TINY KINGDOMS OF PROPHETIC IDEALS
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 21/12/2020

The impact of the melting pot of Roman-dependent South-Eastern Anatolia on the theological and political concepts of the late Roman and early Byzantine world. Transcending from the ideologically and culturally unified Hellenistic world into the two-worlds reality of the Roman Levant and Parthian inland, South-Eastern Anatolia has successfully reinvented its own role, positions, capacities and prospects. The once centrally located area in the globalized Hellenistic world became an important border zone, crucial for contacts and transfers of ideas in the new divided world. Even more, caught in-between the new global powers, their policies, worldviews and agendas, the local leaders and emerging puppet entities of this region were existentially obliged to use their full potential in reinvigorating the traditions and identities, as well as making them most suitable for the new world realities. These reinvented identities, forms, ideas and concepts that provided new synergy between the local traditions and old and new global influences will transform these border lands into experimental laboratory of future universal concepts and tendencies. While specific traditions, related cults and concepts associated early with this region, and spreading later throughout the Roman world, have been frequently treated separately in different scientific analyses, I would argue that South-Eastern Anatolia has its specific place and role in the transfer of the concepts of cultic, religious and political universality of the Hellenistic world, that will dramatically transform the Roman empire in the later centuries.


Author(s): Tevdovski, Ljuben (University Goce Delcev - Shtip)