ABSTRACT
To understand Julia Domna’s upbringing and mental horizons, as far as that is possible, her geographical, cultural, and religious background must be understood, and its complex development through space and time. Only then can she be set against it. Syria is a strip of land stretching from the Taurus mountains in the north to the confines of Egypt in the south; from west to east it reaches from the Mediterranean to the Iraqi desert.1 This is the geographical term; political units called Syria, such as the Roman province and especially the modern state, have been more restricted. Geographers from the Arab period onwards have described the area as divided into parallel zones also running north-south.2 Behind a narrow coastal plain lie broken mountain ranges separated from each other by the valleys of the Jordan and the Orontes. Further still to the east is undulating steppe and then the Arabian desert, watered at Damascus and elsewhere by rivers flowing from the mountain ranges or by local springs, as at Petra and Palmyra. The later Ottoman provinces of Aleppo and Damascus stretched to the Gulf of Aqaba, but they did not include the Mediterranean strip. The political result of the fragmented physical geography was that Syria was not likely to be a political unity but would be split into a number of small states, and, as the route between Egypt and powers to the north, whether based in Asia Minor or in Mesopotamia, a scene of conflict between them.
