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The Seleucid Empire (311-64 BCE) was unlike anything the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds had seen. Stretching from present-day Bulgaria to Tajikistan -- the bulk of Alexander the Great's Asian conquests -- the kingdom encompassed a territory of remarkable ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity; yet it did not include Macedonia, the ancestral homeland of the dynasty. The Land of the Elephant Kings investigates how the Seleucid kings, ruling over lands to which they had no historic claim, attempted to transform this territory into a coherent and meaningful space. Based on recent archaeological evidence and ancient primary sources, Paul J. Kosmin's multidisciplinary approach treats the Seleucid Empire not as a mosaic of regions but as a land unified in imperial ideology and articulated by spatial practices. Kosmin uncovers how Seleucid geographers and ethnographers worked to naturalize the kingdom's borders with India and Central Asia in ways that shaped Roman and later medieval understandings of "the East." In the West, Seleucid rulers turned their backs on Macedonia, shifting their sense of homeland to Syria. By mapping the Seleucid kings' travels and studying the cities they founded -- an ambitious colonial policy that has influenced the Near East to this day -- Kosmin shows how the empire's territorial identity was constructed on the ground. In the empire's final century, with enemies pressing harder and central power disintegrating, we see that the very modes by which Seleucid territory had been formed determined the way in which it fell apart. - Publisher.

Seleucids. --- Seleucids. --- 333 B.C.-634 A.D. --- Seleukidenreich. --- Syria --- Syria. --- Syrien. --- History

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Time and Resistance in the Seleucid Empire investigates the relationship between the formal temporal structures projected by the Seleucid imperial court and the indigenous temporalities that responded to, undermined, and ultimately resisted these. The complex and competing temporalities of the Hellenistic East - a site of intense creativity in conceptualizing time - have either been unnoticed in scholarship or treated in isolation. Understanding the interactions of these time systems as a coherent phenomenon of cultural and political history will provide new contexts and integrated explanations for questions central to both the classical Mediterranean world - such as post-Alexander state formation and "Hellenization" - and Near Eastern and religious studies - such as textual canonization and the emergence of apocalyptic theologies. The book's first half explores, above all, the invention and institutionalization of the Seleucid Era year count. This was the world's first continuous, irreversible, accumulating, and transcendent count of historical duration. The second part examines the Seleucid subjects' intellectual, religious, and political responses to this radically new temporal order. These include, most significantly, the first emergence of apocalyptic eschatology, that is, total histories of the world, from beginning to predicted end.--

Time perception --- Seleucids --- Calendar --- Computus --- Astronomy --- Chronology, Historical --- Chronology --- Chronometry, Mental --- Duration, Intuition of --- Intuition of duration --- Mental chronometry --- Time --- Time, Cognition of --- Time estimation --- Orientation (Psychology) --- Perception --- History --- Imperialism and science --- Ethnoscience --- End of the world --- Calendar. --- End of the world. --- Ethnoscience. --- Imperialism and science. --- Seleucids. --- Time perception. --- Middle East.