Sometime around 305 BCE, Seleucus Nicator, the general of Alexander, tried to wrest back control of North West India. He came into contention with the young Chandragupta Maurya. The same Maurya whose grandson Asoka would play the second most critical role in Buddhism after the Tathagata himself. His Indian ambitions thwarted, Seleucus had to settle for a peace treaty with loss of the eastern Satrapies. Turning his attention back to the Mediterranean, Seleucus went on to fight many wars and built many new cities. Including Antioch in Anatolia, Edessa and Seluicia in Mesopotamia. Also, around 300 BCE, he built the city of Dura Europos in present day Syria, on what would later be a hotbed of imperial contentions and hotpot of cultural hybridization. On the ephemeral borderlands of the Seleucid, Roman, Parthian and Persian empires. A city that was lost to the sands in 257 CE until excavated in the 20th century. It has revealed, among many things, substantial syncretism. A synagogue,...