Inter-Regional Networks in Hellenistic Eurasia

We live in a world that is increasingly defined and shaped by networks. Electronic networks, once envisioned to be open highways of communication, are increasingly the site of largely isolated homogenous networks of information shaped by ideology. Some scholars have considered these groups, despite their embrace of technical innovation and involvement with social uprisings like the Arab Spring, as another component of a complex web of social, political and geospatial networks dominated by powerful nation-states.

Can Hellenistic networks exist without Hellenistic polities? The study of Hellenistic Central Asia and northwestern India, when not focused on broader questions of cultural interaction, has largely been defined by the scholarly pursuit to reconstruct a chronology of political history from limited lines of textual and archaeological evidence.

Hellenistic Babylonia, arguably the heartland of the Seleucid empire, has produced a wealth of data about local economic actors (whether traders or priestly elites) because of the hardiness of cuneiform tablets. In this paper, I will focus on Uruk, a Mesopotamian city southeast of Babylon on the Euphrates, as a case study of Seleucid Babylonia. Using the corpus of Hellenistic economic texts from this city, I reconstruct networks of economic actors within the city, which I will use as a model for economic activity

A polis with an urban center situated on the coast usually had a harbor (limen or epineion), often including an emporion, a special market for foreign trade that operated alongside the agora in the urban interior. Separated from the land- and seascape, harbors were not only integral to commerce and transportation, but also functioned as connective tissues between the larger communication networks of the surrounding sea and the terrestrial environment of the interior.