When is late antiquity

Some historians stretched the medieval years backward and labeled it as the Early Middle Ages. The first historian who suggested this era of hundred years had to be studied on its own right was Peter Brown.

After the book was published, Late Antiquity took center stage in historical studies. It is now generally recognized as a separate and important time, which was neither stagnant nor simple.

Instead, the developments of Late Antiquity are vital to understanding the world that emerged from it, and which, in many respects, continues to exist today.

The clashes between barbarians and Romans were now less significant than the intricate relations between them. Watch it now, on Wondrium. Peter Brown and other scholars particularly highlighted the innovations that took place at that time.

Historians have focused on religious developments in Late Antiquity. Some of the intellectual giants of the Christian tradition emerged in this religiously flourishing era. During this time, the classical world underwent massive transformations due to the settlement of Germanic and other barbarian tribes.

They founded their own ruling systems and introduced their own cultures in the Mediterranean world. The Roman civilization, in turn, influenced them. The most significant manifestation of these cultural changes is that the pagan tribes gradually converted to Christianity. Monotheism introduced by Christianity replaced the ancient gods of the north, and Christianity slowly took over the Mediterranean world and Europe. Political structures and institutions and even titles that belonged to the Romans did not disappear and were adopted again.

The fields of law, the Church, diplomacy, and government kept using Latin as their official language. Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here.

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Related Articles Expand or collapse the "related articles" section about About Related Articles close popup. The Sasanian Empire has been credited by modern historians with having a bureaucratic centralization with provincial officials directly responsible to the throne, and roads, city building, and even agriculture were financed by the government.

The Sasanians are seen as reviving the spirit and traditions of the great Achaemenid rulers of — BCE. Sasanian administrative and political traditions are now also regarded as a formative influence on the Islamic empire of the Abbasids — CE.

The Sasanian empire played also an important role in the development of late antique religions, as it was in fact a vast and diverse empire of many traditions existing in a coherent, if not always harmonious, system. Sasanid Persia, stretching deep into central Asia, was often beleaguered by problems on its frontiers. Romano-Persian relations were played out in a broader geographical arena.

For instance, the long succession of wars fought between the emperor Constantius II AD — and Shah Shapur II AD — involved not only conflict in northern Mesopotamia frontier but also diplomatic exchanges with polities in other regions such as Himyar in southern Arabia and Axum in the Ethiopian highlands.

Shapur launched also a series of punitive expeditions into the Arabian peninsula. Such interactions are a proof that the Mediterranean world of Late Antiquity was part of a larger cultural and economic zone. In spite of long periods of warfare between Romans and Sasanians, these did not isolate the two Empires from each other. There was also a considerable amount of peaceful interaction and forms of acculturation. This interaction was greatly helped by the fact that Mesopotamia constituted a permeable border zone without a fixed boundary similar to other border regions such as those on the Rhine and Danube.

Exchange of knowledge and goods, which took place on a regular basis, was facilitated by the fact that there was a culture shared in common on both sides of the frontier and that Syriac, a dialect of the Middle Aramaic language, was the lingua franca. Antoninus had been a merchant and an accountant in the service of the Roman military commander of Mesopotamia, who defected to the Persians with information on Roman military dispositions.

He was able to even pursue a career in the service of the Persian king. Antonius was not a unique case. According to Ammianus Antonius and Cragausius are two good examples of the social relations that characterized this frontier zone between the two empires where economic, diplomatic, cultural, and intellectual concerns were diverse but economic interchange took place on a regular, though restricted, basis [ 12 ]. This can be regarded not as empty politeness but a mutual recognition of sovereignty and equal rank as well as a clear wish for good relations and dialog.

The accepted equality between the Roman and the Sasanian Empire becomes a reality in spite of the affirmed primacy of the Christian Roman Empire. At the same time, the expansion of Christendom allowed a greater assertion of Christian universality with the integration of a number of peripheral regions through the expansion of Christianity such as in Ireland and Ethiopia and the diffusion of factors of Hellenistic origin in the Arabian peninsula.

The destruction of the Jerusalem Temple at the end of the Jewish revolt of AD 66—70 plays a major role in the development of Jewish religion in Late Antiquity. Jews never lost the desire to see the rebuilding of the Temple, but by the third century, they were beginning to find other ways to worship, and by the end of Late Antiquity, rabbinic Judaism, the normative form of Judaism, was well established.

Nonetheless Jews continued to live in the land of Israel in large numbers during this period, and many in a diaspora scattered both in many parts of the Mediterranean world and in Babylonia. In spite of the hostility to Rome for the destruction of the Temple, Jews within the Roman and Byzantine empires integrated into mainstream culture even if Christianization of the empire and the adoption of Palestina as a Christian Holy Land relegated Jews to a marginal position.

Their situation was different in Babylonia, where, under Sasanian rule, Jews obtained a great deal of independence [ 13 ]. Jewish life within the Christianizing Roman Empire of Late Antiquity depended largely on the particular interaction of three microforces: their community, the local Christian community, and the presence of imperial representatives. As several scholars have noted, synagogues served as local municipal buildings that facilitated quotidian interactions between Jews, Christian, and other local residents, ranging from business and civic matters to more mundane contacts [ 14 ].

Scholarly assessment of late antique Judaism has experienced a series of profound shifts over the past three decades. As Judaism and, later still, Christianity began to infiltrate the Greek mind, it was tempting to wonder whether Abrahamism and Hellenism could possibly be connected, for better or for worse. There is a revised portrait that has emerged of the structures of Jewish communal authority in the High and Later Roman Imperial periods.

Until recently it was generally thought that the priestly leadership of Second Temple period Jewish society vanished in 70 CE, as the priests were supposed to have given way to an emergent rabbinic elite, which already in the second century assumed more or less uncontested control over Jewish social and religious institutions. This picture has been revised. Scholars are now inclined to regard apocalyptists, prayer leaders, and powerful citizens as rivals of the parvenu rabbis [ 16 ].

Groups of Greek-speaking Jews have been seen populating cities throughout the Roman Empire filling the non-rabbinic synagogues. The presumed enduring oral Pharisaic traditions are now regarded as polemical interventions which are to be connected to the seams between Judaism and Christianity. The rabbis themselves are described as a minority group whose arguments are important only for the members of the group itself.

A story of perpetual rabbinic marginality has replaced the hegemonic rabbinism of older accounts [ 17 ]. It must be taken into account how the far-reaching shifts of the last 25 years have to do not only with the new approach to the data of early Judaism but also with the quantity, range, and nature of the data themselves. New archeological finds and new inscriptional evidence have produced a very different empirical landscape. Already by the middle of the fifth century, any assertion of unity of the empire can be regarded as optimistic.

There were tensions between cohesion and fragmentation which are to be taken into account to avoid a simplistic account of the events that constitute the traditional grand narrative of Late Antiquity, in which the Roman Empire is dismembered by foreign invaders. I would like to add that the Dome of the Rock, built by the second caliph of the Marwanid dynasty Abd-al-Malik the Haram of Jerusalem , had the goal to show the authenticity of the Muslim faith and its identity with the faith of David and Solomon, the newness and distorting character of the Christian faith.

The idea underlying the inscription in the Dome of the Rock is that God is one and that Muhammad was a prophet and Christ like him is only a prophet and only a man and not the son of God [ 18 ]. Abd-al-Malik shows his will and power to use the enormous resources of Byzantine skill and experience to promote the Muslim cause. This is the Marwanid claim of building a Muslim Byzantine society shaped and led by the Muslim, incorporating the heritage of the Byzantine subjects.

There is a point that I would like to stress and that I am taking from Averil Cameron: the commonly used terminology that distinguishes between the Byzantine and the early Islamic period is unhelpful, and the majority of scholars both on Late Antiquity and early Islam now prefer the term Late Antiquity; if there is a conclusion to be drawn from recent scholarship on Late Antique Near East, it is that there was no such clear-cut chronological division [ 19 ].

Now, I would like to devote my attention to two scholars who have contributed in a peculiar way to an original reinterpretation of Late Antiquity. A new phase, not only in the English-speaking world, in the study of Later Antiquity began in In this year, after having studied the period for many years, Jones published his three-volume work The Later Roman Empire, — A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey which begins with the reign of Diocletian and ends with that of the Byzantine emperor Murice.

This work, with its almost total reliance on literary and epigraphic primary sources, still provides the most reliable general account of the epoch as Jones possessed an extensive knowledge of the sources. Jones distanced himself from monocausal attempts at explanation and examined a number of interacting factors that had, in his opinion, caused the decline of the Roman Empire.