This book focuses on the fate of the Greek mythological themes, divine and heroic figures, far in the East, primarily in the area of ancient Gandhara and Bactria (today in Uzbekistan). In alphabetic order, it covers primary iconographic schemes, which the art of these areas borrowed from the Hellenistic Mediterranean. We can compare how individual typical depictions of Greek deities changed and accommodated the taste and ideas of the local populace over the centuries. Aside from this, many of the originally Greek mythological characters, including their typical attributes, became, as this book clearly shows, the basis for images of various local Iranian, Indian and other deities.

This book considers how languages, peoples and cultures in the Near East interacted over the millennium between Alexander and Muhammad.

This book--the first full-length study of Theodoret's Therapeutic for Hellenic Maladies--examines Theodoret's arguments against Greek religion, philosophy, and culture. Its analysis of the interaction between Hellenism and early Christian culture offers insights into the broader late Roman and early Byzantine world in the fifth century.

In these fictive creations, Jewish writers reinvented their own past, offering us vital insights into Jewish self-perception.

In the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s conquests in the late fourth century B.C., Greek garrisons and settlements were established across Central Asia, through Bactria (modern-day Afghanistan) and into India. Over the next three hundred years, these settlements evolved into multiethnic, multilingual communities as much Greek as they were indigenous. To explore the lives and identities of the inhabitants of the Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms, Rachel Mairs marshals a variety of evidence, from archaeology, to coins, to documentary and historical texts. Looking particularly at the great city of Ai Khanoum, the only extensively excavated Hellenistic period urban site in Central Asia, Mairs explores how these ancient people lived, communicated, and understood themselves. Significant and original, The Hellenistic Far East will highlight Bactrian studies as an important part of our understanding of the ancient world.

While Jewish Palestine has been at the focus of scholarly interest, Greek Palestine has not yet received similar attention. This book attempts to investigate the intellectual life in that country in the Hellenistic world and in the Roman Empire. The two perspectives taken are a full prosopographical survey of Greek intellectuals in ancient Palestine and an in-depth study of the Greek intellectuals in one particular city, Ascalon. A survey of the penetration of Latin among the educated Greek-speaking inhabitants of the country concludes the book.