Concerning the "Transtigritani". A Geopolitical Curiosity on the Eastern Roman Frontier (4th to 6th Centuries).

Abstract

When Ammianus Marcellinus first describes the area around the city of Amida on the Tigris in Mesopotamia, he refers to gentes living beyond the Tigris and separated from Armenia by the peaks of the Taurus. Further on, we learn that these gentes were organised into satrapies in the Persian fashion, but were under Roman obedience since the Treaty of Nisibis of 299, until 363, when these Transtigritani were divided between the two empires. In addition to Greek and Latin authors, Armenian sources state that these territories were part of the Kingdom of Armenia and that their satraps followed an order of precedence at the royal court. What political reality did these territories cover? Did they form a coherent or heterogeneous whole? What relationship and posture did they adopt towards the neighbouring empires and the Armenian suzerain? The existence of these territories constitutes a real case study on the conception of the frontier, the rivalry, but also the collaboration of the two empires concerning these regions of Upper Mesopotamia. In an ever deepening research of the notion of limes, it appears that these Transtigritani form a "geopolitical curiosity", a unique case in the Roman-Sasanian relations. This paper proposes to exhume these Tigris satrapies from late sources, in order to better understand the geopolitical complexity of the border between the Roman and Persian empires.

Keywords

Citation

@inproceedings{concerningthetranstigritaniage2022,
  title = {{Concerning the "Transtigritani". A Geopolitical Curiosity on the Eastern Roman Frontier (4th to 6th Centuries).}},
  author = {Grau, Eric},
  year = {2022},
  school = {{Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry}}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AU  - Grau, Eric
TI  - Concerning the "Transtigritani". A Geopolitical Curiosity on the Eastern Roman Frontier (4th to 6th Centuries).
PY  - 2022
ER  - 

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