مشكلة العالم “الساميّ” في دورا وفي التاريخ القديم
A pervasive theme throughout the modern historiography of Dura is a putative enduring contrast between colonizers and natives, conceived as Greek and Semitic respectively. One finds, for example, historians writing about the Semitic speech of Dura, the Semitic gods of the place, the Semitic alphabets in use there. Although more recent scholars rightly distance themselves from the explicitly racial approaches of research on Dura of one half-century ago, some of the terms in use have endured sometimes without reflection. Without tedious scolding about Orientalism, this paper will investigate and historicize the term Semitic and other key-terms by which modern scholars have sought to answer the question, “Who were the people of Dura?” (and other inhabitants of Syria under Roman rule).