Syrian Identity in the Greco-Roman World Hardback

By engaging with recent developments in the study of empires, this book examines how inhabitants of Roman imperial Syria reinvented expressions and experiences of Greek, Roman and Syrian identification. It demonstrates how the organization of Greek communities and a peer polity network extending citizenship to ethnic Syrians generated new semiotic frameworks for the performance of Greekness and Syrianness.

Within these, Syria's inhabitants reoriented and interwove idioms of diverse cultural origins, including those from the Near East, to express Greek, Roman and Syrian identifications in innovative and complex ways. While exploring a vast array of written and material sources, the book thus posits that Greekness and Syrianness were constantly shifting and transforming categories, and it critiques many assumptions that govern how scholars of antiquity often conceive of Roman imperial Greek identity, ethnicity and culture in the Roman Near East, and processes of 'hybridity' or similar concepts.

• Proposes a new method for identifying how Greek and Syrian identities took shape in the Roman Near East, and reassesses the role played by the Greek poleis
• Draws upon epigraphic, literary, numismatic, papyrological and material sources
• Combines up-to-date scholarship on imperial formations, Roman imperialism and Greek polity networking to delineate how ancient empires and polity networks affected cultural production