Beyond the River

Here is a blueprint for a new interdisciplinary approach that decompartmentalizes disciplines for the study of this district of the Achaemenid Empire including Syria, Phoenicia, Palestine and Cyprus. Remarkable cultural evolutions and changes in this area need closer study: the introduction of coinage and the coin economy, the sources of tension over problems of power and identity, the emergence of city-states similar to the Greek city type, the development of mercenary armies, the opening up of the Western fringe of the Persian Empire to the Greek world. Completely new research initiatives can extensively modify the vision that classical and oriental specialists have traditionally formed of the history of the Persian Empire.