11 - The Syrian-Egyptian Wars and the new lingdoms of Asia Minor

Summary

This chapter describes the wars between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids from the end of the eighties to the battle of Raphia (217 B.C.). These conflicts, which scholars term the Syrian Wars, were to continue in the second century; they run like a scarlet thread through the history of the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. The virtually incessant enmity between the two neighbouring kingdoms was not restricted to the wars for possession of the border areas of Phoenicia and Palestine but came to assume far greater proportions; in the third century the Syrian Wars also encompassed the western and southern coasts of Asia Minor and helped create the conditions that led to a new configuration of states in that area. The Jewish people was caught up in the centre of the conflict through the fact that Palestine was under Ptolemaic rule throughout the third century. This link with Egypt had brought large numbers of Jews to Alexandria. In the second century B.C. the growing hellenization of the Alexandrian Jews made it necessary to translate the Scriptures into Greek (the Septuagint) but it also gave rise to anti-semitism, which would reach its bloody climax in Roman Alexandria. This hellenization also ranks as one of the historical consequences of the link between Ptolemaic Egypt and the Phoenician-Palestinian region, no less than the intervention of the Romans in the Near East from the beginning of the second century onwards, which was invited by the conflicts between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids.