The province of Britannia and the Roman world as a whole were largely created and maintained by martial means. However, while Roman military studies in Britain achieved much during the last century, it is argued here that they have become isolated, theoretically stagnant and increasingly marginalized. Current archaeological discourse on the Roman world tends to concentrate excessively on social elites and the

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Writing the Legions: The Development and Future of Roman Military Studies in Britain

Seal impressions on bullae offer new ways of approaching the local realities of Seleukid administrative and fiscal practice. Previous studies of these objects have focused primarily on the iconography of the impressed seals. However, analysis of the find-spots of bullae, their forms, the sealing protocols employed, the quantities of extant seal impressions, and the interactions that are evidenced by several individuals impressing their seals on a single bulla, enables a range of aspects of royal bureaucracy in Babylonia to be reconstructed. This study is based on thousands of published and tens of unpublished bullae from several Seleukid sites, and also incorporates a few bullae from elsewhere that are impressed by seals with Seleukid motifs. It demonstrates the importance of groups of men ‘on the ground’ for the articulation and enforcement of royal power. Routine bureaucracy ensured that taxes were collected and local authority maintained throughout the long periods when the king and court were absent from a region, and even during instances of conflict over the throne. Nonetheless, some of the surviving evidence appears to reflect bureaucratic failings; there were also moments of reform and instances of idiosyncratic behaviour. The bullae suggest that administrative practice was relatively homogeneous across Babylonia, but differed from that known from the Greek cities of western Asia Minor. There are however similarities between Seleukid administration in Babylonia and Ptolemaic administration in Egypt, suggestive of cross-fertilisation between the two Hellenistic powers. This study is important because scant information survives about the daily realities of Seleukid control from anywhere in the empire, and very little on Seleukid rule in Babylonia. Fully exploiting these initially unpromising sources helps to fill an important gap in our knowledge, and enables broader comparisons of imperial structures between the Seleukid, Ptolemaic and Achaemenid empires.

Hollow archives: Bullae as a source for understanding administrative structures in the Seleukid empire

The early Principate tends to be interpreted in terms of the constitutional forms in which it was clothed and the administrative innovations which it brought, to the neglect of those, largely unchanged, social and economic factors which shaped the actual working of Roman politics. In no area has this tendency been more obvious than in works dealing with the Fiscus, which has thus been seen as an alternative ‘state treasury’ created at a given moment, by Augustus, perhaps in 21 or 20 B.C., by Tiberius, or by Claudius, which absorbed the revenues of the imperial provinces, and some indirect taxes. It is also seen as an administrative unit (like a Treasury, or a University Chest) concerned with the handling of an area of public finance.

The Fiscus in the First Two Centuries

This paper presents the results of a magnetic survey on the Hellenistic and Roman site of Doura-Europos in Syria. The interpretation of the magnetic data is based on an original approach by considering the use of space in a domestic unit. This type of study has been developed for sociological research but is adapted to the information carried within geophysical data. After a brief presentation of the role of geophysical methods for the study of city planning, the most important components of the 'space syntax' will be presented and applied to two blocks of Doura-Europos, one that has been excavated in the twentieth century by the Yale University and another surveyed using the magnetic method.

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New approach to the study of city planning and domestic dwellings in the ancient Near East

The main aim of this paper is to identify and describe the elements that went together to make up Roman military horse (or riding) harness in the first century A.D.1 Closely linked with this, however, will be a consideration of just how much the archaeological evidence can tell us about the military use of mounts.2 It is to be hoped that the present work will at least serve to generate new interest in cavalry equipment and provoke discussion about the functions of its various components.

C. R. Morey

Papers

The Excavations at Dura-Europos