Description

In the course of his doctoral thesis, Shahin for the first time carried out an in-depth analysis of the 102 surviving fragments of the originally 144 books of the Universal History by Nicolaus of Damascus (64-4 BC). Nicolaus was one of a number of ancient authors including Poseidonius, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pompeius Trogus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Timagenes who composed universal histories. Shahin analyses Nicolaus' Universal History in terms of both its structure and content by means of (a) composing a commentary on all of the fragments and (b) exploring their respective, distinctive characteristics, which contributed to their preservation. The work is based on Felix Jacoby's Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, which remains the principal edition. The analysis takes into account the textual context in which the fragments were transmitted, as well as recent research findings about doubtful references, textual variants and fragments that may be the work of Nicolaus.