Antiochus I Soter

A look at the Seleucid presence in Thrace in the IIIrd cent. B.C., from Antiochus I to Antiochus Hyerax, in "The Danubian Lands between the Black, Aegean and Adriatic Seas (7th Century BC – 10th Century AD. Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress on Black Sea Antiquities", in Tsetskhladze, G., Avram, A. & Hargrave, J. (eds), Archaeopress, 2015, pp. 293-298

I argue that the Seleukid rulers were not the ‘chameleon kings’ of the older literature, who passively adapted their monarchy to supposed local "traditions"; I argue instead that the Seleukids actively negotiated with local elites, and that local customs changed as a result of this, even as these were still presented as ‘traditional’.

Conventional scholarship holds that in the third century BCE, the Seleukid dynasty controlled the various populations of their empire by respecting indigenous ‘traditions’. This paper takes issue with the alleged passivity of the Seleukids and the conceptualization of 'Near Eastern' culture as coherent, static and traditionalist. I focus on the famous Antiochos Cylinder from Borsippa, a document that is often foregrounded as evidence for the early Seleukids’ willingness to adopt the role of ‘traditional’ Babylonian kings. Using globalization theory and Richard White's notion of Middle Ground, I argue instead that the indigenous monarchy outlined by the Cylinder is in fact the innovative result of negotiations between a 'global' imperial elite and a local priestly elite, who cooperated to their mutual benefit. The Cylinder thus reflects neither a top-down imposition of imperial ideology on so-called ‘subalterns’, nor the bottom-up instruction by native experts on how to be a good Babylonian king. The Cylinder instead offers us a unique insight into the dynamics of internal power changes that took place in Babylonian cities after the Macedonian conquest, when priestly families in alliance with the imperial dynasty were able to reassert the supremacy of the central sanctuaries, and hence of their own political dominance.

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The inscription consists of an official letter, dated to the reign of king Antiochus I, sent by Evandros to Andragoras and Apollodotos, Seleucid officials, regarding the deed of manumission of the slave Hermaios, consecrated to the god Sarapis, and his exposure into the Sarapis sanctuary. The provenance of the stone, photographed by Ghirshman in 1959 in Teheran, is uncertain, however it can be considered Hyrcania, modern Gorgān. Andragoras, one of the addressees, might coincide with Andragoras, the satrap of Parthia and Hyrcania in the middle of the III century BC, defeated by king Arsaces I.