DOTTORATO IN SCIENZE STORICHE, ARCHEOLOGICHE E STORICO-ARTISTICHE Coordinatore prof. Francesco Caglioti XXIX ciclo Dottorando: Paolo Cimadomo Tutor: prof.ssa Raffaella Pierobon; cotutor: prof. Mauro de Nardis Tesi di dottorato: Conflicts and Cohabitations in the Southern Levant during the first Centuries of the Roman Rule (64 BCE – 135 CE) 2017 - 2 - CONTENTS FOREWORD 6 CHAPTER 1: GLOBALISING ATTITUDES 1.1 THE ROMANISATION DEBATE 9 1.2 THE DEVELOPMENT OF NEW APPROACHES 12 1.3 GLOBALISATION AND THE ROMAN WORLD 14 1.4 IDENTITY AND ETHNICITY 16 1.5 ARCHAEOLOGICAL APPROACHES TOWARD ETHNICITY 18 1.6 ROMAN ETHNICITIES 20 1.7 INTEGRATION AND PREJUDICES 23 1.8 COMMON ANCESTORS 25 1.9 CONCLUSIONS 28 CHAPTER 2: THE GALILEANS 2.1 GEOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND 29 2.2 GALILEE BEFORE THE HASMONAEANS 29 2.3 FROM THE HASMONAEANS TO THE BAR KOKHBA REVOLT 32 2.4 EPIGRAPHIC SOURCES 38 2.5 THE COINAGE 39 2.6 ARCHAEOLOGICAL FINDS 40 2.7 CONCLUSIONS: GALILEE BETWEEN AUTONOMY AND INTEGRATION 46 CHAPTER 3: THE ARABS IN SOUTHERN SYRIA 3.1 WHO WERE THE «ARABS»? 48 3.2 ITURAEANS 3.2.1 LITERARY SOURCES 54 3.3.2 EPIGRAPHIC SOURCES 56 3.3.3 THE ORIGINS AND DISTRIBUTION 57 3.3.4 THE COINAGE 58 3.3.5 ARCHAEOLOGICAL FINDS 60 3.3.6 CONCLUSIONS 64 - 3 - 3.4 THE NABATAEANS IN NORTHERN TRANSJORDAN AREA 3.4.1 LITERARY SOURCES 65 3.4.2 EPIGRAPHIC AND PAPYROLOGICAL SOURCES 73 3.4.3 THE COINAGE 77 3.4.4 ARCHAEOLOGICAL FINDS 79 3.4.5 CONCLUSIONS 88 CHAPTER 4: THE GREEKS (?) OF THE DECAPOLIS AREA 4.1 INTRODUCTION 91 4.2 GEOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND 93 4.3 LITERARY SOURCES 95 4.4 THE CITIES 98 4.5 CANATHA/QANAWAT 100 4.5.1 HISTORY OF THE RESEARCH 101 4.5.2 URBAN LANDSCAPE 103 4.6 ADRAHA/DERAA 106 4.6.1 HISTORY OF THE RESEARCH 106 4.6.2 URBAN LANDSCAPE 107 4.7 DION 109 4.7.1 HISTORY OF THE RESEARCH 110 4.8 RAPHANA 112 4.9 HIPPOS/SUSSITA 113 4.9.1 HISTORY OF THE RESEARCH 115 4.9.2 URBAN LANDSCAPE 115 4.10 GADARA/UMM QAIS 120 4.10.1 HISTORY OF THE RESEARCH 123 4.10.2 URBAN LANDSCAPE 126 4.11 CAPITOLIAS/BEIT RAS 127 4.11.1 HISTORY OF THE RESEARCH 128 4.11.2 URBAN LANDSCAPE 129 4.12 ABILA/QUWAILIBAH 132 4.12.1 HISTORY OF THE RESEARCH 133 4.12.2URBAN LANDSCAPE 134 4.13 SCYTHOPOLIS/BETH SHEAN 137 - 4 - 4.13.1 HISTORY OF THE RESEARCH 140 4.13.2 URBAN LANDSCAPE 141 4.14 PELLA/TABAQAT FAHL 145 4.14.1 HISTORY OF THE RESEARCH 147 4.14.2 URBAN LANDSCAPE 148 4.15 GERASA/JERASH 152 4.15.1 HISTORY OF THE RESEARCH 155 4.15.2 URBAN LANDSCAPE 156 4.16 PHILADELPHIA/AMMAN 161 4.16.1 HISTORY OF THE RESEARCH 164 4.16.2 URBAN LANDSCAPE 165 4.17 CONCLUSIONS 4.17.1 URBAN DEVELOPMENT 168 4.17.2 THE NATURE OF THE DECAPOLIS CITIES 170 4.17.3 THE SPREAD OF SPECTACLE BUILDINGS 175 CONCLUSIONS 5.1 BLOOD MATTERS 181 5.2 TOWARD HOMOGENISATION? 184 ABBREVIATIONS 186 ABBREVIATIONS OF ANCIENT SOURCES 188 BIBLIOGRAPHY 190 - 5 - FOREWORD Every man in every time felt the desire and the need to connect himself to the other. It is easily clear for the contemporary world, but it was also true for the ancient past. We have often heard about our world as a globalised one, with many interconnectivities and the possibility to know what happened everywhere. The principal issue of this work is to understand if a certain degree of «globalisation» was reached even among ancient communities of the Near East, if there were cases of interconnectivities, cohabitations or conflicts. First of all, I shall attempt to explain my choices. The chronological limits are mostly political: from the coming of Pompey in the region during 64/63 BCE until the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, when Rome seems to have suppressed any independence will in the territories of the Southern Levant. The chosen period was full of interesting political activities, which subverted the lives of local population. More than the annexation of the former Nabataean kingdom, in fact, the defeat of rebels during the Bar Kokhba revolt represented the start for an accelerating process of integration. The analysis starts with a brief history of modern theories about Roman approaches on subjected populations. The concept of Romanisation, as well as the idea of Hellenisation, has been used for a long time by scholars for explaining the hierarchical relationship between a supposed «superior» culture (in this cases, the Roman and the Greek ones) with «inferior» civilisations, namely the peoples which Romans and Greeks have met around the Mediterranean Sea. In this sense, the accounts of Western scholars about Roman history shared often an anti- Oriental interpretation of history, with many prejudices on African and Near Eastern areas1. The processes of cultural integration (or, in some cases, their refusal) were the results of long and multifaceted interactions and sometimes clashes. According to Saskia Roselaar, many studies of the Roman empire lack to explain the causes of the changes, as if the Roman conquest was itself sufficient to justify these profound transformations2. Modern social and anthropologic theories have shown that the relationships between people are far more complex, abandoning the concept of «Romanisation». In fact, the development of a global world system over the past fifty years has shown that the European past cannot represent the universal past, criticizing the Western perspective of the history. Romanisation helped to create a school of thought that perceived a natural superiority of Roman identity over local culture 3: therefore, Romanisation has been considered an early form of progress. The case of Rome was undoubtedly sui generis: there was, in fact, a vast variety of responses to Roman conquest, even inside the same province. How provincial subjects reacted to Roman rule is complex, particularly in the Near East: here many ancient cultures and religions intertwined, transforming the expressions of Greekness, which became a new original culture, hybrid and reshaped in all its aspects. Instead of homogenisation or Romanisation, for the Eastern provinces the term resistance was the main concept and the attention was mostly directed at the survival of the Greek culture4. 1 HINGLEY 2005, 29. 2 ROSELAAR 2015b, 1-2. 3 HINGLEY 2005, 37. 4 LULIĆ 2015, 20. - 6 - The aim of this study is to explore the centrality of integration processes during a period that has often been regarded as formative for the culture of the empire: the coming of Rome tended to increase the diversity of cultural identities. Even those activities that were at first instance considered unambiguously Greek were absorbed into Roman framework: however, there were many local realities which developed and were always considered different, like the Jews and Arabs, who represented something of different in the Empire. FIG. 1. The Roman Empire under Trajan rule. The area investigated is in blue. From https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ARoman_Empire_Trajan_117AD.png For these reasons, this work is focused on one area that knew a very impressive mingle of nations and people. It has been not possible to explore the entire Near East in detail, because the amount of material is too great and varied. For the same reason, I have chosen to trait only marginally the religious question. There are many excellent works about religion of these ethnicities, mostly about Judaism, and I have preferred to not compete with them. The best part of the work has been devoted to archaeological evidences, in particular to architectural and topographic features, albeit I have tried to collect all the sources connected to the places under examination. In detail, literary sources have constituted an important role in the analysis, as well as epigraphic and numismatic ones. The absence of defined political boundaries constituted one of the biggest problems. The issue of exactly defining these areas is connected to the lack of one clear geographical or cultural entity. This area has been interdependent even before the Roman rule: as we will see, Phoenicia, Syria, Palaestina, Arabia and Mesopotamia were so strictly related that their political boundaries were often not taken in account. The presence of nomads entangles the already complicated situation. In particular, so many different people - 7 - dwelt Transjordanian area that it is very difficult to reconstruct precise borders of such nations that emerged during the 2nd century BCE, like Ituraeans, Nabataeans or Judaeans. Another important aspect that is sometimes forgotten is that the area represented for many centuries the periphery of Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms, and then was close the eastern frontier zone of the Roman empire. All these conditions have made the study of these territories very problematic but fascinating. Ethnicity and culture are very difficult concept to examine, even because the social identities we are able to detect were not the only ones that existed. Many ways, based on social, religious and political institutions, might identify social individuals. Cultures and ethnicities are constantly renegotiated and reformulated, because each individual was part of a network of social relations and had the capacity for deciding to accept, transform or reject incentives that had different origins. - 8 - CHAPTER 1: GLOBALISING ATTITUDES 1.1 THE ROMANISATION DEBATE Romanisation is a modern concept, derived from national and imperial ideologies born at the end of the 19th century, which introduced the ideas of nationhood and empire. According to Greg Woolf, the premises of these accounts were two: first, non all the human races were considered equally participating in civilization; second, there was a profound Eurocentric vision of the world5.