Founding the City: Statecraft and Urbanism in Northeast Africa and Southwest Asia, C. 200-100 BCE

"The founding, or re-founding, of cities was a powerful engine of local change in the empire(s) created by Alexander the Great and his Successors. New cities, such as Antioch and Alexandria, epitomized the new world that later came to be defined as "Hellenistic." In this study, François Gerardin examines the subsequent development of this phenomenon by marshaling the evidence for a "new wave" of city foundation in the second century BCE. Approaching this corpus from the perspective of state formation, rather than cultural hybridization, he points out the resilience, if not the resistance, of Hellenistic monarchies-namely, the Attalids, Ptolemies, and Seleucids-at a time when Rome and Arsacid Parthia were on the rise. More specifically, he identifies a shift in power relations between state and subject, monarch and city, in which local adaptations of the polis-i.e., the self-governing citizen community commonly associated with Greece-played a central part. The same process, he argues, characterized each part of the Hellenistic world in a different way, for reasons ranging from ethnicity and dynastic identity to institutional legacies and geographical constraints. In this reevaluation of the later Hellenistic period as an age of ongoing vitality, the example of Euergetis, a new polis in Egypt, occupies center stage. Documented in a fragmentary archive of ancient papyri, it is examined here for the first time in all its facets"-- Provided by publisher.