The period of nearly eighteen years since the publication of The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity has seen a veritable explosion in the amount of publications on the period. I am therefore very pleased to have been able to revise and expand its original contents, and in particular to extend the book’s chronological coverage by adding two new chapters taking it up through the seventh century and including the emergence of Islam. The Byzantine– Persian wars of the late sixth and early seventh century, the Persian conquests and the subsequent victories of the Emperor Heraclius, followed quickly by the Arab invasions, have all received a great deal of recent attention, as have the continuing religious divisions in the seventh century and the wider cultural linguistic and religious landscape of the eastern provinces. The decline or disappearance of Byzantine urbanism in the seventh century has long been a topic for Byzantinists, and the question of the survival or decline of cities in the eastern empire continues to be a major topic for students of late antiquity, especially in the light of new archaeological and epigraphic work. The circumstances in which Islam itself developed, and the reasons for the success of the Arab conquests are of course enormous subjects, and they too have acquired a new salience with the development of two competing views of late antiquity: on the one hand, a return to an emphasis on the fall of the western empire and the rise of ‘barbarian’ successor states in the west; and on the other, a more eastern-focused view of a ‘long late antiquity’ lasting well into the Umayyad period, or even as late as the mid-eighth century. On the latter view, the development of Islam belongs firmly within the world of late antiquity. Such is the approach of the influential Late Antiquity. A Guide to the Postclassical World, edited by G.W. Bowersock, Peter Brown and Oleg Grabar, and published by Harvard University Press in 1999. It is a view that is not without its critics, and these different perspectives are discussed in the Introduction and Conclusion. But it is hardly surprising if the peoples and cultures of the region where Islam first took shape should now attract such an amount of scholarly attention.
Many of the specific themes addressed in the previous publication have been revised and further developed in recent scholarship; both text and notes have been extensively revised, especially the notes, and new material added in many places, as well as substantial extra coverage to take the narrative well into the Islamic period. I am grateful to Geoffrey Greatrex and Shaun Tougher, the two readers, for their valuable suggestions for expansion and revision. It was not my intention in the early 1990s to provide an overall narrative account but rather an accessible analysis of the major areas of interest and importance in the period. A reliable account is now available in Stephen Mitchell’s History of the Later Roman Empire, AD 284–641 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), and there have been other helpful publications, including Philip Rousseau, ed., A Companion to Late Antiquity (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) and Scott Johnson, ed., Handbook to Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). The aim of the present book remains that of providing a critical synthesis of the many key themes which emerge during this extremely important and now much studied and much debated period.
I wish to thank Matthew Gibbons and Amy Davis-Poynter at Routledge for their enthusiastic help in making this revised edition possible, and again my thanks go to Fergus Millar, not only an inimitable series editor but also a constant inspiration and a very good friend, and to Robert Hoyland for invaluable help in the final chapters. Since shortly after the publication of the first edition I have been based in Oxford, and I should also place on record my debt to the very lively seminars, lectures and conferences on late antiquity and Byzantium which have been such a regular feature in these years. Late Antique Archaeology, the series of edited volumes published by Brill, Leiden, originated in conferences organized in Oxford by Luke Lavan and Bryan Ward-Perkins, and the Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity (OCLA) hosts an extraordinarily wide range of events and activity; it has now been joined by the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research (OCBR). I must also mention the many Oxford graduate students, including those I have supervised since 1994, and my visiting graduate students from Budapest, Münster, Nizhny Novgorod and Princeton, who have acted as a constant stimulus and who with my senior colleagues in several different faculties make Oxford such a very rewarding place. I dedicate this revised edition to them and to all the colleagues and friends who, by themselves contributing so much to the study of late antiquity and being so generous with their time and expertise, have done so much to make my own work possible.
Averil Cameron
Oxford, February, 2011