(C2-29) “Euphrates, Protective Shield?” – Religious Diversity and Cultural Identity in the Roman Middle East Between Tradition and Construction

The landscapes west and east of the middle Euphrates, Northern Syria and Northern Mesopotamia are perceived as a space for exchange and meeting which for centuries has been constitutive for the formation and development of religious and cultural identities. On the one hand the region appears to be a source of innovation, from the Neolithic revolution to the development of new religious ideas, on the other hand a border region where the East and the West meet, both in peaceful exchange and in a confrontational manner. This double interpretation has had an impact on western discourse to today, and the perception of the region as frontier to an imagined and hostile Orient is predominant.

This reception is in line with a long tradition of attributions, drawing up frontiers and constructions of identity and alterity. Their roots go back to antiquity. The time when Rome established itself as a global player in the eastern Mediterranean world was decisive; when a line of demarcation between the Roman and the Iranian/Parthian areas of influence was drawn in the first millennium before Christ. The river Euphrates was conceived as a political frontier between East and West for the first time, which then was also connoted culturally and religiously to an increasing degree. Corresponding attributions, however, are primarily identified in the literary discourse of Roman elites. In contrast, hardly any research was done on how the interplay of politics, conflicts and acculturation in the region itself worked and which effects it had. How did local groups and local cults on both sides of the Euphrates react to the new political situation? Which shifts resulted in the clashing of competing power blocks and how did they influence society and religion in the long term? Are we really able to observe a drifting apart? How did the religious circumstances differ on both sides of the river? Did the cults east of the Euphrates have a more “traditional”, more oriental image that was dominated by Mesopotamian as well as Persian influences; the Western ones in contrast a more “innovative”, Greek-Roman character that accommodated the dynamics of the political change in the Levant? It is necessary to also consider biogeographic conditions. Northern Syria was urbanised to a higher degree and a residential way of life dominated, whereas nomadic tribes played a big role in Northern Mesopotamia. Were there thus specific prerequisites in the socio-economic field for developments in religious history? The social dimensions of religious plurality in particular require systematic analysis. Space as a factor needs to be considered in more detail than before when looking at the interrelation or demarcation of religions and religious communities, but also the emergence of sacral places as centres of religious culture of remembrance.

But the focus should not only be demarcation. From the indigenous perspective, such a definition does not seem to have been necessary and/or not always desired. Some local actors deliberately staged and exploited cultural and religious “inbetweenness”. This is particularly expressed in the new syncretic religious programme of the late Hellenistic Commagene King Antiochus I who used the fusion of East and West to legitimate his rule programmatically. Furthermore, it is to be examined whether the code switching that can be observed in the religious representation must be assessed as a form of local resistance.

The intended research thus contributes to a better understanding of the religious history of the Middle East. Comprehensive epigraphic and archaeological evidence allows local religions to materialise and thus makes it possible in this way to understand how local and regional religious structures are altered by transregional processes of exchange, assimilation and transformation, but also by confrontation and violence. In addition to that, it is to be investigated on a meta level to what extent the previous research has been influenced by oriental and colonialist discourse, a phenomenon that has so far not been given proper attention by studies in classical antiquity.