Seleucia-on-the-Tigris: Embedding Capitals in the Hellenizing Near East

In recent literature, the Hellenistic, or perhaps better, the “Hellenizing” world has been often defined as a large connective network. 1 Connectivity stimulated cultural interplay and the interrelation of societies. Such an interplay is witnessed by documents of more ancient date, but it is generally shared that it never reached the expansion, complexity, and social diffusion that both sources and materiality show for the Hellenistic and post-Hel lenistic periods. New cities were founded, and pre-existing road systems were greatly enhanced to fos ter and speed-up connections at a global scale. This was crucial for trades, but it also led to new challenges in the administration of entangled political and social entities. The cities founded then are not completely understood as interrelated phenomena due to the complexity of the world system in which they were established and the incomplete infor mation to process. In this paper the case of one of the most important cities of the Hellenizing world, Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, is addressed based on cross analysis of different types of data, with the purpose of verifying the effectiveness of interpretive models created for describing such a reality. Seleucia was claimed in antiquity – and is still considered in contempo raneity – as one of the largest urban contexts of the ancient world. It was founded in Babylonia in the decades that followed the death of Alexander and its foundation deeply impacted on pre-existing contexts. Literary, epigraphic and, especially, archaeological re cords will be overviewed also considering that our understanding of this phenomenon has been greatly influenced by a retrospective perception of ancient Near Eastern cities that changed over time.