The Phoenician Cities Of the peoples, some still preserve the names which were given to them
by their founders, some have changed them, while others have adopted
a form of name designed to be more intelligible to those who are settled
among them. It is the Greeks who are responsible for this. For when
they subsequently rose to power they appropriated to themselves even
the glory of the past, adorning the peoples with names which were in-
telligible to themselves and imposing on them a form of constitution
as if they were descended from themselves. (Ant. , , Loeb trans.)Alittlelaterhegivesaspecificexample:‘‘Amathus...whichisstillcalled
‘Amathe’ by the local people [epichorioi], though the Macedonians named it
‘Epiphaneia’ after one of theepigonoi[Alexander’s successors]’’ (Ant.,).
Jerome confirms that ‘‘until our own time’’ the town was still called Hamath
‘‘both by the Syrians [Syri] and by the Hebrews [Hebraei]’’ (Hebr. Qu. Gen.
, –, inCCLLXXII, ). It is of course an unquestionable fact that
there was large-scale city foundation by the Seleucids, primarily Seleucus I,
in North Syria, in the Orontes valley, and in Mesopotamia. I need only refer
to Seyrig’s classic study of the urbanisation of North Syria by Seleucus I.^1
The effect in both areas was to produce, in the first instance, societies with
two separate cultures: the Aramaic culture of Hellenistic Syria remains, it
is true, almost invisible to us; the Akkadian culture of Babylonia, using the
cuneiform script, was to survive at least until the first century..It is not ir-
relevant to the present study that it produced one native-born interpreter in
Greek, Berosus of Babylon, in the early Hellenistic period.^2 It was this world
of contrasting cultures in Mesopotamia and Syria, cultures whose nature and
functioning in the Graeco-Roman period remain almost wholly unintelli-
gible, which eventually produced something like a fusion of cultures, in the
form of Syriac Christianity. To illustrate this point I need only mention that
Syriac literature originally stemmed from a Macedonian colony, Edessa.
All recent studies of Hellenisation or ‘‘Hellenism’’ have emphasised that
afusionof Greek and native cultures was categoricallynotwhat Greeks of
the fourth century and after had intended. We have all learnt from Momi-
gliano’sAlien Wisdom() how slight an interest Greeks took in other cul-
tures. Martin Hengel inJews, Greeks and Barbarians() and Claire Préaux
. H. Seyrig, ‘‘Séleucus I et la fondation de la monarchie syrienne,’’Syria (): .
Note also the important study, by P. Briant, ‘‘Colonisation hellénistique et populations in-
digènes: la phase d’installation,’’Klio (): P. Briant,Rois, tributs et paysans: études
sur les formations tributaires du Moyen-Orient ancien().
.FGrH. See S. M. Burstein,The Babyloniaca of Berossus(Sources and Monographs,
Sources from the Ancient Near East, ., ).