Nicator Seleucus And His Empire

Download or read book Nicator - Seleucus and his Empire written by Lise Hannestad and published by Aarhus Universitetsforlag. This book was released on 2020-06-12 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the vast empire of Alexander the Great broke up, the Macedonian general Seleucus secured the lion’s share for himself and went on to become the longest-lived of Alexander’s successors. His tactical skills and his military innovations – including his use of war elephants on a scale never seen before in the West – earned him the epithet Nicator, “victorious”. When he died at the hands of an assassin in 281 BC, Seleucus ruled over a larger territory than any Hellenistic monarch before or since his time, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. This book is a study of his life and achievements, his time and his legacy. It is based on Graeco-Roman and Babylonian written sources as well as on the rapidly growing body of archaeological evidence. Lise Hannestad is professor emerita of Classical Archaeology at Aarhus University. Her main research areas are the Near East in the Hellenistic period, the Etruscans and Black Sea archaeology.

Download or read book New Perspectives in Seleucid History, Archaeology and Numismatics written by Roland Oetjen and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-12-16 with total page 913 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dedicated to Getzel M. Cohen, a leading expert in Seleucid history, this volume gathers 45 contributions on Seleucid history, archaeology, numismatics, political relations, policy toward the Jews, Greek cities, non-Greek populations, peripheral and neighboring regions, imperial administration, economy and public finances, and ancient descriptions of the Seleucid Empire. The reader will gain an international perspective on current research.

Download or read book The Legend of Seleucus written by Daniel Ogden and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-07 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the chaos that followed the death of Alexander the Great his distinguished marshal Seleucus was reduced to a fugitive, with only a horse to his name. But by the time of his own death, Seceucus had reconstructed the bulk of Alexander's empire, built Antioch, and become a king in his turn, one respected for justness in an age of cruelty. The dynasty he founded was to endure for three centuries. Such achievements richly deserved to be projected into legend, and so they were. This legend told of Seleucus' divine siring by Apollo, his escape from Babylon with an enchanted talisman, his foundations of cities along a dragon-river with the help of Zeus' eagles, his surrender of his new wife to his besotted son, and his revenge, as a ghost, upon his assassin. This is the first book in any language devoted to the reconstruction of this fascinating tradition.

Download or read book Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire written by Paul J. Kosmin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-03 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Runciman Award Winner of the Charles J. Goodwin Award “Tells the story of how the Seleucid Empire revolutionized chronology by picking a Year One and counting from there, rather than starting a new count, as other states did, each time a new monarch was crowned...Fascinating.” —Harper’s In the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s conquests, his successors, the Seleucid kings, ruled a vast territory stretching from Central Asia and Anatolia to the Persian Gulf. In 305 BCE, in a radical move to impose unity and regulate behavior, Seleucus I introduced a linear conception of time. Time would no longer restart with each new monarch. Instead, progressively numbered years—continuous and irreversible—became the de facto measure of historical duration. This new temporality, propagated throughout the empire and identical to the system we use today, changed how people did business, recorded events, and oriented themselves to the larger world. Some rebellious subjects, eager to resurrect their pre-Hellenic past, rejected this new approach and created apocalyptic time frames, predicting the total end of history. In this magisterial work, Paul Kosmin shows how the Seleucid Empire’s invention of a new kind of time—and the rebellions against this worldview—had far reaching political and religious consequences, transforming the way we organize our thoughts about the past, present, and future. “Without Paul Kosmin’s meticulous investigation of what Seleucus achieved in creating his calendar without end we would never have been able to comprehend the traces of it that appear in late antiquity...A magisterial contribution to this hitherto obscure but clearly important restructuring of time in the ancient Mediterranean world.” —G. W. Bowersock, New York Review of Books “With erudition, theoretical sophistication, and meticulous discussion of the sources, Paul Kosmin sheds new light on the meaning of time, memory, and identity in a multicultural setting.” —Angelos Chaniotis, author of Age of Conquests

Download or read book Nicator: Seleucus I and his Empire written by Lise Hannestad and published by . This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seleucus was the last surviving of the successors of Alexander the Great and the one who conquered the largest part of Alexander's empire. He was later given the surname 'Nikator', the Conqueror. This book is a study of his life and achievements, his time and his legacy. It is based on Greco-Roman and Babylonian written sources as well as on archaeological evidence, which has grown exponentially in recent years.

Download or read book Comparing the Ptolemaic and Seleucid Empires written by Christelle Fischer-Bovet and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First comparative analysis of the role of local elites and populations in the formation of the two main Hellenistic empires.

Download or read book The Rise of Parthia in the East written by Cam Rea and published by Createspace Independent Pub. This book was released on 2013-10-12 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seleucus inherited a rather large chunk of land, extending from Anatolia in the west to the borders of India in the east. You could say he hit the “lottery” but at the same time he inherited much more than he bargained, more so for his future inheritors of this vast domain. One of the biggest problems in controlling such a vast amount of land is the issue of holding onto it. In other words, the land is too big to use for it is too big to lose. One has to consider, especially those in the Seleucid administration, that there are going to be language barriers, but even more important than language barriers, are the cultural barriers. Because of these cultural barriers, it was easier to allow the locals to govern. In this way, the Seleucids could control their eastern provinces more effectively. However, even this is a façade. While the Seleucids allowed the locals of their eastern provinces to govern, it also created a friction between the two cultures. In other words and as you shall read, the Seleucids began to ignore their supposed subjects of the east. Ignoring the various peoples on the Iranian Plateau and areas further to the east under Seleucid control caused many of them, including Greco-Macedonians, to question the intent of their masters further west. In doing so, many would secede in the east. This secession from the Seleucids enticed certain nomadic tribes, such as the Aparni (Parthians), to invade, conquer, confiscate and colonize the weakest breakaway provinces. The Seleucid regime's uncertainty allowed a small tribe from the north to invade a breakaway province considered Seleucid territory that, in turn, would go on to nearly re-conquer everything Alexander the Great had subdued almost a century earlier.