Catherine Saliou, Le Proche-Orient. De Pompée à Muhammad, ier s. av. J.-C. - viie s. apr. J.-C.
Catherine Saliou, Le Proche-Orient. De Pompée à Muhammad, ier s. av. J.-C. - viie s. apr. J.-C. (Mondes anciens), Paris, Belin, 2020, 16,5 × 24, 594 p., fig. coul., ISBN : 978-2-7011-9286-4.
Texte intégral
1The Near East in the period from either Alexander the Great or the time of the invasion of Pompey until the Late Roman period or Late Antiquity has been the topic of numerous scholarly works. Most prominently to this day still stand works such as Fergus Millar’s The Roman Near East, 31 bc-ad 337 from 1993 and Maurice Sartre’s D’Alexandre à Zénobie. Histoire du Levant antique. ive siècle av. J.-C.-iiie siècle ap. J.-C. from 2001 (also translated into English). Catherine Saliou’s monograph is a welcome addition to the corpus of overview literature on the region, and the chronological framework she covers is much broader than that covered by Millar and Sartre, extending into the 7th century ce. This is a wonderful and much needed chronological expansion of the view on the archaeology and history of the region. There are also other differences between the work by Saliou and the two aforementioned. The series in which Saliou’s monograph is published does not work with footnotes, which for a book of such standard is a great pity, seen from an academic perspective, and the bibliographic sections at the back are fairly rudimentary and organized according to a variety of sources (primary and secondary), topics and locations and, lastly, according to the chapters in the book. This gives an impression of an incomprehensive bibliography, giving neither the student, nor the experienced scholar a proper back catalogue, although it may be sufficient for the general reader. The bibliography also has a heavy —although not exclusive—focus on French scholarly literature, which is disappointing since much new research on the region has appeared in other languages over the last decade. These two points, missing footnotes and the bibliographic sections, can, however, most likely be ascribed to the format of the series. But they still get in the reader’s way of enjoying the vast knowledge that Saliou obviously possesses about the region and unfolds in the almost-600-pages-long book and this begs the question: who is the exact target group of this book? Scholars? Students? The general public? Or is it intended for all? In either case, the format does not do the content justice, which is a pity for the obviously brilliant scholar behind the work.
2The book is structured around eight main chapters. The first part of the book is divided into four chapters, which mainly situates the Near East within a global history framework, as the title of the section indicates. The first chapter is structured along chronological lines giving historical overviews of each of the established—but still artificially introduced—historical periods (64 bc-98 ce, 98-224, 224-363, 363-491, 491-610, and finally 610-641). The second chapter deals with economies—in local and global perspectives. The third chapter turns to the religious life—including of course the Jews, Samaritans and Christians. Chronologically, the book does not go beyond the impact of the Arab invasion and, so, does not tackle the coming of Islam. Chapter four is entitled “At the cross-roads of languages and cultures,” but basically focuses on the impact and meaning of the languages of the region (Latin, Greek, Aramaic and its dialects, as well as Hebrew, Nabatean and Syriac, including a section on the emergence of Arabic). A partial conclusion summarises the first section.
3The second part of the book comprises chapters five to eight under the headline “Living in the Roman Near East”. Chapter five concerns itself essentially with the urban cultures of the Near East, in all its shapes, and its diversity—ranging from its institutions, across administration, provincial organisation, urban spaces and its archaeology, cosmopolitanism as well as religious traditions and societal inequality. Chapter six, entitled “From the countryside to the deserts,” is structured in two mainly chronological sections, the first of which runs from the early provincial period until the time of Diocletian, while the second goes from Diocletian’s reforms until the seventh century, with a short add-on section concerning Palmyra and Petra. Chapter seven deals with the establishment of rules/regulations/imperial influences and the counter-reactions, and it includes a section on the mutations of Late Antiquity, focusing on heritage and transformation, new authorities (including the church) as well as crises and conflicts. Chapter eight focuses on memories and the imagined—a highly interesting approach to a very diverse topic—which covers a broad range of evidence from funerary monuments and portrait traditions to mythological themes and their transferal across periods and a concluding section on religious memories. The second section concludes with a short epilogue.
4However, while the cover indicates that the book stops in the seventh century, there is an entire third section of the book dedicated to the period from the “rediscovery” of the Near East by European travellers until today—including the impact of the war in Syria since 2011 (p. 515-544). This is a selective section—covering only certain periods and events—but of interest to the reader, as it gives insights into the post-antique formation of the region and its highly significant historical developments. Overall, this section is a very welcome addition to a work on the ancient Near East, since most often a historiographic overview of modern developments and the emergence of scholarship on the region is not given in such works. The appendices include a useful chronological table overview of major events, a glossary, the various bibliographies mentioned above as well as a set of indices and a list of the maps in the book.
5The book is an enjoyable reading experience and there is no doubt that much research went into condensing the knowledge unfolded on the pages. It gives unexpected insights and also blends material in ways one is not used to seeing it presented. However, the overall outcome of the reading experience is one of some frustration, since the order and often too short presentations of the material do not do the evidence justice and also make for an abrupt reading experience. Just to name one example: in chapter eight, a short section is entitled “Individual identities,” and one of the subsections is entitled “Funerary monuments and portraits”. It is surprising to see that this subsection amounts to about one page of text with exclusively images from Palmyra (two funerary portraits and one interior image from the Tomb of the Three Brothers), despite the fact that the section gives the impression of having a much wider scope—both geographically and chronologically. Here, the evidence from Palmyra, which in itself in the context of funerary culture is an exception in so many ways—numbers of graves and funerary portraits and inscriptions preserved just to mention a few—, is used as an example to generalise about the entire region. However, as haphazard as this small section seems, a chapter such as chapter two, dealing with the economy of the region in both a local and global history perspective, makes for an intriguing reading and clearly demonstrates the author’s deep knowledge of the various aspects of these issues, from tax law, across the army structure, to ranges of economic patterns in relation to population development—from villages to cities and their networks of various kinds. The chapter is dense in examples of places, locations, cities and villages, and again it is such a pity that the footnote apparatus is not available, since the bibliography at the back of the book referring to this chapter, which holds only eleven titles—a combination of books and articles—is certainly not exhaustive. The same goes for chapter four, which, despite the fact that the title emphasises both languages and cultures, mostly concerns languages—and this even in a very compartmentalized way—in sections addressing Latin, Greek and Semitic languages, also touching upon Safaitic as well as early Arabic. While such a chapter indeed could have been strong, connecting the way in which language-use forged identities and therefore “cultures”, it remains more or less a descriptive chapter, that does not manage to penetrate the veil of what languages do to and for human beings—namely putting words to emotions, regulations, realities and imaginations.
6Overall, the book is inviting and not difficult to pick up and read through. Its layout is lavish, and it holds numerous and beautiful illustrations—all in colour—which today is usually a scarce resource, even with high-impact publishers. Therefore, it is even more a pity that at the end of the more 580 pages, this reviewer is still wondering about the target audience of this book; much work and research have certainly gone into it, but it is difficult to use from a scholarly stand point. While this volume may provide initial and critical insight into, and overview of a region of the ancient world providing an incomparable wealth of evidence, in the larger picture of the innumerable accounts dealing with the Near East it will leave the reader having to go to other works with larger bibliographic resources to follow up on many of the themes presented in the book.
Pour citer cet article
Référence électronique
Rubina Raja, « Catherine Saliou, Le Proche-Orient. De Pompée à Muhammad, ier s. av. J.-C. - viie s. apr. J.-C. », Syria [En ligne], Recensions, mis en ligne le 30 juin 2023, consulté le 18 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/syria/14889 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/syria.14889
Haut de pageDroits d’auteur
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Haut de page