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In the
THE CLASSICAL PERIOD 233
northern Jazira and the adjacent foothills, principalities of ‘Arabs’,
as the Greeks called the pastoral Arameans, were developing around
Nisibis, Edessa, and Hatra. In the extreme south Mesene, the former
delta country of the Sea Land, now greatly extended into the gulf,
became the sub-kingdom of Charax Spasinu or Characene. Charax,
at the mouth of the Tigris, became the main port of Mesopotamia
and a cosmopolitan centre, where Greek and Semitic elements
predominated.
Elymais (Elam) likewise became a sub-kingdom under the Iranian
dynasty of Kamnoskires; its way of life was mixed Greek and Iranian.
The Greeks predominated in the city of Susa, renamed Seleucia-on-
Eulaeus, but the Iranian hill-folk were the main strength of the
kingdom, and the cult of the Semitic goddess Nana was wide
spread. Adiabene (Assyria) was another sub-kingdom, and within
it, at Ashur, a small community of temple priests carried on the
ancestral worship of their god Ashur, using Aramaic and untouched
by either Greece or Iran; in the third century a.d. one of them was
called Esarhaddon. The kings of Adiabene were at one time converted
to Judaism. Gordyene, a district of small principalities, corresponds
to modern Iraqi Kurdistan, and commemorates the consolidation
of the Kurdish peoples (Gordi, Carduchi) in their present localities.
At the nodal point of Mesopotamia the great Greek city of Seleucia,
the focus of Greek civilization, maintained its constitution, though the
Parthians built themselves a barrack town and winter capital on the
opposite bank of the Tigris at Ctesiphon and later sought to weaken
Seleucia by transfer of population. Another Parthian city, Volo-
gesocerta, was also founded near by to draw away some of Seleucia’s
trade. The Greek and semi-Greek cities retained sufficient life
to maintain schools of philosophy and produce men of letters during
the first two centuries of the Parthian era, including two geographers
from Charax and an historian from Artemita. The Greek way of
life was gradually undermined by Semitic and other influences,
but it was a sudden blow, the sack of Seleucia by the Roman general
Avidius Cassus in the campaign of a.d. 164, that fatally weakened
the Greek tradition in Mesopotamia.
Commerce and Trade Routes
The unifying factor amid this welter of political and cultural
diversity was trade. Commerce had ceased to be parochial ever
since the Achaemenid Empire had established a universal currency
and the protection of the trade routes. Through Mesopotamia