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Pap. Giessen 27,[1714] written by a member of the strategos Apollonius’ entourage in the first months of 117, in Fuks’ view, announces an important victory over the Jews in the vicinity of Memphis, although its exact location has not been determined. Fuks notes that there is no certainty that this was a decisive victory, in view of Eusebius’ statement that the revolt was suppressed by Marcius Turbo “in many battles and over a long period.”[1715] But it may be supposed that Memphis was situated near the strategic focus of the war,[1716] since in its vicinity the Nile divides into several arms which fan out northward to form the Delta. Marcius Turbo, who had been despatched by Trajan to suppress the Jewish movement in Egypt,[1717] may have been appointed commander in the province in 116 or in early summer of the succeeding year, not long before the accession of Hadrian to the imperial throne.[1718] According to Eusebius he commanded both land and sea forces,[1719] and if so probably his advance southward was made with the accompaniment of the fleet sailing up the Nile.[1720] The importance of controlling the crossroads at Memphis was emphasized by the location in its proximity of the strong fortress of Babylon.[1721] The bastions of this formidable stronghold are paralleled in forts of the 2nd century on the Syrian and Transjordanian frontiers;[1722] it was reconditioned by Turbo according to a Byzantine source,[1723] and constituted the departure point of the Traiani Amnis[1724] a transport canal that linked the Nile with the Mediterranean, and whose use was renewed by Trajan. It entered the sea by the Pelusiac arm of the Nile, and command of it would have given the Jews rapid access to Sinai and to Judaea. Appian’s story[1725] that the Jews had seized a ship at Pelusium during the revolt, and that he himself was rescued by a Roman trireme (i.e. a warship) in the same district — may possess a similar significance. Pelusium had been the seat, in Ptolemaic times, of a Jewish military settlement which was in a position to hold any army advancing from Judaea and Sinai.[1726] The contemporary incidents at Pelusium are therefore to be understood in the light of the Jewish aim of seizing control of the route from Babylon to the Red Sea and the approaches to Sinai and Judaea.

The dates of Apollonius’ two applications for leave from his military service have been placed by Fuks between September and November 117,[1727] and according to the Historia Augusta’s life of Hadrian, Turbo was appointed to the Mauretanian command in the first period of Hadrian’s rule.[1728] He therefore left Egypt shortly after August, 117, when Hadrian acceded; the following Egyptian prefect, Rammius Martialis, took up his duties between the nth and the 28th of August in the same year.[1729] It is therefore clear that the revolt in Egypt had been put down, for the most part, by August of 117.

The revolt in Cyprus had terminated, as we have seen from epigraphical evidence, at the end of 116 or the beginning of 117.[1730] Hadrian must have visited the island personally at the time, for he was governor of Syria in 117,[1731] and had been so earlier,[1732] and a vexillatio of the VII legion Claudia had been sent to Cyprus from his province, while an inscription proves his personal presence in August, 117 (p. 268); during the same month, however, he was again in Antioch.[1733] The VII Cohort of Breuci is known to have taken part in the suppression of the rising[1734] together with the detachment from the VII legion Claudia.

In 115, having overrun Armenia, Trajan invaded the country of Adiabene, then Mesopotamia (Aram-Naharayyim). In the winter of that year and in the succeeding year, 116, he turned south, took the Parthian capital of Ctesiphon and reached the Persian Gulf. But at this point a violent and widespread rebellion broke out in the conquered areas in his rear, and Trajan was compelled to retire northward. The three centres of the rising were Seleucia on the Tigris, Nisibis and Edessa in Aram-Naharayyim. His marshal Lusius Quietus reconquered Nisibis; S. Arucius Clarus and Tiberius Julius Alexander subdued Seleucia. The rebellion was put down, but had so weakened the Roman effort that the conquest of Parthia could not be completed, and the Emperor died on his way back to Rome, in August, 117.

Scholars are divided on the question whether the Jewish movement of the years 115-117 also found expression in Mesopotamia, and if it did, whether this was a separate Jewish operation, or one carried out as part and parcel of the rising of the entire population against Rome.[1735] Groag[1736] thought that there was no connection between the rebellion of the Mesopotamian population and the order given by Trajan to Lusius Quietus, according to several sources one of whom is Dio Cassius,[1737] to exterminate the Jews; in his view this action followed the suppression of the rising. Jerome, however,[1738] explains Quietus’ attack by the assumption that the Jews were already in revolt, an allegation repeated by Pseudo-Dionysius Tel-Marensis.[1739] Alon appears to share Groag’s view.[1740] As to the Roman apprehension that the Jews might attack the rest of the population — this is Eusebius’ justification of the Roman action — it would have been unfounded because the Greek population appears to have been ranged with the Jews in their resistance to Rome (as Alon saw), as is shown by the rebellion of Seleucia and the desecration of the temple at Dura, which was treated by the Roman forces as a hostile town. Alon does however argue, that the powerful participation of the Jewish population in the fighting against Rome in Mesopotamia, would have imparted to the insurrection of 116 an outstandingly Jewish appearance, and we might add that the circumstances of the time would have converted that community into the spearhead of the resistance movement.[1741]

It were well here to emphasize that history has preserved reports which indicate a very ancient military tradition among the Jews of Mesopotamia and Babylonia. At the end of the 3rd century B.C. Seleucus III transferred 2,000 Jewish families from Babylonia to settlements in Lydia and Phrygia as military settlers, to hold down the rebellious elements of those countries.[1742] It was probably in the same years that a force of Jews played an honourable and successful part in an action between Seleucid troops and a force of Gallic mercenaries in Babylonia.[1743] Later, in 9-6 B.C.. the Babylonian Jew Zamaris passed at the head of a force of Jewish mounted archers from Babylonia to Syria, and settled near Antioch with the permission of the Roman governor Saturninus. These troops were later transferred by Herod to Golan and Bashan as military colonists in order to reduce to peaceful settlement the predatory inhabitants of Trachonitis (a-Lejja).[1744] In the ist century of the current era (A.D. 10-30), two Jewish brothers of the city of Nehar-dea on the Euphrates, Hanilai and Hasinai, established a shortlived independent principality in the area, which held out as long as it did by force of arms.[1745] It seems possible, moreover, to deduce from Josephus, that the fortified towns of Babylonian Nehardea and Nisibis[1746] were held by Jews on their own military responsibility.[1747]