Neoplatonism and Ancient Tradition

Studies on Historicity, Translation and Tradition

Iamblichus and The Neoplatonic Curriculum

In the late 3rd century CE, Iamblichus, a Greco-Roman/Syrian philosopher and mystic, developed a curriculum which he believed represented key doctrines and insights from an ancient tradition, stretching back some 800 years to Pythagoras (570-495 BCE) and beyond. I’d like to explore the history of this tradition in a series of critical and historical essays where we will mainly follow Iamblichus’ curriculum but also consider ideas, personalities and events in a larger context along the way.

I communicated a similar theme in my first entry, where I briefly discussed Jan Assmann’s comparative analysis of Egyptian and Hebrew religion, history and memory. My intentions in sharing this analysis and commentary, as always, are to encourage discussion and expand my own understanding, but also to hopefully introduce others more capable than myself to inspiration.

I believe this theme is relevant as it represents more than just an unsquared circle in Western academia, which would be of little interest to anyone aside from schoolboys and specialists. There is a critical deficiency in how Westerners understand the history of ideas and beliefs.

Our Linear Concept of History

Most moderns have only a vague conception of history. History, today, is conceived of as an inevitable force, a momentum, proceeding linearly along a trajectory, and every ideology since the 18th century has believed in man moving upwards or ahead through the ages. Man had to be improved, then he had to be perfected, history was moving on it’s own, society then had to be improved, had to be perfected, and so on. This is social justice, or man moving towards the rapture, the apocalypse, the end of history.

This type of belief or conception we will designate History for the purpose of this essay. This History, is history as a ledger book. It is a running ledger with debits and credits, advances and declines. Viewed in this way, as a progression or accumulation, modern study of history rarely captures expressions of timeless insight and is more an accounting of hours spent. I compiled something similar in my multi-part economic analysis of the burden of Non-Integration.

But modern History, as we are defining it here, as a force, as a running, cumulative ledger, is not concerned with communicating insight, truth or understanding. It is about staking claims to precedence or primacy. It is evidence to be presented in a courtroom. It is history as a grievance or inheritance to be arbitrated before God. This is not God the Almighty, but God the Assessor, the Arbitrator, the Justiciar. The settler of accounts.

I bring up this discussion of History, and how it is a force of modernism, because the Western heritage of myth, legend, inspiration, and thought, as well as the concepts of cosmology and reality, have been subsumed in this materialistic and progressive concept of linear History. We must first rid ourselves of this conception.

The Purpose of History

For our second preparation, we must now try to understand how we came to inherit this concept of a linear march of history, or of history as a mere chain of causality, and how that has led us to understand history as a progressive ladder to the heavens, or an ascent to paradise, or an appointment with the apocalypse.

History, in the sense that we are describing it as both a linear concept and a belief in trajectory, has proceeded along this path because from the 1st century CE onwards, it largely became a ledger of events which had to be reconciled with the Torah. Firstly by the Jews, then by the Christians and Muslims, and lastly by positivist and progressivist Moderns.

But to begin at the beginning, there’s a reason the Torah wasn’t formally consolidated until the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE, and likely even later. This is precisely when the Macedonians and Romans began arbitrating property disputes in Egypt, Syria and Palestine, and the Torah was quite intentionally designed to secure advantages for this purpose.

The Torah is, first and foremost, concerned with inheritance and purity. Not inheritance in terms of wisdom or the transmission of insight or understanding, or purity in the sense of virtue, but of simply securing one’s material inheritance and possession of benefits by strict observance of a contract. Hence the emphasis on genealogies, first sons, second sons, brothers and birthrights.

Otherwise it is a mostly unremarkable collection of ill-plagiarized fables stolen from neighbors and mercantile anecdotes, but for our purpose we need to understand it primarily as a means to fabricate a claim to inheritance, to primacy and precedence, assembled to leverage position under Macedonian and Roman arbitration.

This is quite telling given the fact that probably the oldest original story that can be reliably attributed to the Hebrews and the story from which the nation of Israel received it’s name, involves deceiving one’s own father and brother out of an inheritance, a birthright. This is the story of Jacob and Esau. Similarly, their other few distinctly tribal stories describe infiltrating high office or otherwise gaining favor from Pharaoh or other Bronze Age potentates to materially aggrandize their own kin at the expense of the natives. This seems to be a repeated motif amongst the great Hebrew epic and is exactly what they were doing between 200 and 10 BCE under the Ptolemies and Romans, not just what they claimed to have done in the centuries prior.

Yet somehow, the scholarly and religious efforts of just a few Alexandrian Jews became not only the predominant mode of worship, memory and self-concept amongst their own people, which was clearly their intent, but guided a mode of being, just a few centuries later, for much of the known world when their people were humiliated, dispossessed and dispersed, and in need of some new understanding of time and place to rationalize the tides of Fortune.

After the 1st century CE then, with their successful reclamation of Jerusalem through the tribal consolidation of Jewish identity, as well as scribal fraud and deceit, and bribery to Roman officials, of course, history is no longer merely a method for the recollection, investigation or transmission of significant insights, but testimony to be used in a courtroom.

But Jewish scribes in Alexandria were hardly the first group to compose courtly or imperial propaganda or to create syncretic religious frameworks, many Jews and Greeks were employed by the Ptolemies and Seleucids for exactly this purpose for centuries. And there is nothing inherently manipulative or evil in this act, as it represented an impulse to stake out an identity in the midst of an irresistible imperial system. However, the Alexandrian Jews of the 1st century were probably the first people to create and leverage national/historical propaganda for the purposes of claiming status and favor from within a host society, which is not an explicitly imperial or courtly purpose, quite the opposite, actually.

They began this first under the Ptolemies, receiving benefits within the city itself, and later under the Romans, receiving most of Palestine. So by the time of the 1st century then, with a Jewish diplomatic victory won by their authorship and possession of a History, we see contract law, or covenant, commercial litigation, if you will, enter into the religious and political sphere. This also established a sub-culture, a sub-state, within the Greco-Roman Imperial organization. This sub-culture was variously patronized, punished, accommodated and entertained, but never was it outright discouraged until much later, as both the Greeks and Romans believed syncretism and civilization to be inevitabilities themselves that would work over time with enough authority and exposure.

Many pre-modern societies conceived of obligations to the Gods or thought of Gods as patrons and protectors but few would have claimed to have one under contract. To the religious sensibilities of largely agrarian traditions this was just another obvious absurdity of Judaism, as divinity and cosmos were best understood in ways that certainly did not involve contract agreement. But how else could they conceive of themselves or the cosmos, being a mostly disorganized, disempowered people dedicated to moveable property? How else could they conceive of divinity? Yet the persistence and success of this spirit is why today every part of world which has been affected by the Torah and it’s History now possesses a spirit of litigation, but not magisterial reverence.

Thus the Torah and all of it’s descendants, including the New Testament and the Quran, reduce man’s religiosity to performing a contract along a fixed timeline in order to store up one’s goods in Heaven. This can hardly be argued. The supreme power of divinity, inasmuch as it interacts with man, is thus reduced to a great Tabulator, a great Accountant in the Sky, who will one day settle all debts with interest paid and reward good performance.

The Loss of Memory, Myth and Ritual Salvation

In this way, as we continue to live with this History and it’s effects, we are unmoored not only from tradition and myth, and from understanding a sense of time and place within the cosmos, but from a way of being in the world itself, as both Evola and Guenon correctly pointed out.

Our comprehension and understanding of God and metaphysics, our ability to sense or comprehend a reality greater than reality, is surely about more than settling accounts or determining one’s share of the inheritance. Being is much more than merely performing ritual or reciting rites and prayers. The ancients certainly believed so. All of them. From Japan to Gibraltar, this was almost uniformly the case for millennia prior the Roman occupation of the East.

What are the chances that they were all wrong?

Were they wrong because they didn’t write it down?

Were they wrong because they didn’t provide a receipt, as the Alexandrian Jews presented to the Romans in the form of the Torah?

Were they wrong because they had no contract with God?

Yet we must also consider the loss of an additional concept related to both linearity and covenant. Consider salvation, or redemption, as it is expressed in both the Old and New Testament. Salvation to the ancients required much more than simply believing testimony, as we are mainly commanded to do in the New Testament.

For ancient participants in the mystery cults, which were nearly all focused on sponsoring ritual reenactments of the soul’s passage into eternity after a trial of virtue, how absurd and simple it must’ve seemed to believe one’s salvation could be achieved by simply reading a verse or attending a lecture. Such a thing required experience and knowledge, not belief, or it failed to be transformative.

In nascent Christianity, one was not required to know or experience or glimpse salvation personally, only to believe the speaker, or the writer, who described it to them in testimony. Thus without direct knowledge or experience, and after obeying a simple contract afterwards, men were promised salvation by proxy in a “world to come.” To add another layer of proxy, Christian salvation was allegedly assured by the self-sacrifice of another, an innocent man, no less, but was not applicable by proxy without individual belief. This again, is a highly legalistic concept, and one bounded by time and performance, and exactly what we would expect of scribes, merchandisers, and money-counters, but certainly not wise men with any semblance of discretion.

A “world to come” is hardly the same concept as eternity. Eternity places time in a separate dimension where everything, for all time, including our own time, is understood to be always present. Thus one’s experience of salvation or redemption is real, and experienced, and exists for all-time in every moment, or it does not exist at all. This was yet another reason why both Jews and Christians were identified as atheists and materialists in antiquity, because they ostensibly believed in a “God” and a soul bounded by linear time and thus causal history, an obviously impossible restraint to place on an all-present, permeating, eternal and uncreated being. This is why the God of the Torah appears to have whims and grudges as well, not in the same sense that myth was understood to be a metaphor by various ancient people to describe their interpretation of divinity, but only in the Torah does God appear to change his mind.

Consider that the idea of salvation by proxy and belief in mere testimony from another, is precisely the opposite of the famous Delphic maxim “Know Thyself,” in that it is “Believe Someone Else.”

Only centuries later, after Neoplatonism was re-discovered and haphazardly integrated into Christian, Jewish and Islamic cosmology and theology, once Christianity had enough historical distance to conceive of it’s own origins through a mythic or metaphorical filter, were such absurdities “worked out.”

The Futility of Post-Modern Revolt

If we accept the conceptions of time, belief and history are not only wrong, plainly wrong, but harmful, then what comes next? What is left?

Evola, Guenon and other Traditionalists posited there would be some return, some turning away, or some revolution back towards traditional forms and concepts, including concepts of time, history and metaphysics.

But to what do we return? To when? To whom?

The Roman Empire? Ancient Sparta? The 5th Century Church? The Byzantine Empire?

Do we start more broadly, and simply pick some moral or individual aim?

To virtue? To courage?

I don’t mean to trivialize the instinct, which is fundamentally correct, but consider some of the premises of the post-modern revolt or return sentiments, such as those which seem to imply that identity or being itself, may be “shopped” or acquired. That you, a middle-class, middle-American, have the spirit or will of a Roman consul or a stoic philosopher. Maybe you do, and there is nothing wrong with taking inspiration from the great souls and men of antiquity and history, but do we sincerely believe that our lives or spiritual existence can match the depths of these pre-modern, pre-covenant figures?

Still others speak of an inheritance that is simply received, by virtue of being born, as if virtue and wisdom are transmitted solely by blood. This is blood and tribe, attempts to revive the Strong Gods or the Old Gods, in all their distance and strangeness to our own times. But not coincidentally, this is just as the Hebrews described their own inheritance, it required no conscious effort simply birth and blood, and covenant.

In either of these modes, the post-modern revolt, or the RETVRN, becomes a costumed subculture or another Torah, except for gentiles, does it not?

So while the impulse to understand history and origins, to reconceive of it according to some older, truer method, and to find or re-establish tradition in an honor-less, memory-less, and desacralized world is admirable, it can find misdirection.

This task, this reorientation, requires serious metaphysics, not merely accounting, nor arguing about genealogies, or birthrights, nor quoting texts or merely studying the great men of history.

Those can be worthwhile activities, but no matter how solemnly we might imitate the lives and rites of our ancestors or the ancients, this is not a material operation, and these actions will not bring them back. Neither will studying them bring us closer to being like them. We must simply be like them. We must think as they thought, live as they lived, strive as they strived, in every sense. And this means in a pre-covenant sense, not in just a pre-modern sense.

Simply reimagining, or pretending, will not do. There is no believing that will bring one right either.

What we must truly seek is this pre-covenant way of being.

The Way Out is Through

If we acknowledge this desire for traditional revolution requires not simply turning away from modernity and History to pre-modern forms but rather to pre-covenant metaphysics, it becomes clear that these other paths we described are ultimately futile.

These other efforts we described are simply aimed at establishing their own counter-Torahs, their own covenants based on blood, or tribe, or they are purely cosmetic and performative, imitative, and materialistic and not modes of being which are authentically lived. In this way, they reduce one’s spirit to the same status as those envious 1st century Alexandrian scribes who sought material rewards and so built their great, sacrilegious national forgery, thus they lead us only further to ruin, and not restoration of being, wisdom and virtue.

I suspect it was the replacement of the spirit of classical metaphysics by this fraudulent letter of History which caused us to lose something so critical that even in our attempts to oppose it, we nonetheless still imitate it’s form and function, merely creating a shadow.

So to find our way out, we will first find our way through then over and above. The higher concept of God as unitive and transcendent is not an Abrahamic concept, despite what has been told to you by History, but an ancient, classical, inevitable insight shared by various people throughout time. The inexpressible, mysterious yet intuitively knowable majesty of God, as well as the unity of existence and the primacy of virtue to both happiness and individual salvation, stands at the heart of Neoplatonism, as well as at the highest level of many other religious and philosophical systems.

Thus, rather than merely opposing the atheist materialism of Abrahamism with an atheist materialism of our own, the Neoplatonic tradition represents a far more sophisticated understanding that simply supersedes the materialism of Abrahamism in every possible way.

The promise offered to the individual is that as a coherent system, based on the oldest human religious and intellectual traditions we can reliably discover, it returns one to a sense of place and purpose within the cosmos, not simply as men and women existed pre-covenant, but as they existed for many millennia prior to that, stretching back into indecipherable, unknowable time.

To begin along this path requires no unfounded belief or secondhand testimony, only an ability for honest self-examination and a desire for understanding. The dialogues and texts are essentially a form of exercise, and by following these exercises, one may experience the same insight, according to their level of understanding, and experience the same epiphany of salvation, of divinity and eternity, with additional practice and contemplation over time. But this is more than just reading and believing, it is exercise, and must be lived, and requires moral and intellectual effort.

The ancients believed moral uprightness and good habits were preconditions to the practice of philosophy, in the sense that a person should have control of appetites and instincts prior to approaching more advanced metaphysical concepts. However, to participate in the primordial tradition requires no written commandments. Such a thing is crude and insulting and implies man is incapable of recognizing what is right, and just, from what is wrong, and evil.

The Neoplatonic tradition instead asserts both virtue and moral excellence are obviously demanded of each of us by a higher, intelligent, organizing power that dispenses justice to each, with like always finding like. At least, this is obvious to one who has the experience of knowing it. If there is such a man who is truly incapable of identifying good from evil without explicit, written instructions delivered by proxy, then that man lacks both discretion and reason, and thus has no potential to conceive of divinity at all, let alone describe it to others.

I began this essay with an extended exposition into History and religiosity because relative to those who lived and taught in the first two centuries of the Common Era, we Moderns are mostly naive of the way our beliefs and memories of the world have been shaped and guided.

They at least knew what they did not know. They accepted truth as communicated by Myth, but only after they had approached and experienced that truth firsthand. They understood truth cannot be shared through secondhand testimony and one cannot “give” truth to another, as if truth is a material object. They understood some truths are so profound they can never be told but instead must be experienced, directly. All of this, and more, is discussed in the first reading we will examine in Iamblichus’ curriculum, which is Plato’s First Alcibiades.

But to find our way back into the pre-covenant, pre-History metaphysics of Iamblichus, we must now enter through the exit, as it were. The only way out is through, so we will descend back into this History. This is what I propose to do in my study of Neoplatonism, and we will do this in conjunction with our study of Iamblichus’ curriculum.

I believe this to be necessary because as with any poison, we have suffered such a fundamental harm to being, when this History entered into the world, we must start at the site of the wound in order to heal it. Thus we will establish the precedence and primacy of Iamblichus, with a date, a time and a single man in our focus. Just as one has to focus on a single point during an attack of vertigo or during some psychotic episode, we must establish a focal point and steady ourselves before we can proceed with our reorientation. Only after we descend into this History, may we then emerge from it, travelling well over and beyond it, through our study of the Iamblichean curriculum.

The Primordial Tradition and the Roman East

I believe this beginning of History which we have been discussing, as a mass spiritual and intellectual deceit which we must now work to exorcise from our understanding, likely reached a critical point around the time of Iamblichus, roughly the third and fourth centuries CE.

By this time the ultimate purpose of the Torah, the material repossession of Jerusalem and Judea, had not only been fulfilled beyond the wildest imaginings of those Alexandrian scribes who aimed at it, but as the Gods are not without a sense of humor or justice, once their grand historical deceit was achieved, the destruction of Jerusalem and diaspora followed soon after. It was from the mouths and on the backs of this diaspora, that a great virus of petty resentment and revenge spread through the Empire, and prayers to God the Great Avenging Accountant began to be delivered in earnest.

We will begin our focus with Iamblichus on the man himself, as well as the world as it stood at the time he came into it. Again, our purpose is to examine his insights and rediscover the tradition of which he spoke in order to properly fix our own position today. One must have wisdom before one can understand justice. This is also a theme from First Alcibiades.

Neoplatonism has been wrongly confined to academic and theological discussions for some time. Even today, though texts and commentary are widely available online, the subject might seem intimidating to those who feel they are outsiders given the technical language often used to describe it. While there are some concepts which require dedicated study or specialty knowledge, the fundamental concepts and historicity surrounding the subject have been poorly expressed and understood.

The term “Neoplatonism” itself is evidence of this failure. There was not a single, self-professed “Neoplatonist” in history until the 19th century, as the term was devised by modern scholarship.

Instead, like Iamblichus, the figures we now call “Neoplatonists” believed they inherited a comprehensive religious, moral, intellectual and scientific tradition stretching back thousands of years. They believed their tradition was not derived from Plato but instead that Plato expressed aspects of this tradition in his teachings, along with Aristotle, Pythagoras, and many others, Greek and Non-Greek, citizen and barbarian alike.

Iamblichus was born, lived and taught throughout the so-called “Crisis of the Third Century,” and though not a political figure himself, was nonetheless intimately connected to the religious, social and political currents sweeping through the Roman Imperial system at the time.

You might take issue with my description of Iamblichus’ ethnos. You might have some concept of Greeks and Romans, Syrians, Persians, etc.... and so wonder “What did it mean to be Greco-Roman/Syrian in the 3rd century?” To answer that, we must look to Iamblichus’ origins, family and the socio-political situation at the time he was born, as identity was not tied to modern state-nationalism in any sense at this stage in history.

I’m not saying the Roman world was a “melting pot” in the modern sense, but the 3rd century Roman East was a highly complex society where race, education, ethnos, family, citizenship, religion and other factors make it difficult to categorize status and descent. In examining these details regarding Iamblichus, however, we may approach both a key Neoplatonic concept and a core idea communicated by Jan Assmann, which involves the translation of names, memory and myth. This is a worthy exercise to begin our analysis.

Location of Modern-Day Al-Eis, Syria, historical site of Chalcis ad Belum/Qinnasrin.

Iamblichus was born around 245 CE in Chalcis ad Belum, which today lies underneath Al-Eis, Syria. According to Appian, Chalkis was founded by Seleucus Nicator, companion of Alexander and founder of the eponymous Seleucid dynasty which ruled in the east for 250 years. By this telling, Iamblichus was born some 500 years after the “founding” of the city by Seleucus.

But how accurate is Appian’s account of the founding?

Chalkis was presumably named for the capital city of Euboea, a Greek state to the southeast of Macedon and just north of Athens, which implies the likely involvement or settlement of some of Alexander’s Greek soldiery there. Alexander’s army was as much Greek, Thracian, and Anatolian as it was Macedonian, and soldiers and settlers from throughout Greece, the Balkans, Asia Minor and Anatolia were spread throughout Central Asia and the Middle East during his campaigns and for generations afterwards.

Thus our first iteration: Iamblichus was born some 500 years after a Macedonian King (with a Persian Queen) sponsored Greek Soldiers to garrison and settle a strategic crossroads in formerly Persian territory.

However, the people there were more properly understood as Syrian, and were not Persian in any sense. But this still only represents part of the complexity. Thus our translation continues. The site on which Chalkis was established by Seleucus dates back to at least the Bronze Age, where a massive fortress stood on top of a promontory, giving the inhabitants a view of a natural military road that ran through the region. The Macedonians, Romans and Byzantines would similarly find the position to represent a strategic crossroads between the settlements that already were or would become modern-day Aleppo, Damascus, and Antioch, as well as eastward towards the Euphrates. ¹

The river which lies close to the city was almost certainly named for Baal, an appellative used to describe a number of great Canaanite/Syro-Phoenician deities and likely early rival to Yahweh, hence when the Romans arrived they combined the Greek name and a Syrian landmark name into one, being Chalcis (Greek) ad Belum (on Baal’s River, the Syro-Phoenician name).

Thus another, second translation: Iamblichus was born in a Roman city some 200 years after it’s conquest by Pompey and the Romans. The Romans combined the preceding Greek and Syrian settlement names and the area was likely garrisoned or settled in part by legionaries and soldiers since the time of Pompey’s campaigns in the East (c. 60 BCE). These veterans and settlers were embedded into the Greco-Macedonian/Syrian city.

But still, we are coming up short, because the Syrians themselves, and before them the Assyrians, referred to the settlement and fortress as Qinnasrin, which roughly translates to either “Eagle’s Perch” or “Eagle’s Nest,” in reference to the position of the citadel overlooking the crossroads.

Thus another, third translation: Iamblichus was born some 2000 years after the establishment of Qinnasrin, aka the “Eagle’s Nest,” aka Chalkis, aka Chalcis ad Belum, in an area overlooking a primevally strategic crossroads. This crossroads was contested by East and West almost continuously for 2000 years.

To some extent then, we can say that the family into which Iamblichus was born had been variously Syrian or Northern Canaanite, then subjected or blended for nearly two millennia into Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Macedonian, Greek and Roman cultures. So is Iamblichus Syrian? Arab? We know that the family from which he likely descended was known to intermarry with regional potentates, such as Babylonian and Chaldean, Armenian and Anatolian people as well.

At the time that Iamblichus lived then, there were virtually no other people in the Roman East, nor indeed in many other parts of the Roman world, that could have made such claims to antiquity or interconnectedness throughout the eastern half of the Empire as the Emesenes. Every competing Hellenistic dynasty had been destroyed by the Romans by this time aside from a few which would collapse within a few centuries, such as the Tiberian-Julian dynasty in the Cimmerian Bosporus.

Thus, at the time of his birth, we can say that Iamblichus’ family had likely been performing priestly functions throughout Syria for nearly 350 years. He was born into a people who were a unique mixture of East and West, Persian and Greek, Roman and Syrian, Macedonian, Thracian, Anatolian, etc… He was probably descended from Greeks, Macedonians, Thracians, Persians, Assyrian, Anatolian, and Arab people who had variously settled or garrisoned the crossroads. We will likely never know. Some accounts describe his family as being Arab, others say Aramaic. We also know that Roman officials from various corners of the Empire interacted with this part of the Empire, to the extent that the Emperor Septimius Severus, himself a descendant of Carthaginians, was determined to marry into Emesene nobility, perhaps out of a desire to reinforce the Imperial State (and his own household) with an ancient lineage tied to the Julio-Claudian household and to Mark Antony and Cleopatra before that.

In this sense, Iamblichus is in many ways the penultimate man of the classical world, were we to be concerned with giving an account of his pedigree for the purpose of establishing a birthright, or a claim to inheritance. It is fitting that his name is a Hellenized translation of an Aramaic or Semitic name which was commonly bestowed on royalty, meaning “He is Kingly.”

But for our purposes, we are more interested in the the knowledge of Eastern and Western metaphysics and religiosity Iamblichus expressed, born from a blended people and descended from nearly every significant civilization of antiquity, stretching back to the Bronze Age. If ever there was a primordial tradition shared widely across the ancient world, which is the central tenet of Neoplatonism, there would be no more reliable guide to it than Iamblichus.

In my next entry, we will look more into the origins of the Iamblichus’ family and the history of the Greeks, Syrians and Romans in the area, as it will give us greater perspective on the man, his teachings, and the times in which he lived. With that concluded we will then begin with First Alcibiades.

In the meantime, please check out this excellent video by American Esoterica on Iamblichus at the link below. It also serves as a good introduction to both the man himself and the myth that has surrounded him.

1. Rousset, Marie-Odile. “The Cities of Qinnasrin and Chalcis from the Bronze Age to the Medieval Period”. Chalcis/Qinnasrin/(Syrie), edited by Marie-Odile Rousset, MOM Éditions, 2021, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.momeditions.13597.