Between the fall of the Seleucid Empire and the establishment of Roman rule in Syria, the Iturai and Emesen formed large territorial rulers spanning several generations, which are subjected to a fundamental reinterpretation here. The book is the first comprehensive discussion of the Iturai in German since the research of Knauf and Schottroff in the 1980s. It embeds the history of the Iturai and Emesener in the context of the historical development of the greater Syrian area and does not reduce it to the negative evaluation of the sources.