LARA FABIAN. Tangled Webs at the Imperial Periphery. Violence and Diplomacy in Ancient Armenia

FEAR LESS HOPE – Ost-West-Dialoge

The isthmus of the South Caucasus has repeatedly sat at the edge of great global powers, serving variably (and perhaps not contradictorily) as a crossroads and buffer zone. In this paper, using the history of Armenia in the Hellenistic and Roman/Parthian periods as a starting point, I explore how local political authorities in the Caucasus coped with imperial violence from both the Mediterranean and Iranian worlds. Although sophisticated diplomatic strategies allowed local powers to remain functionally independent throughout much of this period, I focus here on the critical moments when diplomacy failed, plunging the fragile local system into conflict.

Ph.D. Lara Fabian is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. Her work on the South Caucasus is both archaeological and historical, with a focus on the Achaemenid through Sasanian periods. As a participant in the Freiburg-based „Beyond the Silk Roads“ ERC project from 2017 to 2023, she published on economic history in ancient western Asia, and she is currently working on a book about the echoes of Achaemenid imperial practice in post-Achaemenid western Asia.

Sprache: Englisch
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Foto: Lara Fabian, privat.