Matthew P. Canepa, Commagene Before and Beyond Antiochus I, Dynastic: Identity, Topographies of Power and Persian Spectacular Religion 2021 (original) (raw)
The Hellenistic kingdom of Commagene exerted an outsized influence on the volatile world of post-Seleucid Western Asia given its small size and relatively recent independence. While Commagene is now starting to find a place within the Hellenistic Mediterranean, it is only beginning to be fully and meaningfully integrated into the history of the Iranian world. Building on recent work, this chapter thus offers an inquiry into the origins of Commagene’s Persian royal legacy and Iranian religious traditions under Antiochos I, and the cultural and geopolitical contexts that informed their development. Its primary goal is to provide historical nuance for the ‘Persian traditions’ that scholarship has frequently treated as a complete invention or the outgrowth of a monolithic and essentialized Zoroastrianism. It considers the extent to which these traditions grew from an Iranian constituency in place within Commagene since the Achaemenid period or, more likely, arose from a more restricted courtly or dynastic milieu. In so doing, it analyses the dynastic legacy of the Orontids of Sophene and Armenia and the techniques by which they crafted their royal identity and the nature of their impact on Commagene. In particular, it seeks to strike a balance between the epigraphic and archaeological evidence offered by the Antiochos I’s monuments, which provide the most abundant evidence, and what we can descry about the region’s and the dynasty’s earlier traditions from the archaeological record and fragmentary textual sources.
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Rolf Strootman, ‘Orontid kingship in its Hellenistic context: The Seleucid connections of Antiochos I of Commagene’, in: M. Blömer, S. Riedel, M. J. Versluys, and E. Winter eds., Common Dwelling Place of all the Gods: Commagene in its Local, Regional and Global Hellenistic Context. Oriens et Occidens 34 (Stuttgart : Franz Steiner Verlag, 2021) 295–317. The dynastic representation created by Antiochos I of Kommagene continues to puzzle historians and archaeologist. Its meaning usually is considered either in the light of the Achaemenid past that Antiochos so emphatically refers to on Nemrut Dağı, or from the perspective of Roman history. In the first case, Antiochos is seen as an "eastern" monarch and his royal and religious imagery is accordingly decoded as ancient Persian traditions in Greek disguise. In the second case, Antiochos is seen as a client king whose main political aim was to position his small kingdom in a world dominated by Rome. But for an alleged client king, Antiochos referred remarkably little to Rome in his self-presentation. Moreover, in the mid-1st century BCE, Roman dominance in the Near East was not a foregone conclusion: when Antiochos succeeded to the throne of Commagene the greatest power in the Near East was the Armenian Empire of Tigranes the Great; after Tigranes’ fall, the Parthian Empire successfully challenged Roman supremacy in the region. Moreover, for a local ruler, Antiochos made remarkably grand political statements: he adopted the imperial title of Great King, claimed to be a descendant of Alexander the Great and a successor to both the Seleucid and the Achaemenid empires. This contribution aims to understand Antiochos’ kingship from neither the Persian past nor the Roman future. Instead, it considers Antiochos' monarchy in its contemporary late-Hellenistic context. It shows that Antiochus' royal representation overwhelmingly refers to the Seleucids (and only rarely to the Achaemenids). It argues that the alleged idiosyncratic imagery and rhetoric found on Nemrud Dağ and elsewhere in Commagene can be understood as part of a wider movement among local rulers in the Near East in response to Seleucid collapse.
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