Before Alexander, the Near East was ruled by dynasts who could draw on the significant resources and power base of their homeland, but this was not the case for the Seleukids who never controlled their original homeland of Macedon. The Early Seleukids, their Gods and their Coins argues that rather than projecting an imperialistic Greek image of rule, the Seleukid kings deliberately produced images that represented their personal power, and that were comprehensible to the majority of their subjects within their own cultural traditions. These images relied heavily on the syncretism between Greek and local gods, in particular their ancestor Apollo. The Early Seleukids, their Gods and their Coins examines how the Seleukids, from Seleukos I to Antiochos IV, used coinage to propagandise their governing ideology. It offers a valuable resource to students of the Seleukids and of Hellenistic kingship more broadly, numismatics, and the interplay of ancient Greek religion and politics.

Before Alexander, the Near East was ruled by dynasts who could draw on the significant resources and power base of their homeland, but this was not the case for the Seleukids who never controlled their original homeland of Macedon. The Early Seleukids, their Gods and their Coins argues that rather than projecting an imperialistic Greek image of rule, the Seleukid kings deliberately produced images that represented their personal power, and that were comprehensible to the majority of their subjects within their own cultural traditions. These images relied heavily on the syncretism between Greek and local gods, in particular their ancestor Apollo. The Early Seleukids, their Gods and their Coins examines how the Seleukids, from Seleukos I to Antiochos IV, used coinage to propagandise their governing ideology. It offers a valuable resource to students of the Seleukids and of Hellenistic kingship more broadly, numismatics, and the interplay of ancient Greek religion and politics.

The Seleukids, the easternmost of the Greekspeaking dynasties which succeeded Alexander the Great, were long portrayed as weak, doomed to decline after the death of their first king, Seleukos. Yet they succeeded in ruling much of the Near and Middle East for over two centuries. In this book international scholars argue that in the decades after Seleukos the empire developed flexible structures that successfully bound it together in the face of a series of catastrophes. The strength of the Seleukid realm lay not simply in its vast swathes of territory, but rather in knowing how to tie the new, frequently non-Greek, nobility to the king through mutual recognition of sovereignty.

Alexander the Great of Macedon was no stranger to controversy in his own time. Conqueror of the Greek states, of Egypt and of the Persian Empire as well as many of the principalities of the Indus Valley, he nevertheless became revered as well as vilified. Was he a simply a destroyer of the ancient civilizations and religions of these regions, or was he a hero of the Persian dynasties and of Islam? The conflicting views that were taken of him in the Middle East in his own time and the centuries that followed are still reflected in the tensions that exist between east and west today. The story of Alexander became the subject of legend in the medieval west, but was perhaps even more pervasive in the east. The Alexander Romance was translated into Syriac in the sixth century and may have become current in Persia as early as the third century AD. From these beginnings it reached into the Persian national epic, the Shahnameh, into Jewish traditions, and into the Quran and subsequent Arab romance. The papers in this volume all have the aim of deepening our understanding of this complex development. If we can understand better why Alexander is such an important figure in both east and west, we shall be a little closer to understanding what unites two often antipathetic worlds. This volume collects the papers delivered at the conference of the same title held at the University of Exeter from July 26-29 2010. More than half the papers were by invited speakers and were designed to provide a systematic view of the subject; the remainder were selected for their ability to carry research forward in an integrated way.