Hamish Cameron, Making Mesopotamia: Geography and Empire in a Romano-Iranian Borderland (Impact of Empire – 32), Brill, Leiden–Boston 2019, 375 pp. + 27 maps; ISSN 1572-0500; ISBN 978-90-04-38862-8

Abstract

One might expect that the Romans would have had extensive knowledge of the physical, political and cultural geography of Mesopotamia. After all, for many centuries Rome neighboured with the Parthian state governed by the Arsacid dynasty, and during numerous conflicts between the two states the Roman armies frequently invaded Mesopotamia, sometimes incurring as far as the waters of the Persian Gulf. The information obtained through diplomatic contacts, and in particular during military actions, should therefore have been present in Roman historical and geographical literature, since reports of some campaigns against the Parthians were widely publicised for propaganda purposes by contemporary authors, who were either participants in the events themselves, or wrote about their protagonists. In his book Making Mesopotamia: Geography and Empire in a Romano-Iranian Borderland, Hamish Cameron attempts to prove that this issue is much more complex, presenting his own ideas on the extent of the Romans’ knowledge about the region at various times. Cameron sets himself the task of finding the answer to a series of questions: “how did the Romans imagine the Mesopotamian Borderland? How did they represent the physical reality of this geopolitical space in words? What did they choose to describe, to emphasise, to suggest, to omit? How did they construct their narratives to best explain, justify, rationalise or ignore this edge of Roman power? How did they make ‘Mesopotamia’?” (p. 1). His main sources in the quest for answers are Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Ptolemy, Ammianus Marcelinus and the anonymous author of Expositio totius mundi et gentium—these works contain a collection of data that allow him to compare the changing knowledge of the area in question and to track the ways they were perceived by Roman authors in the period from the 1st century BCE to the 4th century CE (pp. 42–43).1 It is important to note that although the author is interested in the Romans’ notion of Mesopotamia, he generally uses a different term—“Romano-Iranian Borderland,” which essentially comprises a more geographically limited area: “the Mesopotamian Borderland includes the territories that would eventually be encompassed by the Roman provinces of Osrhoena and Mesopotamia as well as adjacent regions of Commagene