Constructing a borderland: Roman imperial geographic writers on Mesopotamia from the 1st to the 4th centuries CE

2016-08-06Geographic writing is often treated as an objective description of space, but the processes of selection, generalisation and aggregation that underlie geographic projects are subjective and ideological. As the only frontier over which Rome faced an empire of similar size and power, the Mesopotamian frontier zone between the Roman and Iranian empires, that is, upper Mesopotamia, the region between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, south of the Taurus mountains and north of Parthian and Sasanian Babylonia, was arguably Rome's most important frontier, yet its representation in Roman intellectual production is seldom studied. This dissertation examines geographic descriptions of that region written in the first four centuries CE, including Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Claudius Ptolemy, and Ammianus Marcellinus as well as the anonymous Expositio Totius Mundi et Gentium. It examines the sources of their geographic knowledge to show the influence of Aramaic, Iranian, Hellenistic, and Roman cultural perspectives and scientific, administrative, and historical genres on their constructions and representations and how those representations fits within their conception of the Roman world as a whole. In other words, how the writers imagined the frontier and how they conveyed that imaginary to their audiences. The historical situation in the region is relevant to my work, especially as it is available for comparison to the descriptions given by the geographic writers, but this project does not aim to present a picture of historical ""reality"", but rather of an ideological space of representation. It also address how these representations changed over the first four centuries of our era