When I look back on my university days at VU Amsterdam, one of the figures who left a lasting impression on me was my professor Bert van der Spek. Anyone who studied the Ancient Near East under him will recall his unshakable conviction that Hellenistic Babylonia — so often treated as a footnote between Alexander the Great and the Parthian Empire — was an extraordinary period in its own right. As students, we regularly heard about the massive project he was working on: the edition of the Hellenistic chronographic texts from Babylonia, those fragmentary but invaluable cuneiform accounts that offer a uniquely Babylonian view of the Seleucid and early Parthian world.
At the time, however, this enthusiasm did not quite reach me. I was more interested in what I thought of as “real” Mesopotamia: the world of Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, Nebuchadnezzar II. The world before Hellenism complicated matters, before the “purity” of ancient Mesopotamia was — so I believed — “polluted” with imported Greekness. I was frustrated with classicists who ignored Near East influences of Graeco-Roman civilization, but ironically blind to the richness of the very period that brought these worlds even closer together. It has taken me a decade and a great deal of reading to realize just how naïve this was. The Hellenistic period in Babylonia was anything but a watered-down afterthought. It was a moment of profound cultural transformation. And now, with the publication of Babylonian Chronographic Texts from the Hellenistic Period, the results of many decades of work have finally seen the light of day. Tomorrow, Van der Spek will present his work at the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden.
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