The Provinces of the Roman Empire 22

The Provinces of the Roman Empire 22

The coinage itself probably only began after the state had come under

Roman clientship. The Arabian-Indian traffic with the region of the

Mediterranean moved in great part along the caravan-route watched over

by the Romans, running from Leuce Come by way of Petra to Gaza.[151]

The princes of the Nabataean kingdom made use, just like the community

of Palmyra, of Greek official designations for their magistrates,

_e.g._ of the titles of Eparch and of Strategos. If under Tiberius the

good order of Syria brought about by the Romans and the security of the

harvests occasioned by their military occupation are made prominent

as matters of boasting, this is primarily to be referred to the

arrangements made in the client-states of Jerusalem or subsequently of

Caesarea Paneas and of Petra.

 

[Sidenote: Institution of the province of Arabia.]

 

Under Trajan the direct rule of Rome took the place of these two

client-states. In the beginning of his reign king Agrippa II. died,

and his territory was united with the province of Syria. Not long

after, in the year 106, the governor Aulus Cornelius Palma broke up

the previous dominion of the kings of Nabat, and made the greater

part of it into the Roman province of Arabia, while Damascus went

to Syria, and what the Nabataean king had possessed in the interior

of Arabia was abandoned by the Romans. The erection of Arabia is

designated as subjugation, and the coins also which celebrate the

taking possession of it attest that the Nabataeans offered resistance,

as indeed generally the nature of their territory as well as their

previous attitude lead us to assume a relative independence on the part

of these princes. But the historical significance of these events may

not be sought in warlike success; the two annexations, which doubtless

went together, were no more than acts of administration carried out

perhaps by military power, and the tendency to acquire these domains

for civilisation and specially for Hellenism was only heightened

by the fact that the Roman government took upon itself the work.

The Hellenism of the East, as summed up in Alexander, was a church

militant, a thoroughly conquering power pushing its way in a political,

religious, economic, and literary point of view. Here, on the edge of

the desert, under the pressure of anti-Hellenic Judaism and in the

hands of the spiritless and vacillating government of the Seleucids,

it had hitherto achieved little. But now, pervading the Roman system,

it develops a motive power, which stands related to the earlier, as

the power of the Jewish and the Arabian vassal-princes to that of the

Roman empire. In this country, where everything depended and depends

on protecting the state of peace by the setting up of a superior and

standing military force, the institution of a legionary camp in Bostra

under a commander of senatorial rank was an epoch-making event. From

this centre the requisite posts were established at suitable places

and provided with garrisons. For example, the stronghold of Namara

(Nemâra) deserves mention, a long day’s march beyond the boundaries of

the properly habitable mountain-land, in the midst of the stony desert,

but commanding the only spring to be found within it and the forts

attached to it in the already mentioned oasis of Ruhbe and further on

at Jebel Sês; these garrisons together control the whole projection of

the Haurân. Another series of forts, placed under the Syrian command

and primarily under that of the legion posted at Danava (p. 95), and

laid out at uniform distances of three leagues apart, secured the route

from Damascus to Palmyra; the best known of them, the second in the

series, was that of Dmêr (p. 149, n. 1), a rectangle of 300 and 350

paces respectively, provided on every side with six towers and a portal

fifteen paces in breadth, and surrounded by a ring-wall of sixteen feet

thick, once faced outwardly with beautiful blocks of hewn stone.

 

[Sidenote: The civilisation of east Syria under Roman rule.]

 

Never had such an aegis been extended over this land. It was not,

properly speaking, denationalised. The Arabic names remained down to

the latest time, although not unfrequently, just as in Syria (p. 121),

a Romano-Hellenic name is appended to the local one; thus a sheikh

names himself “Adrianos or Soaidos, son of Malechos.”[152] The native

worship also remains unaffected; the chief deity of the Nabataeans,

Dusaris, is doubtless compared with Dionysus, but regularly continues

to be worshipped under his local name, and down to a late period the

Bostrenes celebrate the Dusaria in honour of him.[153] In like manner

in the province of Arabia temples continue to be consecrated, and

offerings presented to Aumu or Helios, to Vasaeathu, to Theandritos,

to Ethaos. The tribes and the tribal organisation no less continue:

the inscriptions mention lists of “Phylae” by the native name, and

frequently Phylarchs or Ethnarchs. But alongside of traditional customs

civilisation and Hellenising make progress. If from the time before

Trajan no Greek monument can be shown in the sphere of the Nabataean

state, on the other hand no monument subsequent to Trajan’s time in

the Arabic language has been found there;[154] to all appearance the

imperial government suppressed at once upon the annexation the written

use of Arabic, although it certainly remained the language proper of

the country, as is attested not only by the proper names but by the

“interpreter of the tax-receivers.”

 

[Sidenote: Agriculture and commerce.]

 

As to the advance of agriculture we have no witnesses to speak; but

if, on the whole eastern and southern slope of the Haurân, from

the summits of the mountains down to the desert, the stones, with

which this volcanic plain was once strewed, are thrown into heaps or

arranged in long rows, and thus the most glorious fields are obtained,

we may recognise therein the hand of the only government which has

governed this land as it might and should be governed. In the Ledjâ,

a lava-plateau thirteen leagues long and eight to nine broad, which

is now almost uninhabited, there grew once vines and figs between the

streams of lava; the Roman road connecting Bostra with Damascus ran

across it; in the Ledjâ and around it are counted the ruins of twelve

larger and thirty-nine smaller townships. It can be shown that, at

the bidding of the same governor who erected the province of Arabia,

the mighty aqueduct was constructed which led the water from the

mountains of the Haurân to Canatha (Kerak) in the plain, and not far

from it a similar one in Arrha (Rahâ)--buildings of Trajan, which may

be named by the side of the port of Ostia and the Forum of Rome. The

flourishing of commercial intercourse is attested by the very choice

of the capital of the new province. Bostra existed under the Nabataean

government, and an inscription of king Malichu has been found there;

but its military and commercial importance begins with the introduction

of direct Roman government. “Bostra,” says Wetzstein, “has the most

favourable situation of all the towns in eastern Syria; even Damascus,

which owes its size to the abundance of its water and to its situation

protected by the eastern Trachon, will excel Bostra only under a weak

government, while the latter under a strong and wise government must

elevate itself in a few decades to a fabulous prosperity. It is the

great market for the Syrian desert: the high mountains of Arabia and

Peraea, and its long rows of booths of stone still in their desolation,

furnish evidence of the reality of an earlier, and the possibility of

a future, greatness.” The remains of the Roman road, leading thence by

way of Salchat and Ezrak to the Persian Gulf, show that Bostra was,

along with Petra and Palmyra, a medium of traffic from the East to the

Mediterranean. This town was probably constituted on a Hellenic basis

already by Trajan; at least it is called thenceforth the “new Trajanic

Bostra,” and the Greek coins begin with Pius, while later the legend

becomes Latin in consequence of the bestowal of colonial rights by

Alexander.

 

Petra too had a Greek municipal constitution already under Hadrian, and

several other places subsequently received municipal rights; but in

this territory of the Arabians down to the latest period the tribe and

the tribal village preponderated.

 

[Sidenote: Stone buildings of eastern Syria.]

 

A peculiar civilisation was developed from the mixture of national and

Greek elements in these regions during the five hundred years between

Trajan and Mohammed. A fuller picture of it has been preserved to us

than of other forms of the ancient world, inasmuch as the structures

of Petra, in great part worked out of the rock, and the buildings in

the Haurân, executed entirely of stone owing to the want of wood,

comparatively little injured by the sway of the Bedouins which was

here again installed with Islam in its old misrule, are still to a

considerable degree extant to the present day, and throw a clear light

on the artistic skill and the manner of life of those centuries. The

above-mentioned temple of Baalsamin at Canatha, certainly built under

Herod, shows in its original portions a complete diversity from Greek

architecture and in the structural plan remarkable analogies with the

temple-building of the same king in Jerusalem, while the pictorial

representations shunned in the latter are by no means wanting here. A

similar state of things has been observed in the monuments found at

Petra. Afterwards further steps were taken. If under the Jewish and the

Nabataean rulers culture freed itself but slowly from the influences

of the East, a new time seems to have begun here with the transfer of

the legion to Bostra. “Building,” says an excellent French observer,

Melchior de Vogué, “obtained thereby an impetus which was not again

arrested. Everywhere rose houses, palaces, baths, temples, theatres,

aqueducts, triumphal arches; towns sprang from the ground within a few

years with the regular construction and the symmetrically disposed

colonnades which mark towns without a past, and which are as it were

the inevitable uniform for this part of Syria during the imperial

period.” The eastern and southern slope of the Haurân shows nearly

three hundred such desolated towns and villages, while there only five

new townships now exist; several of the former, _e.g._ Bûsân, number as

many as 800 houses of one to two stories, built throughout of basalt,

with well-jointed walls of square blocks without cement, with doors

mostly ornamented and often provided with inscriptions, the flat roof

formed of stone-rafters, which are supported by stone arches and made

rain-proof above by a layer of cement. The town-wall is usually formed

only by the backs of the houses joined together, and is protected by

numerous towers. The poor attempts at re-colonising of recent times

find the houses habitable; there is wanting only the diligent hand of

man, or rather the strong arm that protects it. In front of the gates

lie the cisterns, often subterranean, or provided with an artificial

stone roof, many of which are still at the present day, when this

deserted seat of towns has become pasturage, kept up by the Bedouins in

order to water their flocks from them in summer. The style of building

and the practice of art have doubtless preserved some remains of the

older Oriental type, _e.g._ the frequent form, for a tomb, of the cube

crowned with a pyramid, perhaps also the pigeon-towers often added to

the tomb, still frequent in the present day throughout Syria; but,

taken on the whole, the style is the usual Greek one of the imperial

period. Only the absence of wood has here called forth a development of

the stone arch and the cupola, which technically and artistically lends

to these buildings an original character. In contrast to the customary

repetition elsewhere usual of traditional forms there prevails here an

architecture independently suiting the exigencies and the conditions,

moderate in ornamentation, thoroughly sound and rational, and not

destitute even of elegance. The burial-places, which are cut out in

the rock-walls rising to the east and west of Petra and in their

lateral valleys, with their façades of Doric or Corinthian pillars

often placed in several tiers one above another, and their pyramids and

propylaea reminding us of the Egyptian Thebes, are not artistically

pleasing, but imposing by their size and richness. Only a stirring

life and a high prosperity could display such care for its dead. In

presence of these architectural monuments it is not surprising that the

inscriptions make mention of a theatre in the “village” (κώμη) Sakkaea

and a “theatre-shaped Odeon” in Canatha, and a local poet of Namara in

Batanaea celebrates himself as a “master of the glorious art of proud

Ausonian song.”[155] Thus at this eastern limit of the empire there

was gained for Hellenic civilisation a frontier-domain which may be

compared with the Romanised region of the Rhine; the arched and domed buildings of eastern Syria well stand comparison with the castles and tombs of the nobles and of the great merchants of Belgica.