The sandtable
J. Enoch Powell
Roman Foreign Policy in the East A. N. Sherwin-White (Duckworth £29.50) One never reads enough history. That'e s AAmericans: they don't read history or, if one of the troubles with t they do, they don't think it applies to therh,' Just fancy blundering into the M without knowing more than they co ,,s newspapers. That picked up fromWrite Eas,i' living in a continent which had no hist°ArY conies — correction, no written, philosopint; century. pfrsoims whaYte agonised over history — before the 1°1'' They Middle East is the world's Perfe,fpt sandtable of geo-politics. Put together tr sterdY'sf Anatolian highlands, the Iranian highlairl`.1 and the Mediterranean littoral, hake" Rivers; hang on to the bottom left the 'Fertile Crescent' to the land of the Tw- the riverine delta-land of Egypt; anevery °11 ft corner writes the have set up the stage on which the s repeated over and over again, whoever of play, and always the same PlaYe' the members of the cast. When the 6°' -d Israel chose the Jews, could he have fano anywhere else so suitable to locate his plaY within-a-play? Probably not, if that 13:1„anY of Man. was to be nothing less than the Redemption of the corners of the sandtable Asat b;a three principal players, Syria and ssY,.t11.`,. (top left and right) and Egypt (bottom left). (top had to score points against each other but each started with a different handicjge' Egypt was too tied to the Delta and the to be able to push any advantage too far ';re the table. The other two each had soroeaa, breathing down their neck from the nir3,a a tains above. Sometimes they the end, they each succumbed
junction across the 'Fertile Crescent'; ha.,rer
to the power from behind. Whatever happened to thwe e"re tle people on the coastal plain, theY d to bound either to 'cop it', if they live merry effectea seaward of the Rift Valley, or to play antics, if they lived to desertward. th,by the ,lon So it was that Syria and then depopulated Judaea. So it was that r•g,e, proved 'a broken reed'. So it was that and Medes and Persians overcame SYri.a exile! which Babylonia and re-installed the Judaea. So it was that a later Syria, ,led to included Babylonia, attempted but farre'rloig Hellenise the Jews while all the time thenided across the Jordan made a COnfout last nuisance of themselves. And so it was !olio that Rome, which had occupied and annexed Armenia, made Syria tarot'yed eSff vince, then annexed Egypt, then d Judaea, and then — but this was a cherent table!
sort of player that had come to the If a nation cannot help defeating its enemies, there is a kind of law which obliges it to go on finding enemies to defeat. For- tunately for Britannia, it was on sea that she could not help defeating her enemies, and that gave her a unique overseas empire which proved painlessly dissoluble. Rome was different: she defeated them on land, where she won all the last battles. Therefore, she had to conquer and rule up to the geographical limits set by ocean or desert or until she could find enemies whom it was impossible for her to defeat.
Before Carthage was finally disposed of, Rome had made her fateful contact with the kingdoms which Macedonian invincibility, in the shape of Alexander's phalanx, had left scattered across the Middle East from the Balkans as far as India. Attempts at in- direct rule by alliances and arbitrations only led to direct rule in the form of provincial government, largely organised by creating or recognising municipalities.
The Aegean Sea offered no limitation, and Western Anatolia was absorbed in the guise of the provinces called Asia and Bithynia. Even before this happened, the Syrian-Babylonian monarchy had seen the writing on the wall and endeavoured to stimulate resistance to Rome.
Thus invited to the sandtable, Rome's first action was to frustrate a Syrian at- tempt at control of Egypt and so, indirect- ly, facilitate the Judaean reaction against Hellenisation.
No sooner had the remaining powers in Anatolia, Mithridatic Pontus on the north and Armenia in the east, been subjugated, than Rome found itself forced to deal with Syria and turn it into a province. This, in turn, drew Rome on to cope with the Palestinian littoral on both sides of the Jor- dan rift. The desertward principalities demanded no more for keeping in order than the occasional expedition; but the in- tractable nature of the Israelite theocratic state defied attempts to subordinate it by direct or indirect rule (though both were tried) and ended in the catastrophe of 70 AD. Meanwhile, the third player had been replaced by someone very different. The Roman province of Syria extended to the Euphrates and no further; for the Babylon- ian half of the Seleucid kingdom had fallen to the power from behind, the power from the Median and Iranian uplands, Parthia.
It was the Parthians who in the east, like the Germanic tribes in the north-west, pro- vided the repeated military rebuffs that were necessary to prove that Rome had reached its ne plus ultra and need conquer no more because it could not.
Such, in outrageously over-simplified presentation, is the story of the geo- political sandtable of the Middle East in an- tiquity. Those who want to read the later stages of that story in detail will refer to the latest work of Mr Sherwin-White, who, as Reader in Ancient History at Oxford, made Rome in Anatolia his chosen theme. But those who shun detail will neglect the warn- ings of the broader picture at their peril. The new Rome, America, arrived at the sandtable just as Franco-British power was vanishing from the region. Perhaps the one novelty which they brought to the game was to gambit with a Judaean alliance. May I suggest to the Pentagon that the ancient
history of the Middle East will furnish with enlightenment and consolation If tt finds its experiences with Iran and Iraq, Turkey and Syria surprising, with FOP disappointing, and with Israel maddening.
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