garrisoned akra within.68 Inscriptions of the Damascene diaspora in the second-century BCE Aegean indicate the adoption or use of standard Greek or dynastic Macedonian names— Alexander, Cleopatra, Agathocles, Lysias—as well as involvement in gymnastic activities and cult.69 In the mid-first century BCE Nicolaus of Damascus’s par- ents, Antipater and Stratonice, ensured his education in literature, rhetoric, music, mathematics, and “all philosophy.”70 These are fair indications of the self-conscious Hellenizing of the late Hellenistic civic elite as well as the urban institutions to support such aspirations. So when Herod the Great funded the construction of a theatre and a gymnasium at Damascus, both of which may have recently been found beneath late Ottoman houses,71 it is likely that he was enhancing rather than establishing these centers of polis life.

66 Dodinet, Leblanc, Vallat, and Villeneuve, “Le paysage antique,” 343–46. 67 Building inscriptions: SEG 2 828–832, all to be dated according to the Seleucid, not the Pompeian, Era; see Henri Seyrig, “Antiquités syriennes #42,” Syria 27 (1950): 5–56 (34–37). For the reconstruction, see Freyberger, “Im Zeichen des höchsten Gottes” and “Untersuchungen.” 68 Josephus, AJ 13.388–389. 69 Julien Aliquot, “La diaspora damascene aux époques hellénistique et romaine,” Les Annales archeologiques Arabes syriennes 51–52 (2008–2009): 77–92. 70 Nicolaus of Damascus FGrHist 90 F132 = Suda s.v. Νικόλαυς, with Ben Zion Wacholder, Nicolaus of Damascus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 16–17. 71 Josephus, BJ 1.422–423, with Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis and Ross Burns, “A Roman Monumental Building in South-East Damascus?” Levant 47 (2015): 93–111; Peder Mortensen, “The Roman Theatre at Bayt al-’Aqqad,” Les Annales archeologiques Arabes syriennes 51–52 (2008–2009): 73–76.

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At the same time, a few traces suggest the active commemoration of Damascus’s Iron Age Aramean greatness. The incorporation into the first- century CE Jupiter temple of a carved basalt orthostat of a winged sphinx in Phoenician-Egyptian style, likely dating to ninth or eighth centuries, indicates both the continued visibility and contemporary significance of Damascus’s glorious past.72 Josephus, drawing on Nicolaus of Damascus, reports that the dēmos of Damascus honored their former kings, Ader and Azaēlos, as gods, on account of their benefaction and temple-building in the city. “Each day”, Josephus writes, “they process in honor of the kings and revere their antiquity” (πομπεύουσι δ’ αὐτοὶ καθ’ ἑκάστην ἡμέραν ἐπὶ τῇ τιμῇ τῶν βασιλέων καὶ σεμνύνονται τὴν τούτων ἀρχαιότητα).73 Even late antique encomia to Damascus could recall kings Tiglath-Pileser III, Hazael, and Razon, alongside the mythical Assyrian rulers Ninus and Semiramis.74 Beside the city’s long-standing Syrian or Aramean population and Hellenized or Hellenic elites, we know of a Nabatean district, a Jewish community, and a city block of Hauran Arabs.75 Evidence for Hellenistic Damascus is, inevitably, slight, but the tradition that Abraham had once reigned as king in Damascus, offered by Nicolaus of Damascus in the first century BCE, and also found in Justin’s Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus, an Augustan- period Gallo-Roman historian, likely derives from a Hellenistic Jewish population resident in the city.76 Similarly, the village in the Damascene chōra (ἐν τῇ Δαμασκηνῇ) named “Abraham’s residence” (῾Αβράμου οἴκησις) could indicate a non-urban Jewish presence as well.77 Certainly, by the first century CE, a very large Jewish community is known. If we are to trust Acts, Saul/Paul chose Damascus as the destination of his persecuting activities immediately after

72 K. Lawson Younger Jr., A Political History of the Arameans from their Origins to the End of their Polities (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2016), 554; Burns, Damascus, 16; Will “Damas antique,” 6. It is noteworthy that Damascus’s Hadad-Zeus-Jupiter was honored as “ancestral” (πα- τρῷος) on an imperial-period altar (SEG 1 546); see Freyberger, “Im Zeichen des höchsten Gottes,” 168–69. 73 Josephus, AJ 9.93–94. 74 See, e.g., Sophron of Jerusalem, SS Cyrii et Ioannis Miracula LIV (PG LXXXVII 3621), with Weber, “‘Damaskòs Pólis Epísēmos’,” 149. 75 Sack, Damaskus, 11. 76 Nicolaus of Damascus FGrHist 90 F19 = Josephus, AJ 1.159; Justin, Epit. 36.2.1–3. 77 Nicolaus of Damascus FGrHist 90 F19 = Josephus, AJ 1.159, with Bezalel Bar Kochva, The Image of the Jews in Greek Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 488n57 and Jeffrey Siker, “Abraham in Graeco-Roman Paganism,” JSJ 18 (1987): 188–208 (192–93).

Dead Sea DiscoveriesDownloaded 25 from (2018) Brill.com10/04/2021 299–318 07:59:49AM via free access Damascus: From the Fall of Persia to the Roman Conquest 317 his work in Jerusalem; his subsequent ventures testify to several synagogues.78 During the First Revolt, over ten thousand unarmed Damascene Jews were said to have been pressed into the city’s gymnasium—perhaps the very one con- structed by Herod—and then slaughtered in a single hour.79 Indeed, it is possible that at least some of the Jews who had settled in second- and first-century BCE Damascus had moved from Judea or Babylonia at the instigation of a Seleucid monarch. Such imperially-prompted Jewish migration, encouraged by land grants, tax incentives, and religious guarantees, is known from elsewhere in the Seleucid empire.80 Indeed, if there is a real- world, accurate, historical referent to the Damascus Document’s “390 years” (or 390 plus 20 years) from Jerusalem’s destruction by Nebuchadnezzar to the community’s migration to Damascus,81 and not only a scriptural reference to Ezekiel 4:5, this would fall soon after Antiochus III’s incorporation of the city and the rest of the southern Levant in the Fifth Syrian War and so during the administrative realignments that followed. We must ask: was this new community of Jews a part of the broader Seleucid project of claiming, colonizing, and poliadizing Damascus?

5 Historical Semantics

In the Damascus Document, the fundamental work done by “the land of Damascus” is relational. As Maxine Grossman has emphasized, without com- mitment to its historicity, the text repeatedly uses the departure to or dwelling in “Damascus” as a figure for the spiritual separation of its community from the ill-usages and new ways of Jerusalem and Judah.82 We must close by asking how the real, historical city of Damascus fitted into the Levant’s relational net- works. Needless to say, the city of Damascus must have meant different things at different times to different inhabitants; yet two possible themes emerge that

78 Acts 9:2, 19–20, 22 and 2 Cor 11:32–33, with F. Schilling, “Why Did Paul Go to Damascus?” Anglican Theological Review 16 (1934): 199–205. 79 Josephus, BJ 2.560, with Vita 27; the number is increased to 18,000 in Eleazar’s speech, Josephus, BJ 7.368. 80 In Lydia and Phrygia: Josephus, AJ 12.147–153, with Getzel Cohen, The Hellenistic Settlements in Europe, the Islands, and Asia Minor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 212–13, and idem, The Seleucid Colonies: Studies in Founding, Administration and Organization (Wiesbaden: Historia Einzelschriften 30, 1978), 5–9. 81 CD 1:5–10. 82 Maxine Grossman, Reading for History in the Damascus Document: A Methodological Study, STDJ 45 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 177, 180–81.

Dead Sea Discoveries 25 (2018) 299–318 Downloaded from Brill.com10/04/2021 07:59:49AM via free access 318 Kosmin may have resonated with the historical thinking and contrastive dynamics of the Document. One plausible semantic frame was that of loss and restoration: Damascus passed through a tripartite historical periodization as a once mighty capital and court, then a rapidly bypassed and depressed town in the century after the Macedonian conquest, and finally a re-risen and reconstructed capital. More germane, perhaps, is Damascus’s likely functioning in a kind of dia- lectic relation with the Seleucid colony of Antioch-by-Daphne. Damascus had been the Levantine capital of the Aramean, Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Achaemenid kingdoms. Its sudden displacement by the ground-breaking, grid- planned, dynastically-named colonial foundations of the Syrian Tetrapolis, all cities without earlier indigenous backgrounds, suggests that Damascus may have come to stand for the former dispensation within the mental geography of the Hellenistic Levant—that is, a representative of the world before the Macedonian conquest, of the old ways of language, religion, and kingship, even of the provocative fact of a deep, pre-Hellenistic history. Think, for instance, of the well-studied polarities of contemporary Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro, St. Petersburg and Moscow.83 Such a dynamic may have gained a greater cultural recognition and political potency during the generations of Seleucid internecine conflict, when kings based in Antioch op- posed kings of Damascus.

While the political developments, cultural tensions, and historical semantics of Hellenistic Damascus can, with current evidence, only be reconstructed in outline, it cannot be doubted that this “real world” Damascene context im- pressed upon the conceptions of the Document’s author(s), readers, and interpreters.

83 See, e.g., Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 83–171.

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