Greek cities in the Eastern Mediterranean

The impressive remaining ruins of the cities of the ancient Near East — cities such as Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem), Apamea, Baalbek (Heliopolis), Bostra, Caesarea Marittima, Gerasa, and Palmyra — almost all date to the Roman period. This is no co-incidence. The Roman empire was an ‘empire of cities’.

The Eastern Mediterranean, however, was already densely populated with cities, when the Romans became rulers.

This lecture revisits some of these long-established centres of the Greek and Roman Near East, and the various ancient peoples who inhabited them. It traces, through the archaeology and historical sources, the transformation of these cities over centuries – also those before the Romans arrived – and asks in which ways we can begin to disentangle the various cultural impacts and legacies visible and invisibly embedded into the fabric of these urban centres.