Читать книгу A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East - Группа авторов - Страница 10

The origins of this volume go back to a time before the civil wars in the Middle East led to unprecedented destruction of the heritage from the Hellenistic and Roman periods in the Levantine lands. In the meantime, our field of research will probably have been changed for ever. It is to be hoped that a lasting peace will eventually be there to enjoy for the long-suffering population of the region.

At the outset, I must thank Al Bertrand, then Editorial Director for Social Science and Humanities Books at Wiley-Blackwell, for commissioning this Companion. Had I known at the time the mammoth task which editing a project of this size involved, I would surely have turned down his invitation … In the years since then, I have dealt with various members from the team at Wiley-Blackwell, and am grateful for the support of Kelley Baylis, Janani Govindankutty, Haze Humbert, Allison Kostka, Ajith Kumar, Jennifer Manias, Roshna Mohan, Elizabeth Saucier, Niranjana Vallavan, and Galen Young-Smith. In particular, I should like to acknowledge the guidance, patience, and kindness of Will Croft, Pallavi Gosavi, Todd Green, Andrew Minton, Skyler Van Valkenburgh, and Dhivya Vaithiyanathan, who together oversaw the final stage of the process. And I am grateful to Moira Eagling and Monica Matthews for their careful copy editing.

A warm thank-you for their splendid chapters and much-appreciated patience goes to all contributors to this volume. As is to be expected for a book of this size, some chapters were originally submitted substantially earlier than other ones, but all colleagues have responded in cheerful collegiality to my requests to ensure that the final version would be as up-to-date as possible. Amongst the contributors, I must single out (for reasons known to them) Jen Baird, Kim Czajkowski, Alberto Rigolio and, especially, Michael Sommer. I am truly grateful.

My thanks are also due to Eris Williams Reed for her insightful comments on an earlier draft of my introduction.

This volume is dedicated to the memory of Sir Fergus Millar, who passed away in the summer of 2019. Fergus was not a great fan of companions or handbooks, but when I asked him for his blessing of the project when I received the original commission he thought that, on the Hellenistic and Roman Near East, there might actually be some use for it. I am sorry that he did not live to see the final product. But surely the reader will perceive his presence as shining through in many of the pages that follow.