Download PDF | Arabs and empires before Islam , Edited by Greg Fisher, Oxford University Press 2015.
625 Pages
Editor’s Acknowledgments
Many people helped with the development and production of this book: I am grateful to all of the contributors for their good humour and patience as this project was assembled, and, in particular, to Michael Macdonald, Walter Ward, and Philip Wood for their immense help in shaping the final product. Pierre-Louis Gatier and Maurice Sartre kindly shared work in progress, and helped to provide English translations for some of the inscriptions discussed in the book. George Bevan provided invaluable assistance with numerous inscriptions and texts. Averil Cameron and Fergus Millar have offered advice and constant encouragement. Roger Blockley, Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, Hugh Elton, Elizabeth Key Fowden, Anthony Kaldellis, and Michael Pregill volunteered their time to read drafts of chapters, and provided valuable criticisms and suggestions. Annie Rose at Oxford University Press patiently answered my endless queries, and helped to bring this book to fruition. Out of this collaboration, any errors which remain are, of course, my own.
I am grateful to the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Carleton, John Osborne, for a subvention supporting this project, and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, for a research grant which provided immense help in the preparation of this volume. The Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities facilitated research travel in Saudi Arabia, and I am grateful to both Suha Kopti in Amman and Chantal Chenede in London for their marvellous organizational skills, which saved both time and effort on numerous visits to Jordan and Syria, respectively. Thanks are also due to my students at Carleton, especially Anik Laferriere, Hajar Tohmé, and Scott Winges, for their help with research, proofing, and collecting source material. My wife, Paola, and daughter, Amanda, have patiently endured the long gestation of this book. To them, too, I am eternally grateful. Greg Fisher Hudson, Quebec
List of Contributors
George Bevan is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at Queen’s University, Kingston. He has worked with the Ḥumayma Excavation Project in Jordan, and has a forthcoming monograph with Peeters entitled The New Judas. Nestorius in Ecclesiastical Politics, 428–451 ce.
Aldo Corcella is Professor of Classical Philology at the Università della Basilicata. He is the author of Erodoto e l'analogia (Palermo, 1984) and coauthor of A Commentary on Herodotus Books I–IV (Oxford, 2007, with D. Asheri and A. B. Lloyd). Touraj Daryaee is the Howard C. Baskerville Professor in the History of Iran and the Persianate World at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (London, 2009), and the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Iranian History (Oxford, 2012). Omar Edaibat is a doctoral candidate at McGill University’s Institute of Islamic Studies, Montreal, Canada. His dissertation focuses on legal pluralism in the Islamic legal tradition. Peter Edwell is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Ancient History at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author of Between Rome and Persia: The Middle Euphrates, Mesopotamia, and Palmyra under Roman Control (London, 2008). Zbigniew T. Fiema is the Docent in Classical Archaeology, University of Helsinki. He is co-director of the Northeastern Petra Project in Jordan, as well as the director of the al-ʿUlā al-Wajh Archaeological Survey Project in Saudi Arabia.
Greg Fisher is Associate Professor in the Department of History and the College of the Humanities, Carleton University, Ottawa. He has worked with the Hu-̣ mayma Excavation Project in Jordan. He is the author of Between Empires: Arabs, Romans, and Sasanians in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2011), and the co-editor of Inside and Out: Interactions between Rome and the Peoples of the Arabian and Egyptian Frontiers in Late Antiquity (Leuven, 2014, with J. Dijkstra). Denis Genequand is currently in charge of Roman archaeology at Geneva’s archaeological office, and holds a lectureship in Islamic archaeology at the University of Geneva. He was the director of the Syrian–Swiss projects in Qasr al-H ̣ ayr ̣ al-Sharqī (2002–11) and Palmyra (2008–11), and is the author of Les établissements des élites omeyyades en Palmyrène et au Proche-Orient (Beirut, 2012). Matt Gibbs is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Winnipeg. He is co-editor of Themes in Roman Society and Culture: An Introduction to Ancient Rome (Oxford, 2014, with M. Nikolic and P. Ripat). Geoffrey Greatrex is Professor of Classics at the University of Ottawa. He is the co-author of The Roman Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars, a.d. 363–630 (London, 2002, with S. Lieu) and more recently of The Chronicle of Pseudo-Zachariah of Mytilene (Liverpool, 2011, with R. Phenix and C. Horn).
Basema Hamarneh is affiliated with the Department of Letters and Philosophy, Bergamo University. She has participated in, supervised, and directed several excavations and surveys in Jordan (including at Mababa, Mount Nebo, and Nitl) and is the author of Topografia Cristiana ed insediamenti rurali nella Giordania Bizantina (Rome, 2003). Robert G. Hoyland is affiliated with Oxford University’s Oriental Institute and New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. He is the author of Arabia and the Arabs from the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam (London, 2001), and Theophilus of Edessa’s Chronicle and the Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Late Antiquity and Early Islam (Liverpool, 2011). He is involved in the publication of Arabic and Aramaic inscriptions from Taymāʾ (Saudi Arabia), Mardin province (Turkey), and various sites in Syria and Jordan. Ahmad Al-Jallad holds a double appointment as Assistant Professor of Arabic Linguistics at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics and the Leiden Institute for Area Studies. He is the author of An Outline of the Grammar of the Safaitic Inscriptions (Leiden, 2015). Ariel S. Lewin is Professor of Roman History at the Università della Basilicata, Potenza. He is the author of Popoli, terre, frontiere dell’impero romano: Il vicino Oriente nella tarda antichità (Catania, 2008).
Michael C. A. Macdonald is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and Research Associate at the Khalili Research Centre, University of Oxford. He is Academic Director of the ‘Online Corpus of the Inscriptions of Ancient North Arabia’ project and heads the British component of the Saudi–German–British ‘Epigraphy and the Ancient Landscape in the Hinterland of Taymāʾ’ survey. He is the author of numerous works on the Safaitic and other Ancient North Arabian inscriptions, and on the history of the ancient nomads of Syria and Arabia. Harry Munt is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of York. He is the author of The Holy City of Medina: Sacred Space in Early Islamic Arabia (Cambridge, 2014). List of Contributors xvii Laïla Nehmé is Directrice de recherche at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS: UMR 8167) and is co-director of the Saudi-French Archaeological Project at Madāʾin Sạ̄ lih, ancient H ̣ ̣egrā, in north-west Arabia. She is the author of numerous works on Arabian history, epigraphy, and archaeology, including the Atlas archéologique et épigraphique de Pétra. Fascicule 1: De Bāb as-Sīq au Wādī al Farasah (Paris, 2012, with the collaboration of J. T. Mililk and R. Saupin). Christian Julien Robin is Directeur de recherche émérite at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, Paris). He is director of the French archaeological missions in North Yemen, Qatabān (Yemen), and Najrān (Saudi Arabia), and Membre de l’Institut (Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres). Among numerous publications, he is the co-editor of several recent volumes, including L’Arabie à la veille de l’Islam: Bilan clinique (Paris, 2009, with J. Schiettecatte), Juifs et chrétiens en Arabie aux ve et vie siècles (Paris, 2010, with J. Beaucamp and F. Briquel-Chatonnet), Dieux et déesses d’Arabie, images et représentations (Paris, 2012, with I. Sachet), and Les préludes de l’Islam (Paris, 2013, with J. Schiettecatte). Peter Schadler is Visiting Assistant Professor at the College of Charleston. His forthcoming book is entitled Christian Heresiological Discourse and Islam: John of Damascus and the Last Heresy. Isabel Toral-Niehoff is affiliated with the Georg-August-Universität-Göttingen. She is the author of Al-Hị̄ra: Eine arabische Kulturmetropole im spätantiken Kontext (Leiden, 2014). Donata Violante is a doctoral student at the Dipartimento di Scienze Umane, Università degli Studi della Basilicata, Potenza. She is the author of Paolo e la predicazione ai gentili: La definizione di un’identità nell’impero romano del I secolo d. C (Florence, 2013). Walter Ward is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. He is the author of The Mirage of the Saracen: Christians and Nomads in the Sinai Peninsula in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 2014). Conor Whately is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Winnipeg. He has published widely on the Roman army, including four chapters in A. Sarantis and N. Christie (eds), War and Warfare in Late Antiquity: Current Perspectives (Leiden, 2013). Philip Wood is Associate Professor at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations at the Aga Khan University, London. He is the author of We Have No King But Christ: Christian Political Thought in Greater Syria on the Eve of the Arab Conquest (c. 400–585) (Oxford, 2010), and The Chronicle of Seert: Christian Historical Imagination in Late Antique Iraq (Oxford, 2013).
Editor’s Introduction Greg Fisher Interest in Arabia and the Arabs in the pre-Islamic period has grown rapidly in the last two decades.1 In part, this reflects the vitality of the study of late antiquity, which has challenged ‘traditional’ geographical, temporal, and disciplinary research boundaries, and driven scholarly interest in areas which had previously received only limited attention.2 The vibrant study of the emergence of Islam, new archaeological finds, or the reassessment of existing material, in Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, and theoretical advances in the study of ‘barbarians’ 3 have also contributed to a renewed examination of the place of Arabia, and the Arabs, as important components of the late antique East. This book provides a portrait of current research in this dynamic field, conveyed through the quotation, analysis, and discussion of a broad crosssection of ancient sources. Written by Roman officers, Greek explorers, Persian emperors, hagiographers, chroniclers, H ˙ imyarite kings, and occasionally Arabs themselves, these sources examine the relationship between Arabs, and empires, in the pre-Islamic period SOURCES FOR PRE-ISLAMIC ARABIA AND THE ARABS The nature of the sources means that the history of the Arabs in the preIslamic period is largely a history of ‘Arabs and empires’. In common with some other peoples peripheral to ancient imperial interests, such as Germanic barbarians, Arabs were mostly written about by ‘outsiders’—those who lived in the empires and states of the East.4 These records, which include Greek, Latin, and Syriac texts, as well as inscriptions in a number of languages, can be understood as ‘outside’ sources.5 Such witnesses, frequently hostile or condescending, reflect a tremendous variety in how ancient observers defined ‘Arabia’ and ‘Arabs’. (Such sources also, of course, say a great deal about the sociopolitical and cultural environments in which they were produced, and such considerations are a consistent background theme in this book.) By contrast, the ‘inside’ sources on Arabia and the Arabs, from which we might hope to obtain a corrective to these one-sided and sometimes remarkably superficial views, make up only a tiny percentage of our available evidence. They mostly comprise inscriptions and oral poetry, known from later collections. An Arab narrative literary tradition would develop only much later, and would be subject to the ‘seismic changes in Middle East politics’ in the Islamic period. This nascent literary corpus (Ch. 8) should be seen as an ‘outsider’ source for the pre-Islamic period.6 It remains a challenge to construct a balanced interpretation of the history of Arabia and the Arabs in the pre-Islamic period. There are, as a result, few synthetic accounts,7 while examinations of the diverse and broad-based source tradition have been necessarily restricted to individual periods, geographical locations, themes, or disciplines.8 This book aims to explore many of the gaps which the source problems have left us. It brings together a wide-ranging group of contributors, including historians of Rome, Greece, Persia, and Arabia, as well as epigraphy experts, Arabic philologists, and archaeologists, to provide an analysis and discussion of the extensive spectrum of the different sources for Arabia and the Arabs before Islam.
GEOGRAPHICAL SCOPE The relationship between Arabs and empires was significantly affected by the most valuable commodity of the East: water. The Fertile Crescent, above and around the 200 mm isohyet (rainfall line) provided opportunities for significant levels of agriculture, animal husbandry, and urban and rural settlement (see Fig. 0.1). Below that line, into southern Syria and Iraq, and further south into the Arabian Peninsula, lay deserts of substantial geographical variation. Studded with oases—Palmyra, for example, or Dadan (al-ʿUlā)—the deserts provided immense challenges to settlement.9 A substantial part of the surviving literary sources discuss conflict between desert populations and those who lived in the towns and villages of the Roman and Persian empires.10 Such conflict reflected the imbalance between the resource-rich lands of the Fertile Crescent—‘the greatest oasis of them all’— and the resource poverty of the desert areas.11 Yet conflict was tempered by trade, seasonal migration, negotiations for pasture and water, and other interactions between different elements of the population.12 By late antiquity, the extension into the desert of Roman settlement and fortifications created opportunities for increased levels of contact between different segments of the population. Arab units appear in the Roman military (Ch. 1), for example, and the hagiographies of monks talk of the Christianization of desert populations (Ch. 6). The geographical situation at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula mirrored, in part, the divergence between the deserts and the Fertile Crescent. The south-west was a ‘land of towering mountains, beautiful coastal plains and plunging valleys... endowed with the double blessing of monsoon rains and aromatic plants’. 13 Some parts of modern Yemen (a region which includes some of the territory of ancient Sabaʾ and H ˙ imyar; Chs 2 and 3) receive up to 800 mm of annual rainfall; even allowing for a divergence between modern and ancient levels of precipitation, it is clear that the relatively clement environment was a key factor in supporting urban and agricultural development in South Arabia (Ch. 2). Sophisticated irrigation works such as the Marib Dam (Plate 4) played an important role in the maintenance of these communities. Yet the balance could be broken by catastrophic events, such as drought or the breaking of the dam itself (Ch. 8). The rich and fertile areas of the southwest were also bordered by regions of stark contrast, steppes and deserts of only minimal rainfall, less than 150 mm annually, and to the east, even less.14 In antiquity, Graeco-Roman writers named the south-western part of the Peninsula Arabia Felix, ‘Happy’, or ‘Lucky’ Arabia, in part due to its fertility (Chs 1–3). In contrast, Arabia Deserta, a challenging dry landscape where access to water was key to survival, lay between the Fertile Crescent and Arabia Felix (this area includes, today, parts of the Rubʿ al-Khālī, Nāfūd, Dahnā, and Syrian deserts; see Fig. 1.2).15 Arabia Deserta was a place of considerable resource poverty, difficult to cross, and of questionable value for conquest—but a place which, nevertheless, was of continual interest to outside observers, as many of the sources discussed in this volume demonstrate.
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