It is grimly appropriate that two such important studies of the ancient town of Dura-Europos have been published so recently. While the deliberate destruction of heritage undertaken at Palmyra by Daesh received widespread press coverage in 2015, the destruction at Dura, caused by systematic looting of the town and its necropolis, is less well known. The site lies in the Deir es-Zor province, near the Iraqi border, and one of the areas of Syria under firm Daesh control for the longest time. Satellite images of the densely cratered site are dramatic and distressing.
Dura-Europos is important and interesting because in antiquity it lay at the margins of three empires. Established as a Seleukid colony c. 300 BC, it became part of the Parthian Empire, then part of the Roman Empire until its destruction by the Sassanian Persians in AD 256. The site stands on the edge of the Syrian steppe overlooking the River Euphrates. Re-discovered in 1920, Dura was excavated by French and American archaeologists until 1937. The evidence for the peoples and cultures that inhabited and influenced the town is particularly vivid and detailed because of the aridity that preserved its wall-paintings and organic materials, including papyrus documents. It was, as Jennifer A. Baird describes it, “this incredible polyglot, multicultural place on the Syrian Euphrates” (p. xii). A Franco-Syrian project directed by Pierre Leriche began in 1986 and continued until the outbreak of the Syrian civil war. Simon James published his exemplary study of the military equipment finds from Dura in Reference James2004, and Baird published her own innovative study focusing on the site's houses in 2014. Both conducted fieldwork there under the auspices of the Franco-Syrian mission.
One of the distinctive aspects of Dura-Europos from the perspective of a Roman archaeologist and historian is the unique and detailed evidence that it provides for the presence of the Roman army within an existing urban centre, and this is the subject of James's book. I drew heavily on that evidence (at least in its published form) in my own 2000 study Soldiers, cities & civilians in Roman Syria. James goes much further than I could, combining evidence from his own 2005–2010 fieldwork (surface study, survey, photography, magnetometry) with re-study of the Yale University excavation archive and the published documents (inscriptions and papyri) from the site. He sets this all in the wider contexts of scholarly debates on the Roman military presence at Dura, relations between soldiers and civilians, and Roman military building. This is a substantial and rigorous study, innovative in its approach and interpretations. The key particular conclusions he draws from his research are that the Roman military base at Dura was substantially larger in area than recognised by the original (1920s–1930s) excavators; and that both the base and its garrison were larger at an earlier date (c. AD 165–180) than was once considered to be the case, the excavators having posited the development of a small early base area into a much more substantial one with an increased garrison and bigger base established c. AD 209–212. James also argues that the size and importance of the “extended military community” of families and other dependants of the soldiers was greater than allowed by earlier studies (pp. 250–55). This all leads him to come down on the side of ‘integration’ in debates about the level of integration or separation between the Roman army and the local civilian population of Dura: “The archaeology of Dura's military base, then, does not reflect simple arbitrary military expropriation and oppression of the local civilian population, but rather indicates a measure of consideration for it” (p. 291).
Part II of the book presents the core of his research, with its detailed re-evaluation of the archaeological evidence from the relevant areas of the site. It re-assesses the published conclusions of the original excavators through James's new fieldwork and re-study of the excavation archives. While new excavation was (quite rightly) not a significant part of James's study, his group's detailed on-site re-examination of inter-relationships between excavated structures adds a significantly original aspect to the publication. One example of this approach, perhaps not in itself of fundamental importance but of particular interest to me, is his re-examination of the development of the bath building in block F3. In a 2004 article, I used the excavators’ original published account and the Yale archives to argue that this bath was not of Parthian date as originally claimed, but Roman, and specifically reflected the presence and cultural influence of the Roman army at Dura. By examining the inter-relationships between these baths and other bath buildings on the site, and the infrastructure of their water supply, James is able to confirm them as Roman, but offer a more subtle and detailed picture of their development and relationship to the Roman military presence in the city. At a higher level, this approach allows James to develop a much more nuanced picture of the development of the Roman base over time than that of the original excavators. His central argument, that the base area was larger and developed earlier than the excavators’ published account suggests, is important and convincing.
Part III is a study of the history of the Roman military occupation of Dura based primarily on re-evaluation of the published inscriptions and papyri from the site. Here, James's conclusions complement those he has drawn from the archaeological evidence. In particular, he argues for the creation and presence at Dura of the cohors XX Palmyrenorum alongside cohors II Ulpia equitata in the Antonine period rather than the former replacing the latter c. AD 208. This effectively doubles the size of the earlier garrison, and explains what James sees as evidence for a larger base at that earlier date. At this point, he also develops the concept of ‘extended military communities’—servants, families and other dependants of soldiers—to argue for the army having a greater impact (at least in numerical terms) on the population of Dura as a whole than suspected by earlier scholars. Here he also draws on Baird's (Reference Baird2014) research arguing for the regular presence of women within the ‘military quarter’ based on the distribution of gender-specific artefacts, something that echoes recent developments in the interpretation of, for example, the fort at Vindolanda. Also in Part III, James presents the archaeological basis for an argument for the integration of military and civilian life at Dura. This comprises evidence that boundaries of civilian properties were sometimes respected in the development of the military base area and that “military takeover was not conducted by unilateral Diktat regardless of consequences for civilians” (p. 287); that the spatial archaeology (and particularly the siting of an arch) reflects continuing civilian access to temples within the military base area, perhaps including processions into it; and that the locations of the bath buildings and amphitheatre argue for combined military-civilian access rather than solely military use. While there is no ‘smoking gun’ here that proves integration, these are important and original contributions to the debate.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given my own (1996) publication of a model emphasising institutional and social separation of Roman soldiers and civilians at Dura, I disagree with some aspects of James's discussion, while acknowledging that his knowledge of Dura far outstrips my own. He sometimes (particularly in later chapters) caricatures the implications of a ‘separation’ model, referring variously to: “a deadly parasite, sucking the life out of the town” (p. 12); “a kind of apartheid” (p. 24); “brutal and insensitive military occupation” (p. 287); “dystopian gloom” (p. 293). This is based on views that Rostovtzeff expressed in the 1930s; James turns to much more recent scholarship (Stoll Reference Stoll2001, for example) for support for ‘integration’. James presents himself as an honest broker between these two extremes (“aspiring to a gentle, even-handed misanthropy” p. 294), even while coming down on the side of integration. Of course, he is quite right. ‘Reality’ lies between the poles of integration and separation, and my own aim was never to ‘prove’ separation (let alone ‘dystopian gloom’), but to generate debate and to test the value of a ‘separation model’ as a response to my own early grounding in a version of Romano-British archaeology that presented Roman imperialism as essentially positive. James twice refers to “naïve post colonialism” (pp. 33 & 294), which he equates with “identifying with the colonized” (pp. 33 & 294) (rather than the colonial power). I think this is unnecessarily reductive, and still feel that acknowledging the fundamental character of imperialism and the distinctiveness of colonial societies is valuable in shaping our responses to Dura and the Roman Empire more generally, as well as in assessing the plausibility of some aspects of the ‘integration’ model that themselves seem to me naïve.
But these minor (and substantially abstract) responses aside, this is a magnificent and important book. In addition to the key evidence and conclusions highlighted above, James includes valuable insights into the history, methods and weaknesses of earlier research at, and on, Dura, and superb illustrations, both archival and modern.
As noted, Baird has already published her own important research on Dura, focusing on, but not limited to, the study of its houses. Her 2018 book is less ambitious than James's, in the sense that it is a synthesis, but perhaps more ambitious for the very same reason. It interweaves an overview of the history, buildings and wider material and visual culture of the site with a fascinating contextual discussion of the 1920s and 1930s American- French excavation and interpretation of the site, and the archive at Yale University that is a key part of its legacy. Baird's fine treatment of the complex interplay between the colonial and Orientalist facets of Dura's ancient and modern history is a particular highlight, demonstrating how the excavators’ outlooks and the location of the site within the spheres of French and British imperial activity shaped their interpretation of it and its historical development. Baird also makes an important point of crediting Susan Hopkins and Margaret Crosby, whose importance on the Yale excavations was overshadowed by their male colleagues. Her sensitive discussion of the ideology underlying the archival photographs from the Yale excavations and their inherent value as items of material and visual culture is also very valuable. One perhaps minor (but to me interesting) point is her comment that Frank Brown (one of the excavators) was partial to recording on index cards. My own experience of the Yale archive (when working on the F3 baths, discussed above) suggests Brown liked to test his subsequent interpretations on index cards too, sometimes leading one to view the archived index cards as primary evidence when in fact the primary records on which they were really based were elsewhere, if they survived at all.
Baird's presentation of the history and the archaeology of Dura is exemplary, setting the primary evidence (inscriptions and papyri as well as archaeology) in the contexts of changing interpretations up to the present day, obviously drawing on her own recent research on the houses, but also (for example) that of Kaizer on Dura and Palmyra, and Andrade (Reference Andrade2013) on Syrian identity. Following the latter, Baird challenges the Yale excavators’ (surprisingly tenacious) model of ‘Hellenic-Semitic’ racial dichotomy in the population of Dura, drawing on, among other things, the evidence of double-naming discussed in my own 2007 paper. Baird points out the gendered naming practices attested in the labels of certain wall-paintings (Greek names for males, Semitic names for women), and I would argue that this reinforces my notion of the contextual use of Greek and Semitic names given the different public-private roles of males and females in asserting (potentially fictive) lineage in Dura's civic life. As another point of detail, I would take issue with Baird's claim (following Bellinger, who originally published the coins) that “Dura was using Roman currency long before Lucius Verus clashed with Parthia: both the coins and the documents attest to this” (pp. 153–54). Certainly there are Roman coins from Dura that were minted before the Roman conquest of the site, but (as I argued in 2004) they may well have reached Dura (and been used there) long after their original production. And surely the references to “Tyrian silver” (pp. 127) as a medium of payment in Parthian-era documents need not literally mean coins minted in (Roman-controlled) Tyre, but merely minted on the Tyrian weight standard. Even if they do actually mean coins from Tyre, their importance in the pre- and non-Roman Near East (among Jewish communities in particular) makes it misleading to characterise them as ‘Roman’ in any real sense.
These individual quibbles aside, this is an excellent book that has changed my outlook on many aspects of Dura and its reception, and a book that inspires me to incorporate Dura in my own undergraduate and postgraduate teaching again, not least because Baird's work (like James's) constitutes an invaluable resource for doing so. Baird is right that Dura was not necessarily “a utopia of multi-cultural harmony” (p. 153), but as she also indicates, we have much to learn from its cultural diversity and its complex and long-standing relationships with colonial power of one kind or another.
