Download PDF | A. Asa Eger - The Islamic-Byzantine Frontier_ Interaction and Exchange Among Muslim and Christian Communities-I.B.Tauris (2015).
410 Pages
This is a long-awaited and much-needed contribution to the study of the Byzantine—Islamic frontier that will force a step-change in approaches to the study of the region as well as to the study of medieval frontier societies and their archaeology. The author is to be congratulated on a clear, concise and well-argued analysis of complex textual and archaeological data. __ John Haldon, Shelby Cullom Davis °30 Professor of European History, and Professor of Byzantine History and Hellenic Studies, Princeton University
‘Dr Eger’s The Islamic—Byzantine Frontier is a well-constructed, original, and convincing book that challenges conventional opinions on the Islamic—Byzantine frontier, and in doing so raises important theoretical and methodological questions on understanding the dynamics of frontier zones in general. His study further weakens the conventional view of frontiers as sparsely populated, marginal, and disconnected peripheries. The “core and periphery” model for explaining the geopolitical patterning of settlements has never seemed so outdated, given the compelling argumentation presented in
Dr Eger’s ground-breaking study.’ Alan Walmsley, Professor of Islamic Archaeology and Art, University of Copenhagen.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
If one looks hard enough, one can see just about anything. A patch of grass, when stared at for hours, is still an unremarkable patch of grass. Yet when one gets down on hands and knees, an entire microcosm unfolds, a multitude of creatures moving around and interacting with one another, and with the growing world around them. This book first began as an unnamed, unremarkable lowmounded patch of land, AS 257, that I surveyed along with other members of my team in 2001 in the Amuq Valley. The site soon turned out to be quite revealing. It was one of three, evenly spaced along a canal and newly founded in the seventh century. The canal was among several channels irrigating the Amugq Valley and in one of many lowland plains settled, irrigated and cultivated on the Islamic—Byzantine frontier. So my interest expanded and took shape, initially as a dissertation and finally into a study of the landscape of the entirety of the frontier and its neighbouring lands. Not a microcosm.
The entire process is the product of much wonderful collaboration and could not have been done without the inspiration, motivation, assistance and cooperation of a large and significant group of individuals. From the onset, I would like to thank my incredible University of Chicago dissertation committee: my advisor Donald Whitcomb, Fred Donner and Walter Kaegi, all three of whom have returned to the thughir many times throughout their scholarship and together formed the perfect team. I would also like to thank Adam Smith, who, as an outside reader, provided an important anthropological perspective on the research. In the field, my list of colleagues to whom I owe great debts of gratitude is happily long, and to name but a select few: Tony Wilkinson, Jesse Casana, Aslihan Yener, David Schloen, Fokke Gerritsen, Rana Ozbal, ‘Tasha Vorderstrasse, Timothy Harrison, Steve Batiuk and Amir Sumak’ai Fink for che Amuq survey; Liz Carter, Stuart Campbell, Liz Mullane, Mhairi Campbell, Claire Heywood, Ben Gearey, Will Fletcher and Kate Grossman for the Maras Survey; and Marie-Henriette Gates, Fran Cole, Salima Ikram, Ben Claasz Coockson, Rado Kabatiarova, Tim Beach, Canan Cakirlar, Carolyn Swan and the tireless Turkish and American undergraduates for the Tupras Field survey and excavations. Many people who have provided me along the way with useful insights and comments great and small must be thanked: Hugh Kennedy, McGuire Gibson, Gil Stein, Scott Branting, Seth Richardson, John Woods, Carrie Hritz, Linda Wheatley-Irving, Rana Mikati, and Derek Krueger; and my support group while at Chicago: Alyssa Gabbay, Pat Wing, Mayte Green, Adrian de Gifis, Vanessa de Gifis, Jonathan Brown, Yuval ben Bassat, Nukhet Varlik and Noha Forster.
This book was largely written during my stay as a Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in the spring of 2012. My fellow Byzantine Fellows, lovingly strengthened by Margaret Mullett and the larger Dumbarton Oaks community, provided stimulating conversations. The library and gardens formed a perfect setting in which to write on landscapes. In particular, this book could not have been completed without the meticulous comments of John Haldon and the second anonymous reviewer throughout. Andrea de Giorgi, Lynn Swartz Dodd, Ian Straughn, Jason Ur, Gunder Varinlioglu, Michael Decker, Charles Gates, Stephen McPhillips, Bethany Walker and Alyssa Gabbay all provided comments, corrections, citations and clarity to individual chapters. Many thanks are also due to Ari Lukas, Luke Kaiser, Claire Ebert and Reed Goodwin for assistance with producing the geographic information system-based maps and to Kyle Brunner, Jan McDonald, Maria Marsh, and Allison Walker for all their help in editing. A last note of gratitude is for my family and friends, whose persistent support and encouragement was boundless and enabled me to traverse this frontier wilderness, this excellent country, these beautiful lands, with their parts untamed and parts organized, teeming with activity.
INTRODUCTION
ISLAMIC FRONTIERS, REAL AND IMAGINED
Standing on a high point in the Cilician Gates north of Tarsiis, surveying his former lands stretched out before him, the Byzantine Emperor Heraklios allegedly uttered his most famous lament, a farewell: ‘Peace unto thee, O Syria, and what an excellent country this is for the enemy [...}. What a benefit you will be to your enemy, because of all the pasturage, fertile soil, and other amenities you provide.’’ The occasion, the retreat of the Byzantine army from Syria in around the late 630s in advance of the approaching Arab army, is one that was to resound emphatically in the works both of Islamic and of Christian writers, and to create an enduring topos: that of the Islamic—Byzantine frontier. For centuries, Byzantine and Islamic scholars have evocatively sketched a contested border: the annual raids that took place between dar al-Islam (House of Islam) and dar al-harb (House of War), the line of fortified strongholds defending Islamic lands, the no man’s land in between, and the birth of jihad. Others depicted the frontier as a wilderness settled by the Arabs. These accounts are not without politico-religious impact. In their eatly representations of a Muslim—Christian encounter, accounts of the Byzantine—Islamic frontier are charged with significance for a future ‘clash of civilizations’ that envisions a polarized world in which Muslims and Christians fight, rest, fight again, and maybe eventually destroy each other; a battle with high stakes over a fault line established from the very earliest period of Islam.* Frontiers have long served as temptingly rich fodder for historians, ideologues and archaeologists, who transformed these shared spaces easily into whatever best serves the historical/ideological needs of the time. The Byzantine—Islamic frontier has not escaped such manipulations. The most prevalent depiction, that of the region as an empty space after the departure of Heraklios’ armies which was then built up by the Arabs, is one that is not confirmed by archaeological evidence, but which nevertheless served the needs of those who put it forth. What is at stake is the continuous simplification of Muslim—Christian encounters throughout history and the appropriation of an assumed or envisioned past that has been gtafted onto modern interactions. Yet, it is important to acknowl-.edge that there are two visions of the frontier, an ideological one and a physical one, each supported by its own categories of evidence whether historical or archaeological. Both views are crucial to constructing (and deconstructing) Islamic frontiers and should be viewed as superimposed layers that impart different meanings, whether real or imagined. This volume contributes to a more complex vision of the frontier than traditional historical views by juxtaposing layers of a real ecological frontier of settlement and interaction with an imagined military/religious ideological frontier.
Unexplored Spaces
The aftermath of the departure of Heraklios, the Byzantine army, and his citizens recedes in our imaginations like water after a flood. Yet, it is worth remaining a bit longer and delving more deeply into this literary world. The establishment of a lasting frontier took about 80 years, until c.720. During this initial stage, the Arabs apparently found a ghost country, a wilderness whose forts had been apparently systematically destroyed and whose inhabitants had been deliberately removed in a scorched-earth policy in the wake of the Byzantine Emperor Heraklios’ retreat. Baladhuri (d. ¢.892), the ninth-century Islamic historian, recorded: ‘What is known to us is that Heraclius moved the men from these forts, which he wasettled {sha‘athaha }. So when the Muslims made their raids, they found them vacant.’? Tabart (838-923) similarly wrote that he took with him the people of the fortresses located between Iskandariina and Tarsiis in the Cilician Plain.* Islamic texts state that when the Arab armies arrived at Tarstis, they found it abandoned and in ruins. Similarly, although after the initial conquests, the Byzantines abandoned the fortresses of Germanikeia (or Mar‘ash) at the end of the seventh century and Sis (Sisiya) at the beginning of the eighth or ninth century and fled to the mountains leaving these cities to fall into ruin (AAarab).? Accounts use the word ‘imara (rebuild), whose root has a greater range of implications than simply restoring buildings. The word refers to cultivated land, crops, or food supplies unavailable to the Arab armies due to Heraklios’ destruction of the land.° In a larger sense, the word connotes becoming prosperous, populous and civilized, implying a sense of organization that reverses sha‘atha. It also has meaning in a religious and obligatory sense, used for the lesser yearround pilgrimage (‘amra) to Makkah and Madinah. The routine destruction of fields is hardly mentioned in textual sources; cultivation of lands appears slightly more frequently.’ Nevertheless, these wider meanings add a level of necessity to rebuilding: the need to build from the ashes something that was better than its predecessor. As such, despite the remains of a pre-existing civilization, the perception by the Arab armies of their frontier environment was not only as a wilderness but as unexplored space. A century later and on the other side of the Islamic world, the Umayyads were negotiating a similar frontier with the postVisigothic Christian Asturians in Spain (al-Andalus), When the Umayyad armies arrived they established the northern frontier at the Duero Valley, which they noted was ‘depopulated’.® Like Heraklios, the Asturian King Alfonso II (759-842) took the existing population and left the valley an empty land that was then settled or populated (repoblaciin) by Arab and Berber tribes. These lands were not empty. Scholars have reinterpreted the verb pob/ar not necessarily to mean ‘to populate’ but ‘to organize an atea administratively’. The populator was a ruler who not only gathered his people together but organized the cultivation of a previously uncultivated territory.” The association with the first Arab and Berber tribes and the need to not only populate, bute to administrate and cultivate an emptied space is strikingly similar to the case of the Islamic~—Byzantine frontier. Christian frontier ideology behaves much the same way. A similar event occurred in 965 when, after most of the Syro-Anatolian thaghir had been reconquered by the Byzantines, the Emperor Nikephoros Phokas (912~69) asked Syrian Jacobites to resettle the area, filling in the ‘deserted’ towns.'° In a similar vein, the tenth-century Byzantine writers used the term eremos, or desert, to refer to lands beyond the oikoument, which carried with it implied meanings of the uncivilized and uninhabited.'! Such spaces, while not physically bare of people and habitation, are perceived by contemporaries as relatively ‘empty’.
The vision of the Islamic—Byzantine frontier as a no man’s land is further augmented by the misconception that there existed a line composed of individual forts (using the singular form of thughir, the thaghr) evenly spaced and strategically situated at key mountain passes and routes stretching from Tarsiis in the west to Malatiya in the east and even farther into Armenia. Although these have been demonstrated to be fortified towns and not isolated fortresses, and part of a deep zone of settlement rather than a ‘line’, their military character is still highlighted while their economic potential is seen only as a later ninth-century phenomenon.'* Until the 720s there was a good deal of back-and-forth campaigining through both summer and winter seasons; the Arabs first tried to seize and settle Byzantine territory as part of Rashidiin and early Umayyad expansionist policies.'* But, while they largely failed on the plateau and beyond the mountain chains, they succeeded in the area of the Taurus and Anti-Taurus Mountain line. From the death of Sulayman and reign of ‘Umar II, (c.717) and throughout the ‘Abbasid period (749-1.965 until the Byzantine reconquest, ¢.965—-1050), following the first real Byzantine offensive by Constantine V (718~75) in 746 and 747, military strategy on both sides pursued a policy of defence, stabilization, and fortification while campaigining took on a symbolic, almost peculiar, form.'* From these frontier settlements, religious warriors would undertake summer annual raids or sewd’if (singular s@’ifa) or jihdd against non-Muslims north into Byzantine lands — a process recorded in the literature for virtually every year for the next two centuries, in a perpetual war between Islamic lands and Byzantine lands, the dar al-Islam and day al-harb, or, as it was sometimes known, bilad al-kufr — ‘land of the infidel’ — as it appears in juridical writings. The Byzantines would also retaliate, once a year.
Strangely, in the wake of this ritualized conflict, the opposing armies never took any land and only held enemy forts for a token period of time. Indeed a quick look at the ninth-century Islamic historian alTabari has the feel of reading the weekly police blotter: each year begins or ends with what raids were carried out into foreign lands and who led them.
The perspective of an imagined frontier in the pages of Early Islamic and Christian sources seers like an easy target that is already distorted, a straw man. Yet, modern scholarship made very few inroads in the region and continued to espouse uncritically the traditional text-based view virtually extolling the peculiarities of the back-and-forth raids.'* Earlier scholarship on Byzantine and Islamic frontiers reflected the historiographical modes of its times. Indeed, the consideration of this period as a Dark Ages by scholars has further created an intellectual and chronological frontier. *° Recently, in the past 30 years, several works directly or in passing have challenged this ‘traditional’ perception of the frontier and its Dark Ages, most notably the writings of J. Haldon, H. Kennedy, P. von Sivers, A. M. Abu Ezzah, I. Straughn, M. Bonner, M. A. Shaban, and K. Durak.*’ There are, however, few synthetic approaches that examine the physicality of the frontier from a military, economic, and transhumant perspective. Similarly, there are few works on the frontier that have examined it over a continuous stretch of time from the seventh to the tenth centuries, or even looking at patterns before and after, from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries, regardless of political periodizations. Unfortunately, in the absence of archaeology and the changing or evolving settlement patterns of the region, the militarized episodes are still taken at face value; the frontier remains frozen in an endless time loop. For some, the frontier is still a no man’s land; for others, however, the frontier was not entirely depopulated: whoever lived there were passive actors in a larger epic drama, extras on a film set.'8 This notion echoes the famous Ottoman historian Paul Wittek’s own Turnerian views on the frontier: ‘a frontier culture will be, in most cases, necessarily primitive. It will be a cast-off from the high culture of the interior, mixed to such a degree with the waste products of the enemy’s culture, that it will share nothing essential in common with that culture whose defender and champion it vaunted itself as being.”’? Building an alternative model in reaction to this view, therefore, is not a straw-man argument for the simple reason that this view has become thoroughly entrenched in subsequent scholarship, which repeatedly projects the idea of a no man’s land of Cilicia or the Duero Valley onto the entirety of the frontiers between Islamic and Christian lands.
At the onset, the Islamic—Byzantine frontier was not such a wilderness as has been previously emphasized. It was neither impassable nor empty. The first such frontier was established at the northern extent of the province of Sham (modern south-east Turkey and northern Syria). Ic extended from the Mediterranean Sea at Antakiya to the Euphrates. The Arabs met with lictle resistance when they took over its major cities and towns in 638. Many citizens, particularly of the upper classes, left if they had not already done so. Antakiya in the mid-seventh century lost its importance as a regional capital and became first a military post and then a small provincial town. The capital of the region on the Islamic frontier shifted further east to Halab (Aleppo). The hinterland of Antakiya, the Amuq Plain (formerly a borderland in the early Umayyad period), was also subsumed within the frontier zone. In the Umayyad period, the Islamic—Byzantine frontier was pushed farther north and established along the southern edge of the Taurus Mountains, stretching from south-west to north-east, encompassing the Cilician Plain from the Lamas River to the west, incorporating the whole of the Amanus Mountain range, the Kahramanmaras Plain (the northern extension of the Amuq Plain), the rolling hills, river valleys, and lowland steppes of the Euphrates region, and the Anti-Taurus and intermontane plains of the Upper Euphrates. This entire region was the province of a/-thughir (Figure 1).
The root of the term thaghr (plural thaghdr) can mean frontier, mouth, or front teeth, likened to the towering Taurus Mountains dividing Byzantine and Islamic lands. Thaghra (plural thaghar) can mean a mountain pass, chink or crevice, and gap or breach in a wall (thalma).°° A logical meaning of thughar in the frontier sense, combining the ideas of gaps and teeth, would refer to the spaces between the teeth, the river gorges that passed through the mountains which linked Islamic and Byzantine lands and were crucial for the movement of armies, nomadic groups, traders, and religious pilgrims. Similarly, the Byzantines called these passes stomata, or mouths. The landscape of the thugha#r was criss-crossed with roads connecting settlements: large cities that had functioned as important urban centers in the preceding centuries; towns and forts, way stations, small villages, farms, and monasteries, inhabited by Syriac-speaking Christians; and pastoral camps of Arab tribes, often invisible in texts, who roamed the area before the arrival of Islam.
The frontier as a wilderness is not yet confirmed by the archaeological evidence, supporting the fact that these events were stories and topoi rather than eyewitness testimony. Excavations at major frontier settlements such as Tarsiis, Antakiya, and Sumaysat show no dramatic destruction, ruin, or burning of these cities in the seventh century. Ir must be remembered that much of the frontier, the northernmost lands of Islamic bi/ad al-shdm, lies ina fertile agricultural zone that receives ample annual rainfall. Surveys reveal newly founded sites and irrigation systems. In Spain, the persistence of habitation of seventh- and eighth-century sites with Roman or Gothic and Arab and Berber toponyms belies any depopulation. The idea of an empty frontier falls in line with an academic view that has been strongly questioned and largely abandoned in the last 30 years, namely, the decline of sectlement after the Islamic conquests in the seventh century.
Although archaeological investigation would normally not expect to perceive short-term depopulation followed by resettlement, the type of absolute depopulation described in the texts is doubtful. Deliberate destruction and the burning of forts would leave archaeological traces, besides involving an excessive amount of labour for a people in retreat. Furthermore, while many city-dwelling elites
and garrisons may have fled with the Islamic conquests, many other people remained, particularly those peoples settled in rural areas, many of which were isolated and monastic communities of non-Chalcedonian Miaphysite and other Christian orders.”! This is also suggested by Tabari’s mention of Heraklios depopulating only the ‘people of the fortresses’, suggesting that non-military and nonofficial inhabitants remained. Survey evidence shows that Islamic settlement was initially very limited and focused on administrative urban areas and irrigated agricultural estates in the plains. Settlement by Muslims would have been even more marginal on the edges of Islamic territory. Arab tribes who practiced nomadic or seminomadic pastoralism and were either Christian or Muslim were also part of the landscape, but often archaeologically invisible. While initially reduced, an empty landscape of smoke and ruin did not exist save in the perceptions of contemporaries. |
Creating a concept of a mythic wilderness is a potent legitimizing tool for a new rising power, and important to the construction of a new ideological frontier. This concept functions as a process, according to I. Kopytoff, which begins with the creation of an institutional vacuum: “The definition of the frontier as “empty” is political and made from the intruders’ perspective.” Abandoned buildings and burned lands can imply a time ripe for a new beginning and, metaphorically speaking, new growth. Indeed, the same themes of ruin and compulsion to rebuild using the civilizing concept of ‘imara repeats in key moments of political maneouvering on the Early Islamic frontier. Both the settlements of Adhana and Massisa were described as ruined (and abandoned) until the ‘Abbasids arrived. Similarly, the Caliph al-Mahdi (r. 775-85) at the start of the ‘Abbasid caliphate sent his Khurasani horsemen to TJarstis only to find it in ruins, which he then ordered rebuilt. Not long after, Hariin al-Rashid (r. 786-809) did the same for Tarstis in 806—7.7? These narratives serve to deny an even earlier Islamic historical claim to the settlements by the Umayyads.
Historians, archaeologists, and frontier scholars working on parallel cases now generally accept that medieval frontiers were never conceived as specific borders of demarcation between two entities in binary opposition, but rather were complex zones that were defined both by their inhabitants and by their character as peripheral lands in relation to their central ruling bodies, which fluctuated over time.”4 Further, frontiers are dynamic processes embodying the cultural interactions taking place within these diverse societies, including adaptation, acculturation, assimilation, and the cultural ambiguity of ethnic and religious groups. In some cases these interactions created new societies (ethnogenesis), uniquely born out of living within a peripheral sense of place. Some archaeologists have argued that contrary to the assumption that the central place typifies culture, it is precisely this interconnectedness of societies and visible process of social change on the frontier that should draw attention to its cultural importance. Taken even further, the processes of frontiers are not rooted to a fixed periphery but are moveable, and even manifest internally within settled societies.
Concepts of territory during the medieval period did not define space and frontier as we do today. Geographers described their world in terms of itineraries and traveling distances rather than geographical space; political maps were later institutions. Territories were demarcated physically, often by single points or boundary markers.’ Natural features, such as the Taurus Mountains, were also used to delimit areas. This can be seen in the early maps of some of the Muslim geographers such as Muqaddasi (b. 945) and Idrisi (d. 1165/6), which show abstracted lines for mountain ranges and coasts. Cartographers abstracted space in conceptualized ways, showing only the largest and most significant areas rather than depicting their worlds comprehensively and accurately,.”° The articulation of rule was over people rather than physical land. Similarly, forts were always described by who controlled them, rather than as physical markers of a frontier.’ There were no political boundaries or unified agreements on the thughir by geographers. Rather, ‘frontier’ was articulated as the distance away from the capital or urban center, that is, the core— periphery model.** This division of core and periphery, however, was not universally fixed. The capital was only given prominence and value through the ideologies and myths created by the ruler (or his propagandists) as specific situations and challenges arose.?? Furthermore, the capital (via the caliph) moved to the frontier several times throughout the Early Islamic period.
Several important studies on specific Roman, Byzantine, and medieval frontiers around the Mediterranean have advanced the conceptualization of territory significantly, and are useful as they illustrate the complexity of frontiers. Roman frontiers, whose infamous /imes were once conceived of as strict boundaries, are now regarded as interactive zones of commercial and cultural contact.”° J. E Drinkwater, based on the research of the fourth/fifth-century Frankish border, states that the frontier was a ‘stage show with created threats to mask internal instability’.°' Byzantine rulers demonized the local ‘barbarians’ and actively employed aggressive policies towards them in part for self-aggrandizement and to justify keeping a military force on the frontier for internal security and tax collection, thereby adding a layer of political and religious ideology. Similarly, the landscape was appropriated symbolically in the reoccupation of cities and other features. From an analysis of Islamic frontiers, T. Rooke argues that part of the process of establishing political sovereignty involved ‘imposing new boundaries on the past and/or old boundaries on the present [...} establish{ing} the stories of events {and} interpreting aggressive attempts at regional hegemony [...] as glorious defensive anti-colonial struggle’.** Part of this discoutse involved establishing foreign invaders and occupants not only as enemies and the ‘other’ but as a destructive force, for the purposes of forging political unity. Taking this view further, D. Miller states:
Anthropologists have shown us clearly that the first ethnographies of frontier native populations are always written by imperial intruders who consistently interpret the pathological militarized state of native society, which is the product of their own intrusion, as the zormal state of native society, subsequently using the resultant stereotype of war-like ‘barbarians’ as a justification, often after the fact, for aggression.”°
Shrouding the frontier and enemy in religious and apocalyptic rhetoric was one response to crisis, and it justified aggression. For the Byzantines, the seventh through ninth centuries were angst ridden; lost borders were attributed to a difficulty in defining God’s realm. The other side of the frontier became part of a dichotomous good/evil eschatological narrative of the post-apocalyptic rise of the heretical nomadic steppe lands of Gog and Magog.” 2
Subsequent aggressive policies and economic policing on the part of the central state backlashed, eventually leading to social competition and the rise of local charismatic leaders on the frontier who were detrimental to the central state.*” As the idea of the central state disintegrated in the Middle and Late Islamic periods, so too did the idea of a physical frontier. Rather, everyone was located somewhere on the frontier and often those on the frontier had more in common with each other than with the central state. As such, the periphery was repositioned as the center and from it radiated spheres of influence encompassing human frontiers of religious plurality, ethnic diversity, and cultural production.*® The frontier became a matter of perspective.
The Great Divide
This book contributes to the conversations by researchers of frontier studies, and reaches towards students and scholars in environmental history. It also addresses both archaeologists and historians in the fields of Byzantine and Islamic studies. This is no easy task. Despite attempts in modern scholarship to mediate the two forms of historical inquiry through an interdisciplinary approach, the fields of Byzantine—Islamic archaeology and history continue to operate in separate spheres, only occasionally utilizing, in uncritical and cursory ways, information the other field has produced. Two challenges in particular can be considered for this study: the physical landscape and environment as a holistic object of study and the centuries of transition as more precisely defined. In order to understand the formation, nature, and process of the Islamic—Byzantine frontier and test the textual model it is necessary to start from the ground up, we need to first examine the archaeological evidence before reintroducing the textual evidence and configuring the two data sets.
INTRODUCTION 13
Byzantine and Islamic archaeology has, with a greater emphasis on the latter, traditionally focused on only the most urban and religious manifestations of the physical world. Amidst the urban network was a thriving rural landscape of villages and multi-ethnic communities, many of which were non-Muslim. Outside the villages and settled communities were many nomadic tribes whose transhumant ways of life often moved out of the range of the Empire. Beyond the Empire was frontier. To understand the thughiir is to examine first and foremost its rural settlements and land-use patterns, breaking the mould of an uncultivated landscape dominated by a few forts. The textual bias towards the urban elite and literate classes supplies mainly rich political and religious information but prevents us from hearing potential voices that are non-urban, and which live outside the framework of the Empire. Newer consideration of Syriac sources provides more details of towns, villages, and monasteries; the itineraries and routes taken; or the ways of life and occupations of local inhabitants, albeit sometimes coloured by religious convictions and hyperbole.”’
Islamic archaeology in particular, as a form of historical archaeology, emerged as a text-driven field, rooted in narratives and using them as guides to search out the nature of this seemingly urban culture and religion. For example, the material culture from the early excavations of the “Abbasid capital of Samarra’, thought to be a shortlived settlement according to texts (836-83 or 892), was consequently first dated to these years, which then served as a dating benchmark for many other sites until recently. Newer research has expanded the scope of urbanism, focusing on the urban landscape and the elements of empire: cities and towns, mosques and other urban institutions, primary centers of production, and intercity networks of trade and economy. Though these projects have been less reliant on historical documents, texts still serve as important supplemental and often legitimizing tools for excavation. As a result, the belief that Islam was an urbanizing civilization is constantly upheld by those who search for it in cities and towns. Gradually, and very recently, studies of rural settlement and material culture driven by social and economic inquiries, often in relation to urban networks, are being considered that can potentially examine new systems of locally organized culture.
Studies on the rural Byzantine and Islamic landscape have had differing results and agendas. Often these remain as singularly focused excavations arguing for an urban model of comparison by patterns of physical resemblance or material culture production. However, the rise of landscape archaeology and the study of the settled environment mainly, through regional surveys and remote sensing using aerial photography and satellite imagery, have, in the past 20 years, significantly expanded our knowledge of rural agrarian systems of settlement and land use, giving voice to the ‘silent majority’. Even more importantly, landscape archaeology is a diachronic method. It allows us to glimpse the /ongue durée history of humans and nature symbiotically, affecting and reacting to one another in a constant yet inseparable relationship.
Consideration of post-seventh-century periods in this field is still quite nascent, but developing at a rapid pace. Irrigation and agricultural innovations historically tied to Early Islamic-period developments (the Green Revolution) are now largely disproved and have been contextualized in a much longer history of agrarian transmission. Ever more Near Eastern surveys, though not all, are considering medieval settlement processes and their profound effect on the environment, some of which will be examined closely in this volume.*® Researchers in Spain have uncovered a rural network of Early Islamic and post-reconquista multi-ethnic villages centered on hydraulic features, using surveys, aerial photography, and linguistic continuities rather than excavation. Archaeology in the thughar region is not entirely underdeveloped; it is possible to re-evaluate what has already occurred with an eye toward the Early Islamic period, configured by newer survey evidence.
A common yet distinctive pattern revealed in the periods of the Late Hellenistic through Islamic was a key shift in settlement, termed ‘the Great Dispersal’, from nucleated city states on tells of the third and second millennium sce and earlier to scattered villages and farms throughout the landscape.” Settlement steadily increased, the peak in most areas occurring in the fifth and sixth centuries with an explosion of sites everywhere. Sites tended to be diffuse and very small (less than 1 ha) with no topographic relief, only distinguishable
by scatters of pottery, roof tiles, and building stones. Surveys that prioritized the recording of tells produced skewed settlement patterns for the first millennium ce. Furthermore, not every landscape was equally preserved. Settlements in arid and montane landscapes, such as the infamous Syrian Jibal (apparent by its betcer-known name of the Dead Cities), represented a rare landscape of survival based mainly on the durability of stone as a construction material and the fact that their upland location was unaffected by flooding and sedimentation. In the low plains of the thughiir, most of which were seasonal or permanent wetlands, settlements were built of local materials, such as mud brick and reeds. This distinction has created an archaeological bias towards finding sites whose remains are visible, large, or striking, while elusive settlements built of perishable materials in more biodegradable surroundings have been overlooked.*°
A noticeable lacuna in both the Near East and Spain is the existence of the nomad or semi-pastoralist, particularly given the strong association with the initial spread of Islam through Arab tribes. This is no trivial omission; pastoral groups represent an unquantified but substantial segment of the population (Figure 2, p. 24)." On the thughir, these populations would have occupied the seemingly inhospitable wilderness regions of marshes and mountains. Their interaction with settled societies and competition over land and resources was at the heart of virtually every conflict, imagined or otherwise. In certain periods, pastoral groups may have outnumbered settled groups. In the archaeological record, these moments show periods of decline. For example, once the fifth-century landscape was universally accepted by scholars as a high point for settlement and population, the point of change was marked by the middle of the seventh-century period with the spread of the mainly pastoralist Muslim tribes. The question of seventh-century decline after the conquests is linked to the visibility of these earliest settlements, and a finer focus on periodization is still necessary.
The issue of chronology, crucial to both historians and archaeologists, is a second challenge, particularly for the elusive transition from the Late Roman (fourth to mid-seventh centuries) to the Early Islamic period (mid-seventh to mid-tenth centuries 640s to 960s for the frontier).** ‘Typically, discrepancies in chronology are exacerbated by the disciplinary divide between archaeology and history; the first two centuries of Islamic rule, where texts are few, are best informed by archaeological evidence, albeit broadly dated, and the subsequent centuries by textual evidence, which is often retrospective, elitist, and government approved. Transformation in the seventh century occurred unevenly, with political changes manifesting as the quickest and most visible, followed by economic reorientation, and finally the cultural (and material cultural) milieu evincing the most gradual response. It follows that settlement patterns and environmental change would also not be readily or quickly apparent. The invisibility of the seventh century has been typically interpreted as a period of decline, the end of the Classical world. Thughar text-based studies have tended to omit this century and the period that followed entirely, and to focus rather on the Roman to Late Roman /imes or Middle Byzantine reconquest of the tenth century through the Crusades. From landscape surveys, Late Roman and/or Early Islamic decline is partly determined via interpretation of lack of identifying ceramic diagnostics, particularly since Roman ¢erra sigillata, Late Roman finewares (mostly ending in the mid-seventh century), and Islamic glazed wares (mid-eighth century/early ninth century and beyond) are easily spotted on walking surveys, are easily dated, and dominate assemblages. Mid-seventh to mid-eighth-century/ninth-century ceramics are often harder to identify, and accordingly suggest a drop or gap in settlement in the first century of Islamic occupation. As a result, survey ceramic analyses, often done without a specialist on board, have swung toward the cautious, often identifying ‘late period sites’ as dating from the Roman to Early Islamic, or the first century BcE to tenth century CE.
Three decades of scholarship by Islamic archaeologists have resoundingly discarded the notion of seventh-century decline, recognizing the archaeological, and in some cases economic, continuity from the Late Roman to Early Islamic Near East.“> For some archaeologists, the notion of decline was not dispensed with entirely but simply pushed further to the ‘Abbasid period, or back to the early sixth-century Persian conquests. This was based on an
over-reliance on misdated coins and ceramics and the wish to align historical-political timelines with material culture. In the archaeological context, Late Roman to Early Islamic continuity has in recent times created a redefined transitional period encompassing the sixth to eighth centuries.
This macroscopic view of continuity, however, highlights two important factors of settlement patterns: 1) that there was never a period of total abandonment in the Early Islamic petiod; and 2) that sites with Late Hellenistic/Early Roman to Early Islamic occupation are often a part of a different system of settlement patterns than preRoman or post-Early Islamic occupied sites. While this transition correctly identifies the difficulty in assigning ceramic typologies to political changes, such a fluid categorization limits the study of the last centuries of Byzantium, the beginnings of Early Islam, and the identification of its initial settlement. At a very general level, absolute continuity between the Classical and Islamic periods is not tenable; change carried political, religious, and cultural implications and occurred on every level, from material culture to rural sites and urban cities to trade networks and land-use projects. With regard to the Islamic~Byzantine frontier, its formation and choices for settlement have become blurred in favour of a general continuity. In this way, the challenges of transition and landscape archaeology, with its reliance on surface ceramics, are intertwined.
Can a landscape~archaeology approach detect socio-political and religious differentiations, or is this perspective perhaps too coarsely grained to pick up such subtlety? This question becomes particularly salient in border zones or frontiers and time periods that have been determined to be transitional. The task of correlating political/cultural periods to archaeological and geomorphological time seems an oversimplification of two very different data sets. However, I would argue that the opposite is true. The process of transformation occurred over an important benchmark in the Near East — that is, the Islamic conquest. As such, it is essential to combine archaeological and historical methods to take advantage of this cultural shift and reveal the new populations, communities, settlements, and material cultures that were introduced or developed as a response to cultural mixing. When this cultural shift is overlaid on a profoundly transformed landscape, it allows for a greater distinction to be made between the Late Roman and Early Islamic periods. Such a combined study can inform whether settlement and land use was linked more with cultural and ethnic practices or evolved naturally as a response by any culture to the changing landscape.
Layering the thughir
It is hoped that this volume will provide alternative routes, contributing toward a re-articulation of the Islamic landscape that synthesizes original survey and excavation work and other published and unpublished archaeological evidence. The focus is on the Early Islamic period, but patterns and changes in the landscape are traced over a millennium from the Late Roman through to the Middle Islamic/ Byzantine periods, the fourth to fourteenth centuries. Furthermore, this study will examine the points of congruity or incongruity between the archaeology of the frontier and its text-based narratives. This study does not begin with the assumption that parts of the frontier were more militarized than others, whether through the perception of a religious battleground, the presence of fortified garrison towns, or a strategic division of the region. The spiritual landscape or conceptual frontiers of the Islamic Empire will not be addressed here, but recent studies have admirably shown how these spaces can be seen as ways of imagining imperial control, articulating dominion, controlling the greater world, discrediting parts of it, and claiming others.“
As already discussed, either as a line or defence-in-depth zone, fortified garrison towns ate implied from textual sources. Caliphs established camps, fortified them with walls, and garrisoned them, leading some to argue that they followed a similar pattern to the amsar, newly-founded garrison towns throughout Islamic territory established in the seventh century.” However, as nearly all of these thughiir towns wete Byzantine cities and none have been excavated, there is no archaeological evidence to suggest how they were planned and whether they functioned primarily as garrison towns. Only two of these settlements have been excavated (Tarsiis and Hisn al-Tinar),
and two have been intensively mapped and surveyed (‘Ayn Zarba and possibly Hariiniyya) in the past 20 years (and mainly in the past ten years). At present, the results do not give us an idea of these towns as fortified garrisons; however, future work may alter our understanding. Textual analysis of the usage of military or non-military terminology in relation to these towns, while not a part of this study, should be undertaken in the future as it may add a further dimension in tandem with the archaeology to how these towns were perceived. This study will examine frontier towns as one of a number of settlement types and discuss their geographic location, chronology, and economic viability as part of the larger frontier landscape. *°
Although textual references at times suggest a division of the frontier into a more vulnerable front-line zone (thugh#r) and rear-line (‘awasim) province, reputedly for defence and supply, these divisions only occur from the end of the eighth century and the frontier did not remain static but developed over time. Shaban first commented that the creation of the ‘ewdsim was intended to produce a more tightly controlled and closer defence system, and primarily to curb investment in the upkeep and garrisoning of more exposed thughar towns. Bonner argues that this division was an idealized and political administrative move to enable the ‘Abbasids to assert authority over former Umayyad lands and prevent the growth of local power.’” Abu Ezzah argues that this division was arbitrary and flexible, and that the list of ‘awdsim towns changed from author to author. In reality this designation did little to affect the everyday life or fate of frontier settlements.
The limit of the short-lived first frontier was at the provinces of Hims (Emesa) and Qinnasrin (Chalcis). These and other towns gradually became subsumed as the Islamic conquests expanded northwards to the Taurus Mountains and beyond. Eventually, the Taurus demarcated a rough upper limit of settlement for the thughar. In an archaeological study of frontier landscapes, however, the frontier should be divided first by its natural topography, then by its settlements, and consideration given to a// parts of the frontier and beyond. While seemingly similarly arbitrary, this division is grounded in historical perspectives and serves two purposes. In the medieval world, with regards to maps and boundaries, spaces were conceived in relation to natural features and chief cities that ruled districts. Further, by drawing attention to the environmental features of the frontier we can closely examine in a Braudelian fashion patterns of settlement and subsistence that cut across textually informed ideological constructions of the frontier.
This book will ultimately argue that the frontier, both real and imagined, is a framework where processes of interaction and exchange took place between communities. The argument will build slowly in two analytical sections. Part 1 (Chapters 1 to 5) provide chronologically grounded archaeological evidence for the environment from geomorphology, natural resources and products, and routes. Following this, survey and excavation data examine the several specific categories of settlement and land-use activities throughout the entire thughir, including northern Syria and Mesopotamia.
The model of analysis used for all the data, often statistical and technical in nature, is derived from surveys of the two large plains: the Amug Plain of Antakiya in al-‘awasim and the Kahramanmaras Plain of Mar‘ash, the forward post of Antakiya in al-thughir. Data for the elusive Late Roman to Early Islamic periods will be gleaned from recent high-resolution surveys and older low resolution surveys from both the thughér and ‘awdsim regions, reassessed to produce a clear image of settlement patterns during this time.
The Jazira river valleys of the Balikh and Khabiir, not formally part of the frontier, are analyzed as a comparative or counterpoint to the rest of the frontier. A central question will be to what extent these various regions, such as the Amug (part of a/-‘awasim) and the Jazira, displayed similarities in the settlement and land-use characteristic of a larger frontier province, showed differences supporting textual reference to administrative provincial jurisdictions, or diverged into a topographically-based set of contiguous river valleys and plains each with their own micro-regional patterns. Results will show that for most of the frontier, with the exception of the region around Halab and most of the Jazira, Early Islamic sites were reduced by half from the Late Roman period. More specifically, seventh- to eighth-century sites were fairly few, although they included new foundations, while eighth- to tenth-century sites were more numerous. This is not evidence of a ‘no man’s land’ on the frontier nor of a continuously inhabited landscape, but rather of one that underwent a substantial reduction of population but became the focus of settlement and economic development.
Part 2 synthesizes settlement patterns, land use, and social interactions in their environmental and historical contexts. Historical evidence from primary texts including geographies written mainly in Arabic; Islamic histories; Byzantine military treatises; and, most importantly from a rural perspective, Greek and Syriac saints’ lives all provide contextual frameworks and at times explanations for the patterns of settlement and land use. Chapters 6 to 9 present a narrative of settlement that incorporates wider Anatolian survey evidence and the Islamic—Christian thaghar of al-Andalus. While the primary locus of discussion is the Early Islamic period, the narrative can be extended to trace change from the Late Roman to the Early Islamic and the Early to Middle Islamic transitions and periods of occupation (or lack thereof).
The development of agricultural estates and irrigation, networks of way stations, adaptations to the spread of marshlands, and the eventual rise of villages and fortified castles are keyed into historical narrative. Chapter 10 closely examines the nature of different types of social interaction and exchange on the thughar, besides those stemming from jihad and apocalyptic ideologies, such as trade and market economy, fluctuating tribal identities, and the rhythms and movements of pastoral populations. I argue that the frontier was layered and constituted three types of interactions: external (competition for resources between groups), internal (political relationships between the central state and peripheral groups), and ideological (military and religious conflict).
Movement and communication across frontier spaces consisted primarily of upland and lowland interactions that were not limited to a singular monumental frontier. Instead, these are duplicated across time over localized environmental frontiers constituting ecological ‘niches’ of liminal space. This volume contributes to a more complex vision of the frontier than traditional historical views by juxtaposing layers of a real ecological frontier of settlement and interaction with an imagined military/religious ideological frontier.
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