The Southern Levant

The impact of Roman rule in this period on at least one group of inhabitants of the Levant can be traced with a degree of detail impossible in almost any other part of the empire. The history of the Jews is preserved through a continuous literary tradition which stretches back to the first half of the first millennium bc. The vicissitudes of the early imperial period were particularly well recorded, partly because the first century marked major changes within Judaism, including the birth of Christianity, and partly because it spawned the only provincial historian of the empire to describe his own society in detail, Josephus. His writings also provide insights into the history of the region as a whole and of nearby gentile peoples, but his remarks about Near-Eastern non-Jews were naturally always from a Jewish perspective, and for much of the history of the gentile inhabitants of the area recourse must be made to the remarks of geographers and antiquarians like Strabo and the elder Pliny, and to archaeology, coins and inscriptions, as elsewhere in the empire. ¹