100 | CHAPTER 4
To resume: Given, first, that our concern is chiefly with Judaism, Christi-
anity and Islam, not just in their origins but in their spread and maturation,
with the geographical emphases just noted; and second that our interest in
ancient Greek thought is focused on its latest phases in Alexandria and then
in Syriac and Arabic translation; it follows that the geographical space we are
concerned with is not primarily the Greco- Romanists’ and Europeanists’
Mediterranean.^31 Nor is it Fernand Braudel’s “Greater Mediterranean,”
which still focuses on the inland sea. Rather it is the region that extends from
the easternmost reaches of the Iranian world to the Mediterranean in the
West—a Mediterranean sometimes single and safe as under Rome at its ze-
nith; sometimes weighted toward the East as in the fifth and sixth centuries
when the West was disrupted and divided; and then eventually under sub-
stantial but not exclusive Muslim sway from the Levant to Andalus. This vast
expanse is almost identical (more generous west of Epirus) to Alexander
the Great’s empire. More generally, it is the map familiar from histories of
the ancient Near East. In proposing this eastward shift of emphasis, I take no
side in the debate about whether the Mediterranean world has some intrinsic
unity beyond having once been all controlled by Rome. I simply draw atten-
tion to the fact that the current inquiry, principally about the history of
Greek and Arabic culture and ideas, favors a geographical framework whose
western part is the Mediterranean variously weighted as the First Millen-
nium proceeds, and whose center is Syria- Mesopotamia, while its eastern
edge is the Hindū Kush mountains of Afghanistan. (For pre- Islamic Arabic
poets, “Turk wa- Kābul” was the equivalent of “Ultima Thule.”^32 )
Neither the Latin end of the Mediterranean, nor Central Asia and China,
is by definition excluded from this scheme. An Augustan official, L. Sestius
Quirinalis, might erect altars to his master on Cape Finisterre in the Atlantic
to mirror those of Alexander on the Central Asian Jaxartes and the Indian
Hyphasis^33 and express a Roman dream of world empire over “our part of the
earth” (“pars nostra terrarum”).^34 The mental horizon of an Edessene intel-
lectual c. 200 or of an Armenian c. 630 might stretch from China to Britain
31 And note how, rereading the myth of Dionysus in fifth- century Eg ypt, one might be led to re-
center it on the Near East: F. Hadjittofi, “Nonnus’ unclassical epic: Imaginary geography in the Dionysi-
aca,” in C. Kelly and others (eds), Unclassical traditions (Cambridge 2010–11) 2.29–42.
32 C. E. Bosworth, “Kābul,” EIs^2 4.356.
33 A. Grüner, “Die Altäre des L. Sestius Quirinalis bei Kap Finisterre,” Madrider Mitteilungen 46
(2005) 247–66; and cf. Orosius, Histories [3:60] 6.21.19–20, on Indian and Scythian ambassadors visit-
ing Augustus at Tarragona and hailing him as another Alexander, who had received a Spanish embassy at
Babylon. It was a natural thought that once the Romans reached the ocean in the West, they would turn
against the East: Sallust [ed. L. D. Reynolds (Oxford 1991); tr. J. C. Rolfe (London 1921)], Histories 4 fr.
69 (Letter of Mithridates) 17.
34 Pliny, Natural history [ed. C. Mayhoff (Leipzig 1899–1906); tr. H. Rackham and others (Cam-
bridge, Mass. 1938–63)] 2.112.242.