Table Of ContentPublished 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
