Contributors

Julien Aliquot (PhD Tours University 2006, Dr. habil. École pratique des hautes études 2021) is assigned to the Hisoma research unit in the Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée (Lyon) as a senior researcher of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). Since 2017 he has led the international program of the Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie (IGLS, https://igls.mom.fr). He is the author of Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie, Vol. 11, Mont Hermon (2008) and Vol. 8/1, Beyrouth et sa région (2023), La vie religieuse au Liban sous l’Empire romain (2009), and Inscriptions grecques et latines du Musée national de Beyrouth (2016, with Jean-Baptiste Yon). He also has co-edited La Phénicie hellénistique (2015) and Sources de l’histoire de Tyr (2 vols., 2011 and 2017). His current work focuses on the epigraphic corpora of northeast Jordan (with Nabil Bader) and Tyre in Lebanon.

Nathanael Andrade is a professor in the department of history at Binghamton University, SUNY. He has authored many publications on the Roman Near East and the Roman Empire’s connections with the societies of Asia. These include Syrian Identity in the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity: Networks and the Movement of Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), and Zenobia: Shooting Star of Palmyra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Gideon Avni is chief archaeologist for the Israel Antiquities Authority and professor of archaeology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His academic interests focus on various aspects of classical, late antique, early Islamic, and medieval archaeology, the archaeology of Jerusalem, nomads and sedentary societies in the desert areas of the Near East, and the diffusion of technologies and movement of people in Eurasia. His recent books are The Byzantine–Islamic Transition in Palestine: An Archaeological Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), and A New Old City: Jerusalem in the Late Roman Period (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2017).

Janine Balty, Dr. habil., honorary researcher at the Centre belge de recherches archéologiques à Apamée de Syrie. She is author of Mosaïques antiques de Syrie (Brussels, 1977), La mosaïque de Sarrîn (Osrhoène) (Beirut, 1990), and Mosaïques antiques du Proche-Orient: chronologie, iconographie, interprétation (Besançon, 1995). She has published widely on the archaeology and history of Apamea-on-the-Orontes (Syria) and on classical iconography (portraits, sarcophagi, mosaics) in various periodicals; more recently, she has written the chapter titled “Mosaics” in Blackwell Companions’ The Hellenistic and Roman Near East edited by Ted Kaizer (Hoboken, 2022). She is co-author, with Jean-Charles Balty, of the large “Introduction historiographique” in the new edition of Franz Cumont’s Recherches sur le symbolisme funéraire des Romains (Rome, 2015). Forthcoming is the publication of the mosaics of the Maison du Cerf at Apamea in Balty et al., La Maison du Cerf et ses mosaïques: la Maison des Chapiteaux à consoles, Fouilles d’Apamée de Syrie, 5 (Brussels, 2022).

Jean-Charles Balty, D.Phil., has been curator of Greek and Roman antiquities in the Musées royaux d’art et d’histoire, Brussels (1963–1995) and professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles (1968–2001). He is professor emeritus of Sorbonne University, where he held the chair of Roman archaeology and history of art (1995–2002), and associated member of the Institut de France (Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres). He is the author of CVRIA ORDINIS: Recherches d’archéologie et d’urbanisme antique sur les curies provinciales du monde romain (Brussels, 1991). He participated in the excavations at Alba Fucens (Italy, 1961–1967) and directed the Belgian excavations at Apamea (Syria, 1965–2001). With Janine Balty, he published Apamée et l’Apamène antique, Scripta varia historica (Brussels, 2013), with Daniel Cazes Portraits impériaux de Béziers: le groupe statuaire du forum (Toulouse, 1995), and with Daniel Cazes and Emmanuelle Rosso the first four volumes of the catalogue of the Roman portraits from Chiragan, Sculptures antiques de Chiragan (Martres-Tolosane), I.1–3 and I.5 (Toulouse 2005, 2008, 2012, 2020).

Michael Blömer is an archaeologist whose research revolves around Asia Minor and the Near East in the Hellenistic and Roman period. He has worked on urbanism, sculpture, religious iconography, and the religious life of the Hellenistic and Roman Near East. He is also an experienced field archaeologist and directed the excavations at Doliche, southeast Turkey. He received his PhD from Münster University in 2009. He is currently professor of classical archaeology at Münster University and working at the Forschungsstelle Asia Minor.

Mary T. Boatwright is professor emerita of ancient history in the Department of Classical Studies, Duke University (Durham, NC, USA); she focuses on Roman imperial history, especially cultural and institutional history. Some of her publications have illuminated the city and elite of Rome; others have investigated communities and practices far from the capital. Her books include Hadrian and the City of Rome (1987), Hadrian and the Cities of the Roman Empire (2000), Peoples of the Roman World (2012), and Imperial Women of Rome: Power, Gender, Context (2021). She has also co-authored textbooks such as The Romans: From Village to Empire, with D. Gargola, N. Lenski, and R. J. A. Talbert (2nd ed.).

Olympia Bobou was born in Greece, where she studied history and archaeology, receiving an M.Phil. in classical archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She continued her studies at Oxford, where she completed a doctoral thesis on statues of children in the Hellenistic period, under the supervision of Professor Bert Smith. She worked as a research assistant and lecturer at various institutions in the UK, including the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. She has published a monograph and various articles on the representations of children, as well as articles on emotions in ancient art. She is now working at the Circular Economy and Urban Sustainability in Antiquity Project, UrbNet, Aarhus University, as an assistant professor.

Corinne Bonnet was professor of Greek history at the University of Toulouse—Jean Jaurès from 2003 to January 2024 and is an associate member of the PLH (Patrimoine Littérature Histoire) Laboratory. She is now professor of the History of religions at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. From 2017 to June 2023, she was principal investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant project “Mapping Ancient Polytheisms. Cult Epithets as an Interface between Religious Systems and Human Agency.” She is the author of several monographs on the history of religions in the ancient Mediterranean world, as well as over two hundred articles. She is particularly interested in the relations and interactions between the Greek and Phoenician worlds, from the Archaic to the Roman periods. She also studied the different historiographic discourses related to these issues.

Ross Burns has published a range of books on the history and archaeology of Syria including Monuments of Syria (London: I. B. Tauris, 1992, 1999, 2009), histories of Damascus (Routledge, 2005, 2nd ed. 2019) and Aleppo (Routledge, 2017), and his study titled the Origins of the Colonnaded Streets in the Cities of the Roman East (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently participating in a study on the reuse of sacred spaces during the centuries of transition from Roman, through Byzantine, and into Islamic times as well as a short history of Syria told through forty monumental sites or buildings. His website www.monumentsofsyria.com provides a visual survey of the sites surveyed in the book of that name.

Matthew P. Canepa is professor and Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Presidential Chair in art history and archaeology of Ancient Iran at the University of California, Irvine, where he directs the PhD Specialization in Ancient Iran and the Premodern Persianate World. An elected fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and former Guggenheim fellow, Canepa is the author of numerous publications including the award-winning books The Iranian Expanse: Transforming Royal Identity through Architecture, Landscape, and the Built Environment, 550 BCE–642 CE (2020 James R. Wiseman Award, Archaeological Institute of America) and The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran (2010 James Henry Breasted Award, American Historical Association). His most recent volume is entitled Persian Cultures of Power and the Entanglement of the Afro-Eurasian World (Getty Research Institute Publications).

Robert Carter has worked in Arabian archaeology for nearly thirty years, specializing in eastern Arabia and the Gulf. He has conducted research in all the GCC countries as well as Iran and Iraq, and has interests and publications in Neolithic settlement and seafaring, Bronze Age trade, urbanism, historic and prehistoric globalization processes, medieval port towns, the archaeology of Christianity in the Gulf, the Chalcolithic (‘Ubaid Period) of Mesopotamia, archaeological ceramics, pearl fishing, and several other topics and periods. He has particular interests in the maritime cultures of the Gulf, ranging from the first traders of the Neolithic through to the pearl-fishing towns and villages of the eighteenth–twentieth centuries ad. His most recent major project was on recent historical archaeology (Origins of Doha and Qatar Project), and he is currently starting a new project in Early Islamic and Christian archaeology of Qatar. He was professor of Arabian and Middle Eastern archaeology at UCL Qatar until 2019, then worked as an advisor for the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities; he is now with Qatar Museums as Senior Archaeology Academic and Fieldwork Development Specialist.

Anne Hunnell Chen is an assistant professor in the Art History and Visual Culture and Experimental Humanities Programs at Bard College. Dr Chen specializes in the art and archaeology of the globally connected Sasanian and Roman worlds. Highlights of her career so far include a fellowship in the Department of the Ancient Near East at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and a postdoctoral associateship in Yale University’s ARCHAIA program for the Study of Premodern Cultures and Societies. She has published on Roman, Persian, and digital humanities topics and is also the founder and co-director of the International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA). Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, IDEA is aimed at dislodging enduring impacts of colonialism through digital reassembly and recontextualization of legacy archaeological data from the site of Dura-Europos (Syria). Dr. Chen also serves as network co-chair and Annotations Activity co-coordinator for the international Pelagios Network.

Graeme Clarke was honorary visiting professor in the School of Classical Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, being emeritus professor of both the University of Melbourne and the Australian National University. He was previously a director of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University (1981–1999) and before that professor of classical studies at the University of Melbourne (1969–1980). He was a director of excavations at the site of Jebel Khalid on the Euphrates in north Syria from 1986 until 2010, after which time excavations perforce ceased. As well as editing the series of seven volumes of Reports on these excavations, he has also published widely on early Christianity, especially in North Africa (notably on Minucius Felix, Cyprian).

Henry P. Colburn has held fellowships at the Harvard Art Museums, the Getty Research Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Bard Graduate Center. He is currently a research associate of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and adjunct faculty at Hofstra University, the Bard Prison Initiative, the City University of New York, and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. His research focuses on the art and archaeology of ancient Iran and its interactions with neighboring regions. He is the author of Archaeology of Empire in Achaemenid Egypt (2020) and co-editor of In Search of Cultural Identities in Western and Central Asia: A Festschrift for Prudence Oliver Harper (2023).

Kimberley Czajkowski is senior lecturer in ancient history at the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh. Her research interests lie in the history of the Near Eastern provinces in the early to high Roman Empire. Her work often focuses on the legal culture of the region, though she has interests in various related themes, including the history of the Jewish people, Roman law, and “Romanization.” She is author of Localized Law: The Babatha and Salome Komaise Archives (2017), and co-editor of Law in the Roman Provinces (2020). She is also co-author of Herod in History: Nicolaus of Damascus and the Augustan Context (2021).

Andrea U. De Giorgi is professor of classical studies at the Florida State University and specializes in Roman urbanism and visual culture from the origins to late antiquity, with emphasis on the eastern Mediterranean. He is the author of Ancient Antioch: From the Seleucid Era to the Islamic Conquest (2016), co-author of Antioch: A History (2021), editor of Cosa and the Colonial Landscape of Republican Italy (2019), and editor of Antioch on the Orontes. History, Society, Ecology, and Visual Culture (2024). He has directed excavations and surveys in Turkey, Syria, Georgia, Jordan, Israel, and the UAE. Since 2013, he has directed the Cosa Excavations and, since 2024, the Montereggi Project in Italy; currently, he is studying the 1930s Antioch and Daphne collections at the Princeton University Art Museum.

Lucinda Dirven studied history of art and theology at the University of Leiden where she obtained her PhD in 1999 with The Palmyrenes of Dura-Europos: A Case Study of Religious Interaction (Leiden: Brill). Since then, she taught at the departments of archaeology and history of the Universities of Utrecht and Amsterdam. Currently she is professor of antique religions at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. Her research concentrates on the Roman Near East in general and Dura, Hatra, and Palmyra in particular. Her hallmark is the combination of literary and archaeological sources in order to reconstruct the religious history in the region.

Avner Ecker is a classical archaeologist in the Institute of Archaeology and in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Currently, he is also a member of the research group Remapping Ancient Elites: Between East and West in the Mandel Scholion Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is co-editor of the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae (CIIP), writing a book titled The Rise of the Polis in Roman Palestine, excavating the Jezreel Valley’s ancient Roman polis of Gaba Philippi (Tel Abu Shusha near Mishmar Ha-Emeq—part of the Jezreel Valley Regional Project), and publishing the Greek ostraca from Maresha (O. Maresha).

Peter Edwell is associate professor in ancient history in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He researches and teaches on the relationship between the Roman and Iranian worlds and in the area of late antiquity/early Byzantium more broadly. He is currently a member of the project Crises of Leadership in the Eastern Roman Empire funded by the Australian Research Council and has written a number of books and articles focusing on the relationship between Rome and its powerful eastern neighbor. His most recent monograph, Rome and Persia at War: Imperial Competition and Contact, 193–363 CE was published in 2021 by Routledge.

David Engels is chair of Roman History at the University of Brussels (ULB) since 2008 and currently works as research professor at the Instytut Zachodni in Poznań, Poland. Author and editor of numerous scholarly books and papers on ancient history, cultural comparatism, and the philosophy of history, his book publications include Das römische Vorzeichenwesen (Stuttgart, 2009); Le Déclin (Paris, 2013); Von Platon bis Fukuyama (as ed.; Brussels, 2015); Studies on the Seleukid Empire between East and West (Leuven, 2017); Rome and the Seleukid East (ed. with Altay Coskun, Brussels, 2019); Renovatio Europae (as ed., Poznań, 2019); Oswald Spengler: Werk, Deutung, Rezeption (Stuttgart, 2021); Europa Aeterna (as ed., Poznań, 2022).

Zbigniew T. Fiema has been involved in research on the Near East in the Roman-Byzantine period since the mid-1980s. His interests are concentrated on ancient urbanism, trade and economy, and military architecture. He has excavated in Egypt (Alexandria), Syria (Palmyra), and Saudi Arabia (Madâ’in Sâlih/Hegra), but Petra in Jordan remains his scholarly focus. He has directed the fieldwork of three excavation projects there (Petra Church Project, the Roman Street in Petra Project, and the Finnish Jabal Haroun Project). Fiema has lectured in archaeology at various academic institutions in Europe and the United States. He was fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC, and at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey. Currently he is docent in classical archaeology at the University of Helsinki and he participates in a German mapping project in Petra.

Leonardo Gregoratti was educated at the Universities of Udine (Italy) and Trier (Germany). He has conducted research in Udine, Trier, Kiel, and Bergen. Between 2013 and 2018 he collaborated with the Department of Classics and Ancient History of Durham University as IAS Fellow. Recently he has been a visiting researcher at the University of Freiburg (Germany). His research interests include Roman history and epigraphy and the history of western Asia, in particular the Roman Near East, Palmyra, long-distance trade, and the Parthian Kingdom. He collaborated as classical historian with the archaeological missions conducted by Udine University in Syria and now collaborates with Iranian colleagues.

Julia Hoffmann-Salz is an ancient historian who has worked at the University of Cologne and the Free University of Berlin. After receiving her PhD at the University of Bonn with a work that compared the economic impact of the Roman conquest in regions in Hispania Tarraconensis, Africa Proconsularis, and Syria, she has recently written a second book on the Ituraeans and their neighbors during the transformation of Hellenistic Syria into the Roman Near East. Her research focuses on communities in the ancient Near East from the late Seleucid period to the third century ad and beyond. She has recently co-hosted an international conference on the Near East under the Severans and workshops on the use and meaning of caves in the ancient Near East from prehistory to the Middle Ages. She is also starting on a new project on the role of enemies for the Hellenistic empires.

Oliver D. Hoover is an honorary curator at the American Numismatic Society, New York. He has published widely on Seleucid and other Near Eastern Hellenistic coinages, with particular interest in their political, cultural, and art historical implications. He co-authored Seleucid Coins, Part II: Seleucus IV through Antiochus XIII (2008) with Arthur Houghton and Catharine Lorber and has worked on the American Numismatic Society’s important digital resource, Seleucid Coins Online (http://numismatics.org/sco/). His current focus is on the completion of a multivolume handbook of Greek coinage, eleven volumes of which have been published so far.

Hartmut Leppin has been professor of ancient history at Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main since 2001. In 2015 he was awarded the Leibniz-Prize of the DFG. He was fellow at the Faculty of Classics in Cambridge and member of the IAS Princeton. Since 2019 he has been president of the Historische Kolleg München. His main research interests are the history of ideas in the ancient world and late antiquity, with a particular focus on the non-classical traditions. Currently he is principal investigator of a DFG-long-term project producing a new edition, translation, and commentary of John of Ephesus’s Ecclesiastical History, one of the major understudied sources of late antiquity. Recent publications include Die frühen Christen: Von den Anfängen bis Konstantin, 3rd ed. (Munich: Beck, 2020), English translation in preparation with Cambridge University Press; Paradoxe der Parrhesie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2022).

Pierre Leriche was born in 1940. Now Emeritus Directeur de Recherche in CNRS, Laboratory Archaeology of the Near East Nanterre. Agrégé in history and geography in 1968, Leriche was lecturer of Greek history at the University of Caen for five years. Interested by the meeting and mixing of civilizations, he spent four years in the Institut Français d’Archéologie in Beirut, then was recruited in 1978 as scientific member of CNRS in Laboratory of Archaeology in Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris. In 1984, he became State Doctor in Greek History and in 1986, Directeur de Recherche in CNRS. Applying Wheeler’s method of archaeology, he participated in excavations on classical sites in the Orient: Aï Khanum (Afghanistan), Ibn Hani and Apamea (Syria), and others. He then created and led the “French-Syrian Archaeological Expedition in Europos-Dura” (MFSED, 1983–2011), the French Uzbek Archaeological Expedition in Northern Bactria (MAFUZBactria, 1993–2016), and other smaller excavations in the Near East.

Achim Lichtenberger (PhD 2001, Tübingen University) is a professor of classical archaeology and the director of the archaeological museum at Münster University where he is also the director of the research center for ancient numismatics. His research interests are the Hellenistic and Roman Near East, iconography, numismatics, landscapes, ancient religion, and settlement archaeology. In the last decade he has co-directed archaeological fieldwork projects in Armenia, Israel, and Jordan. Lichtenberger is author of several monographs, Der Olymp: Sitz der Götter zwischen Himmel und Erde (2021), Terrakotten aus Beit Nattif (2016), Severus Pius Augustus (2011), Kulte und Kultur der Dekapolis (2003), and Baupolitik Herodes des Großen (1999).

John MacGinnis is senior curator at the British Museum, where he has been lead archaeologist in the “Iraq Scheme” archaeological training program. His interests are the archaeology and epigraphy of Mesopotamia in the first millennium bc, i.e., the Assyrian through to the Parthian periods. He has worked in countries across the Middle East, including Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Sudan, Turkey, and Cyprus; he has also worked in India and Pakistan. From 2016 to 2021 he directed excavations in the Darband-i Rania Pass in Iraqi Kurdistan, including at the site of Qalatga Darband, a fortified settlement dating to the early Parthian period, which is characterized by multiple elements exhibiting Hellenistic cultural influence. Prior to this he was a field director at Ziyaret Tepe in southeastern Turkey, the site of the Neo-Assyrian provincial capital of Tušhan, and was also archaeological advisor to the High Commission for Erbil Citadel Revitalisation.

Volker Menze is professor and head of the Department of Historical Studies at Central European University in Vienna. He has worked on the post-Chalcedonian Christological Controversy and published a book on Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church (Oxford Early Christian Studies, 2008). He edited a few Syriac texts related to non-Chalcedonian Eucharist communities and the early establishment of an underground church against the ruling Chalcedonian Church of the Empire. His recent work includes an edited volume on Syriac hagiography (The Wandering Holy Man: The Life of Barsauma, Christian Asceticism and Religious Conflict in Late Antique Palestine) and articles on the politics of church councils, book burnings, bribery, episcopal nepotism, and alternative ecclesiologies in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. He published the monograph Patriarch Dioscorus of Alexandria: The Last Pharaoh and Ecclesiastical Politics in the Later Roman Empire in the Oxford Early Christian Studies series in 2023.

Kristina M. Neumann is associate professor of Roman/digital history in the Department of History at the University of Houston, Texas. Her monograph, Antioch in Syria: A History from Coins (300 BCE–450 CE) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), applies digital mapping and exploratory data analysis to the numismatic evidence as a means of critically reassessing the relationship between civic and imperial power within the city and region. She is also the co-director of SYRIOS, a National Endowment for the Humanities–funded, web-based exhibit bringing the coins and history of ancient Syria to a wide public audience (https://syrios.uh.edu). She is executive producer of the podcast, Public Historians at Work, through the University of Houston’s Center for Public History, and has worked with archaeological projects in Rome, Pompeii, and Israel.

Simone Eid Paturel studied Spanish and Latin American literature at Paris-Sorbonne University, Egyptology at the Institute Kheops in Paris, History and Archaeology (BA) and the History of Ideas (MA) at the University of London. Her PhD was completed in 2014 at the University of Newcastle. She is the author of “Reconstructing the History of the Cypriot Maronites” (Journal of Cyprus Studies, 2009) and Baalbek-Heliopolis, the Bekaa and Berytus from 100 BCE to 400 CE: A Landscape Transformed (Brill, 2019).

Adam Pažout is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action fellow at the Universtitat Autònoma de Barcelona with project ‘VIA-TARIQ: Analysing the long-term change and persistency of the Roman road system in the Levant’. He earned his PhD in archaeology at the University of Haifa, Israel, for his dissertation on spatial analysis of rural fortifications and road system in the region of the city of Hippos. Between 2014–2019 he was involved in the Hippos-Sussita Excavation Project as an area supervisor. In 2017–2019 he co-directed several small-scale excavations in the context of Hippos Regional Research, together with Michael Eisenberg and Mechael Osband. Between 2021-2024, he was part of the MINERVA project, headed by Tom Brughmans, at the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions, Aarhus University, headed by Rubina Raja, focusing on the Roman road and transport network in the Eastern Mediterranean. His research interests include Hellenistic and Roman southern Levant, Roman roads and transportation, rural and urban fortifications, landscape archaeology, and application of GIS in archaeology.

Rubina Raja (D.Phil. 2005, University of Oxford) is professor of classical archaeology and art and chair at Aarhus University, Denmark. She is also centre director of the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for Urban Network Evolutions (grant: DNRF119) and heads several further collaborative research projects with a focus on West Asia and Palmyrene culture and society, including the Palmyra Portrait Project. Raja has published widely on the Mediterranean region and West Asia from the Hellenistic period into the medieval period with a focus on global outlooks as expressed through local behaviours. She specialises in urban societies and their diverse networks and cultures, including their architectural and other visual cultures, such as portrait cultures.

Anna-Katharina Rieger was trained as a classical archaeologist at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, where she received her PhD. Her broader interests cover material religion, arid landscapes, space and mobility, urbanism, iconography, and economic and social history in the central and eastern Mediterranean. After positions at the German Archaeological Institute, Rome, and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, she was research assistant and visiting lecturer at Göttingen, Halle-Wittenberg, and Berlin. She directed a landscape-archaeological project in the Eastern Marmarica on water management, dryland agriculture, and mobile life-strategies. With a project on sacred places in the Roman Near East she was member of the ERC Advanced Grant “Lived Ancient Religion” (dir. Rubina Raja and Jörg Rüpke) at the University of Erfurt. She was awarded fellowships of the Humboldt Foundation and the Excellence Initiative of the University of Warsaw. Recent publications cover sacred space in the Palmyrene, and religion and local identity in the Lebanon Mountains.

Steven A. Rosen is the emeritus Canada chair of Near Eastern Archaeology at Ben-Gurion University. He received his doctorate from the University of Chicago. Prior to the university, he worked for the Negev Emergency Survey. He has excavated numerous sites in the Negev, ranging from prehistoric through modern times, focusing on the pastoral societies of the region. He has also pioneered the study of stone tools in the Metal Ages. He is a member of the scientific board of Paléorient, and past editor of Journal of the Israel Prehistoric Society. He served on the Archaeological Council of Israel for more than twenty years and as BGU vice president for External Affairs and deputy rector. Recent books are Revolutions in the Desert: The Rise of Mobile Pastoral Societies in the Negev and the Arid Zones of the Southern Levant and Flint Trade in the Protohistoric Levant with Francesca Manclossi.

Catherine Saliou is professor of Roman history at the University Paris 8 and directeur d’études at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris Sciences et Lettres University. Her principal research interests are urban history, history of architecture, and the late antique Roman Near East. Her main publications pertaining to Antioch or ancient Syria are Antioche de Syrie: histoire, images et traces de la ville antique (edited book, in collaboration with P.-L. Gatier and B. Cabouret, Paris-Lyon, 2004), Gaza dans l’antiquité tardive: archéologie, rhétorique et histoire (edited book, Salerno, 2005), Les sources de l’histoire du paysage urbain d’Antioche sur l’Oronte (edited book, Paris, 2012, online), Libanios, Discours, III: discours 11, Antiochicos, edition and translation M. Casevitz and O. Lagacherie, commentary C. Saliou (Paris, 2016), and De Pompée à Muhammad: Le Proche Orient romain, I^er  s. av.-VII^e  s. apr. J.-C. (Paris, 2020).

Stephan G. Schmid has been professor of classical archaeology at Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin since 2008. Previously he held a position as professor of classical archaeology at the Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier III, and earlier he was the deputy director of the Swiss School of Archaeology in Greece. He holds a PhD from Basel University (Switzerland) and a habilitation from the Université de Paris I—Sorbonne (France). His research interests are, on the one hand, related to his long-term excavation activities in Petra (Jordan) and Eretria (Greece). On the other hand, he is working on the relationship between sedentary and non-sedentary populations, luxury architecture in the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean. For some years, his interest focused on Cyprus, starting with research on the history of archaeology in Cyprus, and leading to a new project aiming at better understanding the territorial organization of Cypriot Iron Age polities, including the excavation of a sanctuary of the Great Goddess in Idalion.

Eivind Heldaas Seland is professor of ancient history and premodern global history at the University of Bergen. His research interest is in the interaction between environment, economy, ideology, and political power in shaping complex societies/early states in the ancient world. He has worked extensively with the Indian Ocean/Red Sea region and the Near East, but is also interested in the Mediterranean and Central Asia. Seland is the author of Ships of the Desert and Ships of the Sea: Palmyra in the World Trade of the First Three Centuries CE (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2016).

Michael A. Speidel studied ancient history and other ancient world sciences at the Universities of Zürich, Basel, Heidelberg, and Oxford. He is professor of ancient history at the University of Zürich. He also holds the position of director of the Mavors-Institute for Ancient Military History. He received several grants and academic honors, including guest and research professorships in France, Germany, Poland, Turkey, and Switzerland. His fields of research include social, cultural, military, provincial, administrative, economic, religious, and political history, as well as Roman epigraphy, numismatics, and papyrology.

Karl Strobel is professor emeritus of ancient history and archaeology at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria, where he was professor ordinarius (chair) 1998–2020. He studies ancient history, classical philology, archaeology, Egyptology, and Hittitology at the University of Munich and made his habilitation at the University of Heidelberg. His research is focused on the Roman Empire, Roman military history, ancient economy, archaeology and culture of Asia Minor, and on the ancient Near East in late Bronze and early Iron Ages. He was head of the archaeological research of the city of Tavium and of the epigraphic survey in the province of Yozgat, Turkey. His last major publications are on the emperor Trajan (2nd ed. 2019, Romanian ed. 2022) and on southeast Europe (fourth century bc to third century ad). He edited Eothen 16 (2008) on the geography and topography of Anatolia in the second and first millennia bc, and Eothen 17 (2011) on Anatolia and Syria after Šuppiluliuma II (ca. 1200–800/700 bc).

Laurent Tholbecq is professor of classical archaeology (Roman Provinces) at the Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium). He has worked in the Near East since 1992 and headed the French archaeological mission in Petra since 2013. His expertise is in Hellenistic and Roman architecture in the Near East; he has a particular interest in Nabataean studies and Provincia Arabia.

Miguel John Versluys is professor and chair of classical and mediterranean archaeology at Leiden University. His research explores the cultural dynamics of the Hellenistic-Roman world (roughly 200 bc–ad 200) from the point of view of Afro-Eurasia. He investigates these processes from local, regional, and global perspectives and by means of a variety of methodologies and techniques. His research has two distinct focus points: the interconnection of cultures and their various identities (globalization), and the interdependence of objects and people. He is the author of Visual Style and Constructing Identity in the Hellenistic World: Nemrud Dağ and Commagene under Antiochos I (2017) and the editor of Persianism in Antiquity (2017); “Common Dwelling Place of All the Gods”: Hellenistic Commagene in Its Local, Regional and Global Eurasian Context (2020) and Alexandria the cosmopolis: A Global Perspective (2022).