Late Antiquity: Eastern Perspectives PDF
Preview Late Antiquity: Eastern Perspectives
Published by The E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trust Trustees: G. van Gelder, R. Gleave, C. Hillenbrand, H. Kennedy, C. P. Melville, J. E. Montgomery, C. Woodhead Secretary to the Trustees: P. R. Bligh © The E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trust and the individual authors 2012 ISBN 978-0-906094-53-2 EPUB ISBN: XXXXXXXXXXXXX A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library Further details of the E. J. Gibb Memorial Trust and its publications are available at the Trust’s website www.gibbtrust.org Printed in Great Britain by Short Run Press Exeter Contents Acknowledgements and List of Contributors 1. INTRODUCTION Adam Silverstein and Teresa Bernheimer 2. A NEW LOOK AT MAZDAK François de Blois 3. BUDDHISM AS ANCIENT IRANIAN PAGANISM Patricia Crone 4. EASTERN SOURCES ON THE ROMAN AND PERSIAN WAR IN THE NEAR EAST 540– 545 Michael R. Jackson Bonner 5. COLLABORATORS AND DISSIDENTS: CHRISTIANS IN SASANIAN IRAQ IN THE EARLY FIFTH CENTURY CE Philip Wood 6. THE KHURASAN CORPUS OF ARABIC DOCUMENTS Geoffrey Khan 7. THE LATE SASANIAN ARMY James Howard-Johnston 8. URBAN MILITIAS IN THE EASTERN ISLAMIC WORLD (THIRD–FOURTH CENTURIES AH/NINTH-TENTH CENTURIES CE) Luke Treadwell 9. THE LONG SHADOW OF PRE-ISLAMIC IRANIAN RULERSHIP: ANTAGONISM OR ASSIMILATION? D. G. Tor Index Acknowledgements The editors wish to thank Damien Bove for help with the maps, H. Namir Spencer for help with the index, the Khalili Family Trust for use of the cover illustration from the Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, and Val Lamb at Oxbow for typesetting the book (amongst many other things). List of Contributors TERESA BERNHEIMER SOAS FRANÇOIS DE BLOIS SOAS MICHAEL R. JACKSON BONNER University of Oxford PATRICIA CRONE Institute for Advance Study, Princeton JAMES HOWARD-JOHNSTON University of Oxford GEOFFREY KHAN University of Cambridge ADAM SILVERSTEIN King’s College London D. G. TOR University of Notre Dame LUKE TREADWELL University of Oxford PHILIP WOOD University of Cambridge 1 Introduction Adam Silverstein and Teresa Bernheimer Where and when does ‘Late Antiquity’ end? From among these questions it is hardly surprising that the latter has attracted more scholarly attention than the former. After all, ‘Late Antiquity’ is a phrase whose two components are time- related; defining the period covered by the phrase is thus crucial. In the four decades since Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity first appeared and the field of late antique studies began to gather real momentum, scholars have debated the place of early Islam within the late antique world, thereby determining when ‘Late Antiquity’ ends. Whereas earlier generations, such as Pirenne’s, might have argued for excluding ‘Islam’ from this world – on the grounds that its rise led to decisive discontinuities with the preceding period – most scholars in recent decades have made the opposite case,1 stressing the many important points of continuity – in everything from art and architecture,2 to language, popular and high culture, and religion – from Late Antiquity to the first century or so of Muslim rule. The workshops entitled “Late Antiquity and early Islam” (and the related volumes published by Darwin Press entitled Studies in Late Antiquity and early Islam) clearly embraced this point, while also implying that the phrase ‘Late Antiquity’ itself does not on its own include early Islam. Early Islam’s increasing integration within the world of Late Antiquity is captured in the more recent work Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Post-Classical World, whose title does not ‘add’ early Islam but whose contents do – and not only does ‘Islam’ get its own chapter (by Hugh Kennedy),3 but one of the volume’s three editors, Oleg Grabar, was himself an Islamicist.4 To an extent, the continuity between the pre- and early-Islamic periods was appreciated by scholars even before the publication of Brown’s World of Late Antiquity: Gaston Wiet’s short article “L’Empire néo-byzantin des omeyyades et l’empire néo-sassanide des Abbasides”5 appeared in the early 1950s. Moreover, the fact that the subtitle of Brown’s book is AD 150–750 indicates that already in the early 1970s it was acknowledged that it is something other than the rise of Islam that caps the period. Precisely when within the period of ‘early Islam’ Late Antiquity ends is probably impossible to determine, and the answers are likely to vary based on the criteria applied.6 More on this below. Although, as stated, ‘Late Antiquity’ is essentially a term of periodization, this period must also be contained geographically – otherwise scholars of Late Antiquity might be beholden to awkward discussions about T’ang China and Gupta India, to say nothing of contemporary Mesoamerica. Where, then, does Late Antiquity end? To answer this (or, for that matter, any question of geography), it is important to establish one’s intellectual coordinates. ‘Late Antiquity’ is an intellectual construct devised by what might be called – for lack of a better term – ‘westernists’ to study ‘westerners’; that is to say, those who, when looking down onto the Eurasian world from above, are physically and intellectually centered on Europe and the Mediterranean. ‘Late Antiquity’, therefore, begins in the lands of southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean that produced ‘Classical Antiquity’ and where it was consciously transformed in the period discussed here. Already in Classical Antiquity, though, the oikoumene included lands well to the east of the Mediterranean, taking in the Achaemenid Empire, the eastern borders of which extended to modern Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is, in fact, to ‘western’ sources such as the works of Herodotus and Xenophon that we owe much of our knowledge of Achaemenid history, and though the relationship between the two sides was often dominated by rivalry if not outright war – the Greco-Persian wars lasted half a century – Greek authors were not incorrigibly hostile to their eastern neighbors, with Xenophon’s choice of Cyrus the Great as his model of an ‘Ideal Ruler’ being an obvious example of this. And in the post-Achaemenid period, Alexander the Great’s adoption of the Persian title ‘King of Kings’ (as well as an array of Persian court-practices) further indicates the esteem in which ‘the east’ was held.7 The relative decline of ‘Persian’ power in the post-Achaemenid period (the occasional Parthian success vis à vis the Seleucids notwithstanding), however, allowed the Romans and Later Romans to develop a largely justifiable sense of superiority over their easterly neighbors. It was thus, as James Howard-Johnston puts it in his contribution to this volume, “hard for Romans to reconcile themselves with the existence of an equipollent eastern neighbour, once loose Parthian rule was replaced by a more managerial Sasanian regime.” And though relations between the Byzantines and the Sasanians were often very fractious, neither side could afford to underestimate the other as their fates were interdependent. The world of Late Antiquity, as Peter Brown so aptly termed it, was thus inhabited by equal partners and scholars of late antique studies have, for the most part, acknowledged the Sasanians’ as cohabitants in this ‘world’. The fact remains, however, that such acknowledgement of the Sasanians as equal partners with the Byzantines rarely translates into equal coverage for the eastern part of the late antique world in studies of the period. Thus, while the volume Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Post-Classical World included an Islamicist
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