Founding the City

The founding, or re-founding, of cities was a powerful engine of local change in the empires created by Alexander the Great and his successors. However, in Founding the City, François Gerardin argues that a "new wave" of city foundations in the second century BCE played an equally decisive role in shaping the eastern Mediterranean and Near East. Rather than reading these foundations primarily as sites of cultural hybridity, Gerardin approaches them as instruments of state formation deployed by the Attalid, Seleucid, and Ptolemaic monarchies at a moment when both Rome and Arsacid Parthia were ascendant.Drawing on a wide body of evidence--historiography, inscriptions, papyri, coins, archaeology, and cuneiform tablets--Gerardin traces how Greek-style civic communities served as flexible political technologies that mediated relations between monarch and subject. He shows that each kingdom adapted the polis model in distinctive ways, shaped by local geography, institutional legacies, dynastic strategies, and ethnic diversity. At the center of this study is the newly published documentary archive of Euergetis, a previously unknown polis of Ptolemaic Egypt. Examined here in full for the first time, this papyrus dossier illuminates the local negotiations, administrative structures, and political aspirations that accompanied the making of a new city.Founding the City restores the vibrancy and dynamism of the second century BCE and challenges narratives that treat this period as one of terminal decline. Instead, it reveals a world still experimenting with urban forms, civic identities, and statecraft on an imperial scale.