The Land of the Elephant Kings: Space, Territory, and Ideology in the Seleucid Empire

The traditional, titular exoticism of the "elephant kings'" world-such an inducement to study it-is retained in a section on the Seleucid Indica (chapter 1) but refigured within the Seleucid-centric, spatial mode of analysis. Kosmin provides some inventive examples of how Seleucid history can work comparatively with geography, colonialism, and migration studies: the curious description of Seleucid geography as organized into settlement "panels" and circulatory "axes" (186-92), the brief section on Chasidic toponymy in New York (109-10), and the reading of the establishment of dynastic cult and the Seleucid Romance as "a spatializing act" within the reimagined heartland of Syria (104-108).