Greek cities in the Eastern Mediterranean: local, Greek and Roman heritages in urban landscapes and the role of excavation history
The impressive remaining ruins of the cities of the ancient Near East — cities such as Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem), Apamea, Baalbek (Heliopolis), Bostra, Caesarea Marittima, Gerasa, and Palmyra — almost all date to the Roman period. This is no co-incidence. The Roman empire was an ‘empire of cities’.
The Eastern Mediterranean, however, was already densely populated with cities, when the Romans became rulers.
This lecture revisits some of these long-established centres of the Greek and Roman Near East, and the various ancient peoples who inhabited them. It traces, through the archaeology and historical sources, the transformation of these cities over centuries – also those before the Romans arrived – and asks in which ways we can begin to disentangle the various cultural impacts and legacies visible and invisibly embedded into the fabric of these urban centres.
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Rubina Raja is professor of classical archaeology and art at Aarhus University, Denmark and director of the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for Urban Network Evolutions.
She heads further collaborative research projects focusing on the archaeology and history of Palmyra and the Eastern Mediterranean, including the long-standing Palmyra Portrait Project.
Raja is an experienced field archaeologist having headed several large-scale excavation projects in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Raja’s research focusses on societal and urban developments, visual culture and iconography, architecture as well as networks from the Hellenistic to the medieval periods.
While being a classical archaeologist, she has pioneered work in the fields intersecting archaeology and natural sciences bringing high definition studies of the past to the forefront in its historical contexts.
She has published widely on the Hellenistic to early Medieval periods, with a focus on the eastern Mediterranean, and her monographs include Pearl of the Desert. A history of Palmyra (OUP, 2022), Urban Development and Regional Identity in the Eastern Roman Provinces, 50 BC – AD 250: Aphrodisias, Athens, Ephesos, Gerasa (Museum Tusculanum, 2012) as well as Palmyrene Sarcophagi (Brepols, 2023).
Presented in conjunction with the Australian Archaeological Institute in Athens as part of the 2025 Greek Festival of Sydney
Header image: View of Palmyra in the Syrian Desert. Courtesy of Winnie Denker.
