The Problem of Hellenistic Syria of inland Syrian cities in the Hellenistic period, one can add a passing allu-
sion to the fact that Antonius could find in Antioch in the s..aleading
citizen who knew Aramaic, or perhaps Parthian (PlutarchAnt. ).
One of the major problems in the understanding of Hellenistic Syria is
thus the relative scarcity of direct and contemporary evidence for any non-
Greek culture, or cultures, in the region, either in the Achaemenid or the
Hellenistic period itself. That might not matter, if we were confident that
the evidence available for the Roman imperial period could be used to show
cultural continuity, rather than the importation of new elements, from the
desert, from Babylonia, or from Mesopotamia. The question of chronology
may be crucial, and certainly cannot be ignored. To give one central ex-
ample, in his famous book of ,Der Gott der Makkabäer, Bickerman argues
that we should envisage the pagan cult imposed in ..on the Temple in
Jerusalem not as Greek but as Syrian. In particular he explains the emphasis
which Jewish sources place specifically on the desecration of the altar by the
‘‘abomination of desolation,’’ by the parallel of Arab worship of the altar as a
cult object in itself. To reinforce this, he uses the example of an inscription
from Jebel Sheikh Barakat near Beroea (Aleppo) with a dedication to Zeus
Madbachos, ‘‘Zeus of the Altar.’’ But there is an acute problem of chronology
here: the temple from which this inscription comes did not exist in the sec-
ond century..It was constructed by persons with Greek names between
the s and the s..; the earliest inscriptions recording its dedication to
Zeus Madbachos and Selamanes, ‘‘the ancestral gods,’’ probably date to the
s..^103
The ancestors of these people may indeed have worshipped these same
deities through the Hellenistic period. The god Shulman/Selamanes is in fact
attested in Syria long before that. But nobody, so far as we know, put up a
temple for these gods on this site, or composed a dedicatory inscription for
them until the first century..The problem therefore remains. Whatever
the society, economy, and culture of the Syrian region was like in the Helle-
nistic period, the ‘‘Hellenistic’’ Syria, with a distinctive mixed culture, which
our evidence allows us to encounter is that which evolved under the Roman
Empire.^104
That is, however, in the first instance, a fact about our evidence. It is not
presented here as a definite conclusion about the ‘‘real’’ world of the Syrian
.IGLSII, nos. –; see O. Callot and J. Marcillet-Jaubert, ‘‘Hauts-lieux de la Syrie
du Nord,’’Temples et Sanctuaires(), ff.
. See esp. Teixidor (n. ), for the popular religion attested in the inscriptions of this
period.