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Geographically defined, the Near East comprised of the lands situated between the Mediterranean in the west (bordered by the Phoenician and Palestinian coastal strips), the Taurus mountains in the north (with the hill countries of Commagene and Osrhoene opening up into the northern sections of Syria and Mesopotamia), the “land between the rivers” Euphrates and Tigris in the east, and the more sparsely populated steppe zone stretching into the Arabian peninsula in the south. Intersected by the great rivers and their tributaries, the various sub-regions were very different from each other as far as topography and geology are concerned.

Taken as a whole, these lands had always been – as already emphasized by the great Russian scholar Mikhaïl Rostovtzeff in a classic paper (1935a; see id. 1941b) – a transit region, a meeting-place for the three great civilizations of the ancient world: the Mesopotamian, the Egyptian, and the Aegean. At the same time, the enormous zone beyond Anatolia and the Mediterranean Sea was a region of great geographical and cultural diversity (see now Cameron 2019 on the relevant writings by the ancient geographers). Even if the geographical (and environmental) divisions cannot explain all the cultural variety, the fact that all sub-regions had their own, quite specific geological characteristics will have had some bearing on the cultural developments within them (for helpful overviews see the relevant chapters in different volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History , by Musti 1984; Kennedy 1996b; Sartre 2000, 2005b; and also the overview article by Rey-Coquais 1978).

The continuously shifting borders of the subsequent and overlapping imperial powers notwithstanding, the Near Eastern lands (at least in part) formed the heartland of the realms of the Seleucids and the Arsacids, and the latter’s successors the Sasanians. As for the Romans, in the centuries forming the prelude to the rearrangements under the tetrarchy, when the lands of the Near East came to form one of 12 new dioceses under the name “Oriens” (which also included Egypt and Libya), the region had undeniably grown into an integral part also of the Greco-Roman world. With the main enemy on its eastern frontier (see the collections of sources in Dodgeon and Lieu 1994; Dignas and Winter 2007), Rome concentrated many of its forces in the region and the percentage of legions stationed in the Near East grew substantially over the course of the principate (Isaac 1992; Kennedy 1996a; Gebhardt 2002; Mitford 2018). The army played a major role in processes of state formation and both legionaries and soldiers from the auxiliary cohorts often found themselves deeply engrained in the local societies in the vicinity of their camps (Pollard 2000; Stoll 2001; see Haynes 2013 on the auxilia; James 2019 for a case study of the best-known base of any garrison in the Near East). Emperors, and with them the imperial court, spent more and more time in the Levantine provinces, also when not campaigning against the Parthians or later the neo-Persians. And perhaps most significantly in the long run, the Near East is the region that formed the cradle of the three great monotheistic world religions of today.