Eivind Heldaas Seland

• University of Bergen

The Syrian oasis city Tadmor, better known as Palmyra, has received by far the most attention within scholarship on the Roman Near East over recent decades. New evidence and recent research allow us to better understand many aspects of Palmyra on its own terms, but it also has highlighted the lack of synthetically published data from Palmyra itself...

Urban resilience in past societies is challenging to measure given the nature of our data, which, for the most part, gives insight into past processes only through their archaeological and historical outcomes. We, therefore, suggest approaching the issue in conjunction with vulnerability, which was only too familiar to ancient societies, and outcom...

The Strata Diocletiana was a military road in Late Roman Period Syria. It ran from Damascus to the Euphrates by way of Palmyra. The road was fortified and received its name during the reign of Diocletian (284–305 CE), following the Roman sack and subsequent garrisoning of Palmyra after the city’s failed revolt 272–273 CE. The Strata Diocletiana is...

The Norwegian Arbeidernes leksikon, “Workers’ Encyclopedia,” was published in six volumes from 1931–1936. It was inspired by The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, explicitly aimed at working-class readers, and establishing an alternative to the hegemonic bourgeoise discourse. The editors and many of the contributors belonged to the Communist Party of Norw...

Food security in ancient urban centers is often discussed but rarely formally modelled. Despite its location in an inhospitable desert where food production is a constant challenge ancient Palmyra grew from a small oasis settlement in to a major geopolitical player. Here, we present a spatially explicit reconstruction of the land use and agricultur...

Palmyra, the UNESCO world heritage site that tragically made headlines following ISIS's destruction of several of its key monuments in 2015, was once a thriving city in the heart of the Syrian Desert. Settled from Neolithic through modern times, the documented urban history of the site spans a millennium, from the late centuries bc until the late f...

In this proof-of-concept study we investigate the potential and chal-lenges of a formal network approach for the examination of 1st to 3rd century CE kinship networks in ancient Palmyra (in present-day Syria). The recent availabil-ity of a large, digitised archaeological dataset allows for a thorough reassessment of previously studied genealogies....

Rivers have always been a magnet for human settlement, providing resources, such as water, food, and energy, and communication and travel routes. Climate- and human-made changes to the environment can easily affect the fragile balance between the 'natural' and the 'urban', causing droughts, floods, and other changes in riverine systems that challen...

While horses and camels depicted in Palmyrene artworks (first three centuries CE) have often been related to caravan trade, the animals are mostly shown with riding gear or as symbols in religious contexts. Drawing together all iconographic evidence of horses and camels from the area, the authors discuss Palmyrene society’s attitude towards these a...

Combining global perspectives with localized case studies and integrating scientific and material evidence of environmental change in historical narratives are amongst the main challenges for the field of global history in addressing the dawn of the Anthropocene. In this article, we trace the relationship of the city of Gerasa (Jerash, Jordan) with...

In this article, we present a new figural graffito from the temple of Bel at Palmyra and place it in context with two recently published examples from Tomb no. 173. They may constitute corroborating figurative visual representations for a segment of the Palmyrene trading cycle that has hitherto rested on epigraphic, ethnographic or other historical...

Wer die Integration des Indischen Ozeans in die Netzwerke der antiken Welt beschreiben will, tut dies üblicherweise aus einer mediterranen Perspektive. Diese Herangehensweise wird durch die Quellenlage und die historiographische Tradition gestützt. Sie führt jedoch implizit ein Narrativ der Frühen Neuzeit fort, die in den antiken Seefahrern aus dem...

This interdisciplinary study addresses issues of urban-riverine hinterland relationships in semi-arid environments over millennia at Gerasa/Jerash in Jordan, presenting research that stimulates new lines of enquiry with much broader implications than those relating to this single site. Through the presentation of new data on wadi-sediment responses...

Although facilitating material exchange, trade networks consist of people and are thus in essence social networks. Social networks depend on cohesion among members and boundary-maintenance towards other groups. Throughout history, ethnicity and geographical origin have been important group markers, but long-distance trade poses particular challenge...

The Syrian city of Palmyra was a major hub in the Old World trade of the first centuries CE. It has long been clear that the main eastern axis of Palmyrene trade was directed towards the Euphrates and the Persian Gulf. The route from Palmyra to Hit on the Euphrates was first described by Mouterde and Poidebard in 1931, but Poidebard’s survey (1930–...

Cambridge Core - Prehistory - Globalization in Prehistory - edited by Nicole Boivin

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

In the Roman period the world from the Atlantic Ocean to the East China Sea was tied together by ships and caravans carrying textiles, minerals, aromatics, and other valuable commodities across vast distances. In the span of three short centuries the Syrian city of Palmyra rose from unremarkable origins to assume a key role in this exchange - a pos...

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea is a Roman period guide to trade and navigation in the Indian Ocean. Justly famous for offering a contemporary and descriptive account of early Indian Ocean trade, the work has been subject to and a point of departure for numerous studies. Its extensive influence on scholarship is, however, also problematic, as it...

Historians and archaeologists often take connectivity for granted, and fail to address the problems of documenting patterns of movement. This article highlights the methodological challenges of reconstructing trade routes in prehistory and early history. The argument is made that these challenges are best met through the application of modern model...

In the millennium after 300 BC, the western Indian Ocean emerged as a main hub of Old World exchange. Study of this commerce long depended on separate regional archaeologies and a handful of literary sources with Western/Roman bias. A recent surge in scholarly interest has led to a vast increase in data that has fostered a more balanced understandi...

The ancient East African kingdom of Aksum gradually adopted Christianity from the early- to mid-fourth-century reign of Ezana onwards. The well-known narrative of the late Roman church-historian Rufinus relates a top-down process of conversion, starting with the ruler himself. The report, corroborated by the adoption of Christian symbolism on Ezana...

The Indian Ocean is famous for its well-documented Jewish and Islamic trading networks of the medieval and early modern periods. Social networks that eased the challenges of cross-cultural trade have a much longer history in the region, however. The great distances covered by merchants and the seasonality of the monsoons left few alternatives to st...

The significance of faith as a cohesive element in the development of commercial networks in the Indian Ocean is well documented in the case of Islamic and Jewish diasporas of the medieval period, but what was the situation in Late Antiquity, when Christianity was the expanding religion in the areas east and south of the Mediterranean? Drawing on l...

From the first century bce until the third century ce, Roman trade with the Indian Ocean passed by way of two major axes: the Red Sea–Nile and the Persian Gulf–Syrian Desert. The overall distance by way of the Persian Gulf–Syrian Desert route was considerably shorter, but the overland part of the journey was almost four times longer, and goods had...

A famous passage in the 1st-century Greek merchant's handbook, Periplus Maris Erythraei, reports a Roman attack on the city of Eudaimôn Arabia – Aden in present-day Yemen. No such campaign is known from other sources, and the passage has been ascribed to a scribal error, to an otherwise unknown Roman campaign and to a mix-up with the well-known Ara...

In the decades around the beginning of our era, emergent Roman participation in the monsoon trade with India, Africa and Arabia reputedly brought a well-established system out of balance. Patterns of commerce changed. New states emerged and old states lost power. In Southern Arabia, the states that achieved political and military success in the fol...