Middle East - Anthony Ham [21]
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Alexander the Great, directed by Oliver Stone, made much of Alexander’s supposed sexual ambiguity, but it’s a spectacular Hollywood adaptation of the life of the great man.
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What the Mesopotamians began with their city-states, the Romans perfected in the extravagant cities that they built to glorify the empire but which also provided new levels of comfort for local inhabitants. Their construction, or development of earlier Phoenician and Greek settlements at Ephesus (Click here), Palmyra (Click here), Baalbek (Click here) and Jerash (Click here) announced that the Romans intended to stay.
So was the Roman Middle East a utopia? Well, not exactly. As just about any foreign power has failed to learn right up to the 21st century, Middle Easterners don’t take kindly to promises of wealth in exchange for sovereignty. The fiercely independent nomads that occupied the empty spaces on the Roman map did as they pleased and the Romans largely left them to their own devices.
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Alexander the Great on the Web (www.isidore-of-seville.com/Alexanderama.html) contains good links to books and other references on the Middle East’s youngest and most successful empire builder.
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The same could not be said for the Jews who, living in Palestine at the heart of Roman rule, found themselves stripped of political power and operating in an ever-diminishing space of religious and economic freedom. By the middle of the 1st century AD, Jews across the Roman Empire had had enough. Primary among their grievances were punitive taxes, the Roman decision to appoint Jewish high priests and the not-inconsiderable blasphemy of Emperor Caligula’s decision in AD 39 to declare himself a deity. The anti-Roman sentiment had been bubbling away for three decades, in part due to one rebellious orator – Jesus of Nazareth (Click here) – and to a Jewish sect called the Zealots, whose creed stated that all means were justified to liberate the Jews.
Led by the Zealots, the Jews of Jerusalem destroyed a small Roman garrison in the Holy City in AD 66. Infighting within the revolt and the burning of food stockpiles in order to force wavering Jews to participate had disastrous consequences. Jerusalem was razed to the ground and up to 100,000 Jews were killed in retaliation; some Jewish historians claim that the number of dead over the four years of the revolt reached a million.
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The Middle East under Rome, by Maurice Sartre et al, is one of the few region-wide studies of Rome’s rule over the Middle East. It combines academic research with an accessible writing style.
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The failed uprising and the brutal Roman response (which came to be known as the First Jewish-Roman War) would have consequences that have rippled down through the centuries. Jerusalem was rebuilt as a Roman city and the Jews were sent into exile (which, for many Jews, ended only with the creation of the State of Israel in 1948). Few people in the Middle East dared to challenge the Romans after that.
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Petra is the most famous Nabataean city, but the sister city of Madain Saleh, in Saudi Arabia, has similarly spectacular, rock-hewn tombs. In 2008, it became Saudi Arabia’s first Unesco World Heritage site.
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In AD 331, the newly converted Emperor Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the ‘Holy Roman Empire’, with its capital not jaded, cynical Rome but the newly renamed city of Constantinople (formerly Byzantium, later to become İstanbul). Constantinople reached its apogee during the reign of Justinian (AD 527–65), when the Byzantine