The conquest and destruction of Selinus by the Carthaginian army in 409 B.C. and its reoccupation by the Syracusan general Hermocrates the year after provide an excellent case study for exploring two of the main themes of this volume. This chapter focuses on the destruction of 409 B.C., comparing Diodorus Siculus’ account with the archaeological evidence, in an attempt to evaluate both the physical damage sustained by the city and the reliability of the ancient author. This discussion is followed by a brief account of Selinus’ survival and recovery, always on the basis of Diodorus Siculus and the available archaeological evidence.

This chapter compares different temporal regimes developed by the Seleucids and Ptolemies. Kosmin suggests that the Seleucids created a new “historical field” when Seleucus proclaimed a new epoch of Babylonian history and called the year of his conquest of Babylon year 1. The Babylonian historian and priest Berossus, despite writing a history of pre-Seleucid Babylonia, situated himself in the new world of the Seleucids. Yet in Egypt the Ptolemies continued reckoning with traditional regnal years, showing their subordination to traditional uses of historical time. But there were changes, too. Greek regnal years started with the anniversary of the king’s accession, oaths were sworn by the divinized royal members and Demotic dating formulae used the eponymous priests of the royal cult. All this established the Ptolemaic dynasty as a unit and a method of structuring time in its own way. Manetho and Berossus took over dynastic history, creating thirty dynasties up to the Macedonian conquest. The Ptolemies created a neue Zeit, but the Seleucids were more revolutionary. In both empires the local elites and populations participated in shaping the new politics of time.

The chapter studies the Persian destruction of Athens in 480 B.C. (Acropolis, Agora, Kerameikos) and the city’s spectacular economic and political recovery in less than one generation.

This chapter studies the consequences of the conquest of Epirus and the supposed destruction and enslavement of 70 cities and 150,000 persons by the Romans, as well as the region’s revitalization under Augustus.

This paper takes as a starting point that the same sort of negotiation occurred between kings and priests in Egypt and in Babylonia, because in both places their temples fulfilled similar economic, social, and religious roles. While the Ptolemies were integrated into the religious rituals from the time of Ptolemy I on, this also implied that they were responsible for maintaining stability. Pfeiffer assesses how the king negotiated situations where his legitimacy was at risk, such as Nile failures or unrest. Focusing on the trilingual decrees, he shows how Ptolemy in Egyptian documents acts perfectly according to Egyptian royal ideology. Only the priests had sufficient knowledge of it to conceive such a narrative. Yet this was not the doing of a homogenous priestly group, but mainly of the Memphite priests. Turning to Seleucid Babylonia, Klinkott examines moments of interaction between kings and priests, such as temple rituals performed by Alexander and the Seleucid temple-rebuilding program. He sheds light on the process of negotiations between the Seleucid kings and the priests, who possibly gathered in a synod, and on the adoption of older Babylonian traditions by the Seleucids.

The chapter discusses the contribution of microstratigraphy and micromorphology to the study of destruction layers in archaeology.

Using archaeological survey data, this chapter compares the Greek and Roman experience of survival and recovery combining the urban and rural approaches.

The editors present the topic, review the historiography, and outline the goals of the present volume, focusing on the high survival rates of cities and economic recovery.

The Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires are usually studied separately, or otherwise included in broader examinations of the Hellenistic World. This book proposes a more dynamic comparison, with a particular, though not exclusive focus on the interaction of the royal centers with local populations and elites. Both political entities are approached as multiethnic empires whose resemblance and entanglement are sufficient to make comparisons meaningful. In the process of comparing them, differences and connections become more salient and better explained. We aim to explore the different structural capacities for, and levels of, integration that were either aspired to or achieved by the kings and populations of each empire.

This chapter compares the Great Revolt of the Thebaid (206–186 BC) and the Maccabean Revolt (starting in the 160s), which took place in a period of important social, economic, and political change. Though the events preceding each revolt differ markedly (the founding of a polis in Jerusalem, for example, has no counterpart in the Thebaid), Honigman and Veïsse emphasize multiple interconnected internal and external factors, including political miscalculations and expensive wars. They observe that it was not domination itself, but the way it was played out at a given moment that triggered revolts, especially a tighter royal control over land and taxation. Though they stressed that using sources of a rather different nature requires caution, their systematic examination of the causes of the revolts, of the ideological discourses, of the reaction of the government, and their aftermaths help to identify different strategies applied by each regime in different regions. They show how history, memories, and the structure of the territory made indirect rule of Judea conceivable for both Seleucid kings and the locals, while it was unthinkable for the Ptolemies and the “rebels” in the Thebaid.

This chapter focuses on Babylon and Egypt and offers a systematic comparison of the role of the local elites in the temple administration within the Seleucid and Ptolemaic governmental structures. While in both regions temples were the “centers of public life” before the Macedonian conquest, the traditional religious role of the king offered to the Ptolemies in Egyptian temples granted them a unique position that was not paralleled by the Seleucids in Babylonia. Moreover, the authors emphasize that the temple’s elite were representative of the local elite in Egypt, but that it was not the case in Babylonia. Therefore, these different traditions, notably the conception of the Egyptian king as a high priest superior to all the other priests, may explain why the administrative functions of the temples in Egypt, as well as the priestly elites, were largely integrated into the state structures of power, and why this did not happen in Babylonia. There, Seleucid kings could not play this role through the existing temple institutions and instead founded poleis as tools of governance of local communities.