Commutatio et contentio. Studies in the Late Roman, Sasanian, and Early Islamic Near East. Wellem: Düsseldorf 2010. (original) (raw)
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Oriente Próximo Antiguo y Mediterráneo, 2018
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Further Engaging the Paradigm of Late Antiquity
Journal of Persianate Studies, 2013
For close to four decades now, scholars of the late Roman, early Christian, early medieval, and early Byzantine worlds have gradually formed the diachronic concept of the “Late Antique” period as an extension of classical studies. The chronological boundaries of the field have been put, roughly in the period between 200 and 800. Its genesis has been, in no small measure, due to the long and sustained tradition of in-depth scholarly investigation of GrecoRoman history and culture. One of the primary locomotives of the debate on “Late Antiquity”, furthermore, has been the question of the continuity of the Greco-Roman heritage in the wake of the gradual growth of Christianity in the classical world. (Browne 1971) Beyond these primary concerns, however, other pertinent queries have gradually come to engage the scholars in the field. One of the more pressing of these in recent decades has been whether or not one should or could have a synchronic as well as a spatial view of “Late Antiquity.” Moving beyond the Greco-Roman heritage, the questions asked have become more complex: how far chronologically, and how wide geographically, should scholarship cast the net? Through which prism or prisms, should we study the new social and economic, religious and political trends and institutions of “Late Antiquity,” (Clover and Humphreys 1989; Walker 2002; Morony 2008) trends that ultimately came to construct the heritage of our modern age? In response to these inquiries, the study of the Germanic conquests in the west, the history of the Caucasus, Ethiopia, and Yemen, of Mesopotamian Jewry, Nestorian Christianity and the Slavs, among others, have gradually entered into the debate on “Late Antiquity.” (Ibid.)
Eastern Sources on the Roman and Persian War in the Near East 540-545
Appeared in Late Antiquity: Eastern Perspectives (eds. A. Silverstein and T. Bernheimer), Gibb Memorial Series, Oxbow, Oxford: 2012. The surest test of a source’s worth is its comparison to other texts of known value. In the case of Arabic documents dealing with Sasanian Iran, the ideal test involves weighing the later texts against contemporary accounts from the Roman, Syrian, and Armenian milieux. But this is often impossible. For the most part, only when the doings of the Sasanian Empire impinge directly on the Roman world do western sources take notice of them. This state of affairs leads the historian to one obvious topic: war. For it was war that brought the Great Powers together in a way that nothing else did, and it was war that made perhaps the deepest impression in their respective annals. It can be said, perhaps, that Roman and Persian warfare affords the ideal context in which to compare Sasanian and foreign sources.