2 History Short Writing Assignment

Unit 1 Writing Assignment (WA)1

Why was Rome/Byzantium interested in ruling the Middle East and what were the main effects in the Middle East of her rule?

Be sure to use information in the module including one of the three online selections (one of Kennedy, Mango, Millar). Don't forget to look at all of the parts of the module. In unit 1, these include the three "sub modules" at the bottom - on various aspects of Roman society and state system. The module and the sub-modules serve in this online course as my "lectures". All are essential to your learning what I expect you to learn. You may choose to focus on Imperial Rome or Byzantium depending on which of the 3 selections you chose.

You should submit your assignment in the WA1 Dropbox, found in the tabs for Unit 1. Please place at the top of your assignment - whether you cut and paste it into the dropbox space or whether you upload a document - your name and which WA this is - in this case WA1.

Be sure that you have read thoroughly the Frequently Asked Questions and their answers in the Lessons Tab for the course. If you have trouble finding these, please email us immediately. It is there that I provide my rules for submitting assignments in this course.

Unit 1 - Rome and Byzantium in the Middle East

Cardo Maximus (Main Street) , Roman Apamea , in N.W. Syria, on the Orontes River. On both sides of this main street were many religious and civic buildings. Much of the city was destroyed in two 12th century C.E. earthquakes.

Haghia Sophia (Church of the Holy Wisdom) , Constantinople (today's Istanbul), built by the Roman/Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the years up to its dedication in 535 C.E. The four corner minarets were added to the church at the end of the 15th century C.E. by the Ottoman Turks, who had conquered Constantinople in 1453 C.E. The church was transformed into a mosque by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II.

Study Guide for the assignment in Donner for this unit. (In a course on a topic for which the names, places, and terminology are not familiar ones to most Americans, I have found it helpful to provide a study guide for some of the readings. In the units for this course, I will be providing a study guide which I strongly recommend that you examine while you are reading the assignments. (Should you come up with something that you don't understand and which I don't explain in the study guide, please ask me ASAP via email or in the unit forum, and I will add something to the guide).

Because the assigned books do not provide much information on Rome in the Middle East, I am including several readings below and I expect that you will choose one or two of them to read for this unit.

Kennedy , Rome's Desert Frontier: 24-46. Study guide to the reading in Kennedy. I provide here, and for each of the assigned readings, a study guide which you should consult prior to reading the item. All of the readings (besides those in the books) I make available in the syllabus should be read IN ONE SITTING--they are about one particular issue, or are providing a well-presented point of view on one issue. They cannot be well understood if read in small "chunks".

Millar , The Roman Near East: selections from Chapter 6. Study Guide to the reading in Millar.

Mango , Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome: 13-31. Study Guide .

It is not only because the Roman Empire included for several hundreds of years much of what we will be studying in this course as the Middle East, but that is certainly one of the reasons. Rome conquered and governed Asia Minor (sometimes called Anatolia, and in our own time, a major part of Turkey), Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, and the Iberian Peninsula. But there are other reasons too for Rome's importance for our understanding of Middle Eastern history in periods long after Rome had "fallen."

In each of the modules, I provide links to topics I've put together which offer important information not emphasized in the books. I do expect you to go through these links. These are what I call "sub-modules." The modules and sub-modules serve in this online course as my "lectures."

Roman Provincial Government

Roman Technology - Transportation Infrastructure, Water Supplies

Roman Cities and International Trade

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David Kennedy and Derrick Riley. Rome's Desert Frontier. University of Texas Press, Austin, 1990.

Chapter One: Physical and Human Geography. starting with pg. 24.

The region with which we are here concerned comprises the Roman provinces of Syria, Mesopotamia, Judaea (or Syria Palaestina) and Arabia. In modern terms, these represent Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan, together with neighbouring parts of Turkey, Saudi Arabia (the Hedjaz) and Egypt (Sinai). In antiquity, this broad sweep of land between the rugged mountain terrain of eastern Anatolia and the barren desert of the Arabian Peninsula was often referred to loosely as 'Syria'.

Geographically the region is zoned from west to east. A narrow strip along the Mediterranean coast offers useful agricultural land and ports, a number of which are on islands. Most rivers begin in the chain of mountains which rise steeply behind the coast and form the next zone. The mountain ranges fall into five sections, which are, proceeding from the north to the south: the Amanus Mountains, the Ansariyeh Mountains, the towering Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon, which rise to over 2500 m., the rather lower hills of Judaea and Samaria, and finally the Negev Desert and the hills along its eastern fringe. Passes cut through or between these ranges. Beyond them runs a chain of three major rivers: the Orontes, the Litani and the Jordan. The first two of these, rising within a few miles of each other west of Baalbek (Heliopolis), run respectively north and south for considerable distances before turning through gaps between the mountains and flowing into the MEditerranean at Seleucia and just north of Tyre, respectively. The ever-deepening valley of the Jordan, running south through the Sea of Galilee to flow into the Dead Sea, is extended by the dry Wadi Araba down to the Red Sea. Beyond these coastal mountain ranges the land remains high, usually over 500 m., until it eventually falls to low levels in southern Mesopotamia.

Not that the inland region is featureless. Starting north-east of Damascus, the Jebel Rawaq, rises up and runs north-eastwards to Palmyra. Beyond Palmyra, the squat range of the Jebel Rijmen, north and north-east of the city,e xtends half way to the Euphrates. Further still to the north-east is the Jebel Cembeh, extending eastwards from Tunainir and then rising steeply to become the more formidable Jebel Sinjar which reaches to wihtin 60 km of the Tigris. No mountains lie between the Jebel Rijmen and the Jebel Cembeh.

Some distance south of the Jebel Cembeh, and extending for about 150 km southwards towards Anqa on the Euphrates, is a series of wide salt marshes, which formed a natural barrier. From the Tigris to Damascus, and then southwards to the Red Sea, the typical land surface is a gravel desert, but this is interrupted by silts in the river valleys, and by the lava desert in the region south and south-east of Damascus, where the ground is covered by the black basalt of ancient volcanic eruptions, in the form either of lava flow or thickly strewn rocks.

The land on both sides of the coastal mountains, the coastal zone and the eastern slopes, is well watered and fertile - the valley of the Orontes in particular supported a series of great cities. Further inland, with the exception of the area in the north towards the Euphrates bend, and the Hauran, south of Damascus, this fertile belt soon gives way to region sof steppe and desert extending eastwards to the Zagros Mountains of Iran and south-east to the Arabian Peninsula. Most of the inland region is insufficiently watered to allow dry farming, the limit of which is marked by the 200 mm. isohyet, though in the steppe area limited agriculture is possible if rainfall is "harvested" and utilized for irrigation. There are major oases at Palmyra and Azraq, but elsewhere the desert south of the 200 mm. isohyet offers only sparse grazing for the nomad's flocks of goats and camel herds, which were watered at occasional, in places seasonal, wells, water-holes, or streams in wadis. However, the "desert line", i.e. the boundary or transition between the desert and the region regularly cultivated by village-dewelling farmers, was not always the same. Fluctuations in local security or in rainfall could move it back and forth even over short periods. In the far east of the region are the valleys of the Euphrates and Tigris, and those of their tributaries, especially the Balikh and Khabur. There the ribbon of land near the river, as well as adjacent irrigable land, was settled and farmed intensively.

Human Geography

Settlement within the region was at its densest in the area of great cities. Antioch at its height, with perhaps a quarter of a million people, was one of the three great cities of the Roman Empire (alongside Alexandria and Carthage). There were many other great urban centres: Laodicea, Berytus, Tyre, Sidon, Jerusalem, Apamaea, Damascus and Palmyra, all but the last on the coast or within 80 km. of it. Rural populations could be large; in the time of the Emperor Augustus, a census recorded 117,000 citizens in the city and territory of Apamaea, while Galilee was renowned for its large population. Beyond this fertile strip, good arable land and the availability of water were the crucial factors determining the location of population. In the semi-desert and desert, as noted above, these favourable conditions were found in the valleys of the Euphrates, Tigris and their major tributaries on the eastern side of our region, and on the steppe areas of the desert margins on the western side.

The population of the region was overwhelmingly Semitic: Arabs in the steppe and desert regions, including Hatra and much of Mesopotamia, Palmyra, Emesa, Ituraea, the Hauran and Arabia Petraea; Jews in not only the province of Judaea (or Syria Palaestina), but also in the adjoining parts of Syria and as major elements in the great cities throughout the region; Phoenicians along the central and northern Levantine coast; and thorughout, a sub-stratum of the older Aramaic population. There were also Greek, or rather semi-Greek, populations in many cities, especially the great Hellenistic foundations of the north - Antioch, Laodicea, Seleucia and Apamaea; a small number of Italians, some who had arrived as traders and administrators, and others among the veteran colonists who settled at Berytus, Heliopolis and Ptolemais. Other subject peoples of the Empire, most notably Gauls, Thracians, Spaniards, Egyptians and Moors, appeared as soldiers, many of whom subsequently settled, and here and there were to be found Parthians, mainly refugees and their descendants.

This heterogeneous population was reflected in the range of languges in use. Latin would have been little heard outside the army camps and the governor's administrative staff; even in the veteran colonies Latin soon disappeared. Greek was the dominant language amongst the bulk of the urban populations, used by immigrant and Hellenized native alike, though many must have been bilingual. Both urban and especially rural people also spoke various dialects of Aramaic and proto-Arabic - Hatrene, Syriac, Palmyrene, Nabataean and Safaitic, all of which were written languages, surviving on inscriptions and occasionally on documents.

Economic Factors

: Economically, this was an important region. To a substantial population and good agricultural lands, one could add a rich transit traffic. The great cities of the Roman Mediterranean received their luxury items from the Orient (silks, spices, ivory, furs, carpets and embroiders), as well as "Syrian" exports (glass, textiles, cotton, figs, dates, wines and slaves), through the succession of ports which marked the Levantine coast from Cilicia to Alexandria. Beyond, passes through the mountain chain linked these coastal cities to the communities of the interior, and beyond again, there were routes which could be followed across the steppe and desert. Natural routes across northern Mesopotamia, along the Euphrates, across the central and southern Syrian Desert, into the interior of the Arabian Peninsula, through the Red Sea and up the GUlf of Aqaba, brought importance and commercial prosperity to a host of cities. These were also the entry points of much merchandise from elsewhere in the Empire; in particular, some, such as Seleucia, had a vital role to play in the supply of the armies of the region.

The deserts were not the sole preserve of caravan traffic. Nomads lived there. Then, as until very recently, they led a spartan existence, dependent on rare perennial springs and seasonal water courses for themselves and their animals. Consequently, their life was one of constant transhumance with the flocks of goats and herds of camels which were the basis of their primitive economy. Nomad and farmer interacted to some extent. There was some modest trading and the animals oculd be grazed on the stubble of the farmer's fields, which they simultaneously manured. The relationship between Arab nomad, and Arab semi-pastoralist and the farmer varied not only across time but from region to region. Kinship was not always a guarantee of harmony and on occasion nomads preyed on merchants or settlements on the desert's edge.

The settled parts of this great region form what old books on ancient history called "fertile crescent", with its western tip in Palestine, now Israel, and the occupied territories, and its eastern tip on the Gulf. The Roman Empire had a firm hold on the western end of this "crescent" and its central part in Northern Syria. Beyond this, towards the River Tigris, lay debatable lands, and in the far east of the zone was the sphere of Parthia and later the Sasanian Empire. The concave side of the "crescent" was on the south, roughly outlined on the map by the 200 mm. isohyet; beyond lay the desert.

Since the Roman desert limes has been little studied until recently and since some readers may be unfamiliar with the line it followed, it may be useful here briefly to describe its course. Very approximately, the western part of the limes coincided with the 200 mm. isohyet. Commencing at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba, it ran north through the modern country of Jordan, with an offshoot through southern Israel. Near Damascus in Syria it turned northeast towards the Euphrates, taking advantage where possible of the line of mountain ranges and incorporating the oasis of Palmyra. After reaching the Euphrates, it followed the river south-eastwards for some distance, and here it may be said to have reached the debatable lands. From the confluence of the Euphrates with the Khabur the limes went north and north-eastwards to cut through the "crescent", taking advantage first of a river line and then a mountain range.

Behind the limes lay densely populated regions, some of the most important parts of the Empire. Beyond its southern part there was quite different terrain - desert, with nomad peoples. After it had turned north to cut through the "crescent", there was again desert beyond it in places, but there were also areas which had carried large populations from the earliest times.

Chapter Two: Historical Survey

Roman rule over the Semitic provinces of the Middle East extended across some seven centuries. In 64/3 BC Pompey the Great entered the area and, refusing to restore the former Seleucid Hellenistic dynasty, which had declined into warring factions, organized what was left of their kingdom as the Roman province of Syria. At the other extreme, the annihilation of the field army of the Emperor Heraclius at the Battle of the Yarmuk in AD 636 ended forever Roman rule over the lands south of the Taurus Mountains.

The military requirements of the region varied greatly with the changing political and economic background. There were, however, at all times two main considerations determining the size of garrisons and their distribution: the need to secure and police the population - particularly those of the great urban centres and in the mountainous areas and desert fringes, and the need to protect from external threat the sources of wealth - the cities and their rural populations, and various important natural resources. A limiting factor to the routine implementation of a policy was the need to place major units where they could be sustained with food and supplies. Ancient agricultural surpluses were low and troops had to be located where either they would not be competing with some existing major population centre or food could be brought in. In practice the dispositions made for either of these could overlap with those required for the other.

Internal Security

. Most of the great cities were within 80 km of the coast, some of the largest being in the north. The concentration of so many people in a single centre such as Antioch raised the danger of disturbance amongst what was a racially mixed and, on occasion, volatile population. In the south, Jerusalem was not only a large city but also the political and religious centre of a numerous people. The Jews became increasingly alienated from Rome in the Early Principate. Sporadic insurrections were followed by bloody rebellions in the time of Nero and Hadrian. There may have been an uprising of some sort as late as the reign of Septimius Severus (193-211) and the Caesar Gallus (351-4) certainly had to put down a rebellion in Galilee. Clearly, however, the wholesale slaughter and dispersal of the Jewish population of Syria Palaestina in the first and second centuries ended the major revolts. By the late third century the two legions which had been based there since the early second century had both gone.

The External Threat: Parthia

External threats came from two directions: on the one hand, the Parthians and their Persian successors, and on the other, the Arab nomads of the Syrian Desert. When a Roman army first arrived on the Upper Euphrates in eastern Anatolia in probably 96 BC, much of the great sweep of land from Mesopotamia across Iran to Afghanistan was subject, directly or through subordinate kings, to the Parthian Arsacid dynasty. Formerly, until conquered by Alexander the Great, this region had been the heartland of the Achaemenid Empire (550-350 BC) of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes. Alexander's successors, the Seleucid kings, had ruled over it from their twin capitals of Antioch on the Orontes and Seleucia on the Lower Tigris. However, in the generation before the arrival of Rome on the Euphrates, Iran and even the eastern capital at Seleucia, had gradually been lost to the Parthians. For the next six centuries, first the Arsacid dynasty of Parthia, then their neo-Persian Sasanian successors, were to represent the single most potent threat to Rome on her eastern frontier, the only power comparable to herself in size or power she faced on any of her frontiers.

Not that the threat was unremitting. Far from it. Although early amicable contacts between representatives of the two empires soon deteriorated, wars were in fact uncommon before the third century. The reasonable Parthian expectation that the boundary between the two empires might be the Euphrates was soon to be dashed by Pompey whose forces in the mid-60s BC crossed the river and drove deep into Armenia and the Caucasus. Indeed, they even crossed the Upper Tigris and one Pompeian general returned to Syria across the breadth of northern Mesopotamia.

A major reversal came a decade later when the Triumvir, M. Licinius Crassus, for reasons of personal ambition, provoked a war with Parthia and invated Mesopotamia. His disastrous defeat and death at the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BC opened Syria to the first Parthian invasion. Raids took place in 52, and in 51 came a major invasion. Though Cassius, the de facto governor of Syria after Crassus' death, inflicted a defeat, a Parthian army wintered in northern Syria and the province remained in turmoil. Internal dissension within the Parthian royal family, however, ended the invasion and the Parthian threat faded for a few years.

Pompey negotiated with Parthia for support in 49 BC at the outset of his civil war against Caesar. It was not till 45, however, that a Parthian force appeared in Syria and was able to raise the siege of a Caesarian army of a Pompeian army inside Apamaea. In 44 some of this force was found with Cassius, who sent them home to seek more extensive support for him in the new round of civil wars. Once again their support was too late; the decisive battle was fought at Philippi a few months later. However, in 40, soon after the victor of that battle, Mark Antony, had passed through Syria to Egypt, a major Parthian invasion of Syria tok place. Alientated by widespread Roman corruption and extortion, many cities opened their gates to the Parthian prince, Pacorus, and all but Tyre fell into his hands. The occupation was short-lived. Antony's general P. Ventidius Bassus soon drove them out in a succession of victories - the second resulting in the death of Pacorus - in 38 and 39. IT was to be two centuries before a Parthian army again appeared in Syria.

The wars however were not over. Antony's attempted revenge for Roman defeats and loss of prestige nearly ended in disaster when he led an army through Armenia into Media in 36 BC. That however was to be the last direct clash of Roman and Parthian for nearly a century.

There had been important lessons for both. By the end of the 30s each had tasted victory as well as defeat. Rome was to remain the more aggressive, but there was now an undoubted wariness of the military ability of a state which had seized much of the former Achaemenid and Seleucid empires, and inflicted signal defeats on major Roman armies.

It was now clear that though Roman expeditions could take many months to preapre, Parthia's lack of a standing professional army revealed a great weakness already evidenced by her slowness in responding to the appeals of Pompey and Cassius. However, if the feudal nature of her organization made her slow to gather her strength for aggressive warfare, the reaction time for countering a Roman invasion of her territory was rather faster. More important for Syria was that the scene of likely and actual warfare moved northwards. The mountains of Armenia not only offered Roman armies some protection against the formidable Parthian cavalry, but geographically the region became a bone of contention until Rome gained a more lasting advantage in the second century. At that point the war zone moved south to Mesopotamia. However, the Roman planners did not enjoy our hindsight. Even if Roman expeditions until the time of Trajan were in practice to be across the Cappadocian rather than the Syrian frontier, the Parthian threat to Roman territory was long perceived to be towards Syria. The Syrian Euphrates was literally and figuratively the direct point of contact between the two empires.

The Emperor Augustus threatened war with armies on both Capadocian and Syrian frontiers, but ultimately achieved his ends - the recovery of the lost eagles of Roman legions anda dominant role in Armenia - by diplomatic means. Disputes arose over Armenia, but it was not to be until the reign of Nero (54-68) that a great war broke out in that region. Even then,and only on one occasion, and in Armenia not Syria, did Roman and Parthian forces clash. Not that Syria did not seem threatened. The historian Tacitus explicitly tells us how in A D 62 the governor of Syria, C Domitius Corbulo, fortified the Euphrates' bend in the face of a possible Parthian attempt to break into his province. None of his forts has yet been identified.

The next major war - the first extended warfare between the two - came half a century later. The Parthian War of II3-I7 saw Roman armles, for the first time since Crassus, thrusting across Mesopotamia. His forces advanced down the Tigris and Euphrates. Ctesiphon, the Parthian capital, fell and new provinces were declared: Mesopotamia (northern Mesopotamia) and Assyria (Babylonia), as well as Armenia to the north. These were short-lived; rebellion and Trajan's death gave his successor Hadrian his pretext to abandon them. Trajan's reign, however, marks something of a watershed in the history of the desert frontier. The Parthian War itself was a great aggressive adventure aiming permanently to cripple, if not fragment, Parthia. Not only did Trajan aim at seizing large new territories which would have needed garrisons, but, as noted above, he completed the process of annexing allied native states west of the Euphrates and the desert. Thus Arabia Petraea was annexedi n 106 and a garrison established, including a legion at Bostra, which became the capital of thenew province.

Trajan's war was to be the first of several thrusting deep into Parthian territory. Half a century later, in the wake of initial defeat in Armenia and a Parthian invasion of northern Syria, Roman armies struck back. Ctesiphon was sacked once more and Roman direct control was again pushed beyond the Euphrates. This Parthian War (162-5) in the reign of Mlarcus Aurelius was, however, rather more modest in its territorial ambitions than had been that of Trajan. Roman garrisons were pushed further down the Euphrates and occupied Dura-Europos, while others appeared on the River Khabur, effectively turning the former Parthian vassal kingdom of Osrhoene in north-western Mesopotamia, into a Roman vassal. By 165, Rome ruled, directly or indirectly, the whole sweep of territory from the headwaters of the River Khabur to the Gulf of Aqaba.

Intervals between warfare had shortened and with the Severan period wars were to come in swift succession, foreshadowing a very different situation in the third and subsequent centuries. Septimius Severus' First Parthian War of 195-6 took Roman armies across northern Mesopotamia against Parthian allies and vassals on the Middle Tigris, and resulted in the annexation of part of Osrhoene as a province of that name. The Second Parthian War of I98-9 followed the paths of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius: Ctesiphon was captured, and new territory seized. A province of Mesopotamia was created, extending to the Middle Tigris and with two legions in garrison. Control may even have been pushed further down the Euphrates. Less than 20 years later, in 216, Septimius' son and successor Caracalla, launched another aggressive war, cut short by his own assassination. The next emperor, Macrinus, fared badly and peace was made in 218. It was to be the last war with Parthia.

The ExternaI Threat: Persia

By the close of the second century, Parthia had been in gradual decline for several generations. The extensive Arsacid family clung to royal power, but it had suffered from civil wars and too powerful vassals. The expeditions of Severus had further weakened the dynasty and, at the time of Caracalla's assault on Parthia in 216, his opponent Artabanus was already distracted by war with an internal rival. More to the point tne ruler of Persis, nominally a vassal kingdom, rebelled about this time and began extending his power over adjacent lands. In c. 224 this 'Neo-Persian' king, Ardashir, a descendant of one Sasan, defeated and killed Artabanus and proceeded to establish his control over what henceforth is traditionally called the Sasanian Persian Empire.

Conditions changed almost immediately. The new empire was much more tightly controlled, and its rulers, fired by religious zeal, laid claim to all the lands of their Achaemenid Persian predecessors. In the west, that meant lands which now formed the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire from the Aegean to the Nile. The new rulers themselves were also aggressive and able men who, in contrast to their Arsacid predecessors, whose claims to the region were rather half-hearted, rapidly and vigorously took the offensive against Rome.

Septimius Severus had claimed that his new province of Mesopotamia was to be a bulwark for Syria. Cassius Dio was to write, however, that even within his own lifetime (he died post-229), it was proving to be a cause of new war and a drain on resources. And Dio may not even have lived to see the first of the major wars of the region.

In 230 Ardashir invaded Mesopotamia and besieged Nisibis; raids were mounted against Syria. The consequent war when the Emperor Severus Alexander came east with an army in 232, is little understood. The outcome, however, after mixed success for both protagonists, seems to have been the retreat of the Persians. Ardashir was undeterred and returned to the attack, probably in 238, with the capture of Carrhae and Nisibis in Mesopotamia; probably then or sooner, his armies also captured Hatra. Increasingly preoccupied in the west by civil upheaval and barbarian attack, the Roman response was again slow and it was not till 243 that the Emperor Gordian III arrived to drive them back, subsequently losing his life in the course of his advance. With Ardashir now dead, Gordian's opponent had been his son, Shapur I, a man of enormous energy and unfortunately for Rome, great longevity - he was to rule for some 30 years. As such, his reign spanned very closely the period of Rome's greatest weakness, his actions indeed being a major contributor to it.

The murder of Severus Alexander in 235 had ushered in a period of short-lived emperors and civil wars which were to persist for half a century. Bad enough in itself, it was unfortunately only part of a calamitous cycle also involving extensive external war which was in large part responsible for the internal upheavals and for their continuace. Faced with repeated barbarian assaults along the European frontiers and their deep penetration within the Empire, emperors were unable tockle vigorously the mounting crisis in the East.

Gordian's successor Philip made peace with Shapllr in 244, but the latter returned to the offensive in 252 or soon after with a catastrophic assault. Roman fortresses and cities all along the Euphrates were captured , a Roman army was annihilated at Barbalissus on the Euphrates opposite Antioch, and Antioch itself was amongst many great cities captured and sacked in Syria and beyond. A few years later, probably in 258 or 259, the Emperor Valerian himself was defeated and captured by Shapur near Edessa. Once again the Roman lands were overrun, cities and forts sacked but not held. Order was restored over most of the region only by the rallying of some scattered Roman forces and the vigorous counter-attack of the Palmyrene prince Odenathus. Subsequently, howeve rZenobia, Odenathus' widow and regent for their son, tried to assert her independence of the embattled emperors in Europe, and rule the East - further parts of which she proceeded to overrun. When eventually the Emperor Aurelian came east in 271-2, Zenobia's 'Palmyrene Empire' was rapidly overthrown and the emperor set about the huge task both of restoring and reorganizing the frontier and reasserting Roman dominion. Fortunately, it was at this juncture, in 270 or 273, that Shapur I died; his immediate successors, were lesser men - and shorter lived.

Odenathus had reputedly invaded Babylonia and assaulted Ctesiphon following his defeat of Shapur in 259/60; two decades later the Emperor Carus was certainly to do so in 283, though dying in the course of the campaign. The subsequent peace involved, probably, the restoration of the Roman province of Mesopotamia and, in the aftermath, Rome entered on a renewed period of stability under first the Emperor Diocletian (284-305) and his associates in the Tetrarchy; then the first part of the dynasty of Constantinethe Great (324-63). The period of relative weakness in Persia ended temporarily in 293 when Narseh, a son of Shapur, came to the throne (293-302). Initially his efforts to recover Mesopotamia went smoothly; Galerius, Diocletian's junior colleague, his 'Caesar', in the East, was defeated in 297 by Narseh. The very next year, however, Galerius inflicted a crushing defeat on the Sasanians and not only recovered Mesopotamia once more, but acquired new territories beyond theTigris. It was an important victory, bringing stability to the region and ending warfare for 40 years. Diocletian took the opportunity to overhaul and reorganize the eastern defences, with a large number of new forts and the reconstruction of great strategic highways. Significantly, it seems to have been atabout this same period that the Persians too began to construct in the region their own system of fortifications against Rome. One consequence was to be the tendency for wars to be fought out in the same relatively restricted area of Mesopotamia, and deep invasions of each other's provinces became rarer.

In part, peace was lasting because of the death of Narseh in 302, the short reign of Hurmazd II (30209), and the accession of the infant Shapur II. This last, however, was to prove every bit asmuch a thorn to Rome as his great namesakeand predecessor. Shapur 1I reigned for 60 years(309-79). Coming of age, he rapidly displayed his ambition to recover Sasanian control of Armenia and, in particular, Mesopotamia. It was in the latter that most of the warfare took place and, an indication of changed conditions after the great programme of fortification and a reliance on static defences, wars became largely campaigns of sieges of the great fortress cities. The pages of the history of Ammianus Marcellinus record graphically the sieges of Amida, Bezabde, Nisibisand Singara. Only with the reign of Julian do we again find an aggressive Rome taking the initiative. Julian's expedition in 363 took him to Babylonia and a victory before the gates of Ctesiphon. His return up the Tigris, however, was a catastrophe in which the emperor himself perished. The outcome was disastrous for Rome. The Emperor Jovian concluded a most unfavourable peace by the terms of which Rome abandoned Armenia, and not only gave up theTranstigritan territory gained by Galerius but ceded Roman Mesopotamia east of the River Khabur. The real measure of Roman weakness, however, is that Nisibis, the strategic key to northern Mesopotamia, which had been defended so often, was also ceded.

During the century and a third which followed, Roman-Persian wars were rare. More tothe point for Syria and Mesopotamia, they weremore often fought out further north in Armeniaand the Caucasus. Thus, for example, the war ofValens of 370-8, though directed by him fromhis headquarters in Antioch. A few years later, c.386, even in this region peace was established bythe partition of Armenia, which removed a boneof contention. Not until 42I/2 did Rome andPersia again clash in Mesopotamia. Rome wasvictorious, attacking Nisibis in 42I and, afterinflicting a defeat the next year, making peace.A brief period of hostility in the north followedagain in 439, but was soon settled and a peacemade in 442. It was as well that it should havebeen so, for Rome was heavily distracted in thisperiod by the barbarian pressure and invasions in Europe. Even within the eastern half of the Empire, the power of German generals in Roman employ, rebellions and civil war remained a preoccupation throughout most of the fifth century, but relations with Persia were not difficult. The explanation for this relative stability on the eastern frontier seems to lie in a parallel Persian pre-occupation with both internal problems and assaults on her own frontiers in the Caucasus and in the north-east. A measure of the introversionof both states during this period can be seen in the failure of Rome to act when, in 483, Persia refused to return Nisibis, which had been ceded for 120 years by the treaty signed by Jovian in 363; conversely, the Persians let pass for almost 20 years the Roman retaliatory refusal of an agreed payment to support the defence of the Caucasian passes against their common Sarmatian foes to the north.

The early years of the sixth century saw a renewal of wartare in the East, for an account of which we are indebted to Procopius, who records not the wars themselves but, in his Buildings, the detailed account of the fortification or refortification of cities and forts. War was initiated in 502 by Persia which seized fortressesi n Armenia as well as taking Amida in Mesopotamia. The Roman counter-attack retook Amida and led to the construction of a great new fortress at Dara, confronting Nisibis. A seven-years peace was made in 506 which lasted in fact until the last year (527) of the next reign. Ironically, the new war was in large part the outcome of the refusal of Justin to adopt the heir-apparent of thePersian king, Kavad; in anger, the latter initiated the new war (in the north again) but it was to be the spurned son, Khusrau I, who was to be the main protagonist over the course of a long reign(531-79).

In the war which began in 527, Justinian's generals had mixed fortune. In the north-east, victories were won by Sittas in 530, while in the Syrian region, Belisarius, who had been engaged on fort building, first won a victory at Dara in 530, then was heavily defeated the next year at Callinicum, at the confluence of the River Balikh and the Euphrates. In the event, however, it suited both empires to conclude, in 532, a Treaty of Ternal Peace: it lasted eight years.

`Khusrau's assaults on the Roman defences began in 540 and continued through to a five-year truce in 545. He made significant advances in this period, not just in the Caucasus, where he seized territory (and which was not covered by the truce), but in Mesopotamia and along the Euphrates, where his armies sacked fortress-cities or allowed themselves to be bought off. Once again, Antioch was sacked. In 551, the truce was renewed for the Mesopotamian area, though again the two empires continued to fight in the Caucasus; indeed, fighting dragged on there until 557 and then in 561, a comprehensive 50-years peace was agreed. By the terms of this latter, the existence of the great fortress city of Dara was accepted by the Persians, but no new forts were to be built by the Romans near the Persian frontier.

A new round of fighting broke out a decade later in the time of he Emperor Justin II. It went badly for Rome: they failed to seize Nisibis in 572 but the Persian counter-attack took Dara and then went on to ravage parts of Syria - including the sack of Apamaea - forcing Justin to make peace. Once again the peace only covered theSyria-Mesopotamia region, and war continued vigorously in Armenia. Khusrau's death in 579 failed to end the fighting which again flared up in Mesopotamia.

Peace was not in fact finally restored until 591, by which time both sides had been debilitated by two decades of warfare. Even then, its achievement was due to a quite unforeseen piece of good fortune for the Romans. Hurmazd IV died in 590 and a consequent civil war not only distracted Persia from further thoughts of warfare but actually worked very much to Roman advantage. One protagonist, Khusrau II obtained the help of Roman troops to regain his throne, granting in return, by a treaty of 591, territory which included Dara. While the Emperor Maurice lived, Khusrau was content to remain at peace; Maurice's overthrow by Phocas in 602, however, provoked a Persian invasion of Mesopotamia. Their victory in battle was followed swiftly by the fall of Edessa and Dara, and, in 606, the capture of Amida and Resaina led to raids into Syria. Phocas was overthrown in 610 but his successor, Heraclius, was to face on his eastern frontier one of the greatest threats of any emperor for centuries.

Khusrau II was not content, as many of his predecessors had been, with simple expeditions into Syria for booty. In rapid succession after 610 his armies struck through the Roman defences; in the north, they reached Chalcedon opposite Constantinople itself; in the south, Syria was overrun, and armies passed into Egypt, which they occupied in 619. The long-standing Persian claim to the lands of the eastern Roman Empire seemed to have been made good at last. Heraclius' counter-attack was equally dramatic. Beginning from a base in north-west Armenia, he graduallyt urned the tide through a series of victories, ultimately forcing Khusrau to recall his troops from Chalcedon. The climax came in 627/8 when Heraclius led an army down into Mesopotamia, defeated a Persian army at Niniveh on the Tigris, then marched on to the capture and sack of Khusrau's palace at Dastagird in Iran, over 300km (almost 200 miles) to the south-east.

The disaster soon led to the death of Khusrauin 628 and a period of internal strife and a whole succession of short-lived monarchs. In 632 when Yazdgird II became King of Kings, Heraclius wasalready re-established in his eastern possessions, returned by treaty after Khusrau's death.

This final great series of campaigns in which the frontier defences of each side were swept aside as bold thrusts were made into the empire of the other, were in fact to prove just wasted energy. Both empires, debilitated by the effects of this and earlier wars, civil strife and wars on other frontiers, were too weak to resist the Arab forces of Islam. In 636, at the Battle of the Yarmuk in north-west Jordan, an Arab army annihilated the main Roman army in the region and went on to overrun all of Syria; in the same year, at Qadisiyya, the Persian army was soundly defeated and in 642, after a period of resistance, the army of Yazdgird was destroyed at the Battle of Nihavand in Iran. The outcome of centuries of war was, ironically, to be the destruction of Persia and the uniting of the entire region of the Persian Empire and the former Roman eastern provinces up to the Taurus Mountains under the rule of a new Moslem Arab empirel

Th e E x t e r n al Threat of The Nomads

It will be clear from the above that only on rare occasions were sectors of the desert frontier other than those of Mesopotamia and northern Syria threatened by Parthia or Persia. Nevertheless, the semi-desert and desert from the Euphrates to the Red Sea and the Negev are studded with Roman forts. Here, however, the perceived threat could not have been the powerful army of Parthia or Persia; it has been traditional to explain these forts in terms of the threat posed by the desert's nomadic tribes.

Arabs could be found in the entire region from Mesopotamia to the Sinai Desert and Arabian peninsula. Some had settIed in great clt1es such as Hatra, Palmyra and Petra, but most retained their traditional way of life as nomads - Scenitae,'Tent-dwellers'. For such tribes in a difficult environment, a crucial factor in their simple and precarious economy was the availability of water, whlch led to thelr regular transhumance between winter and summer pasturage with their flocksof goats and herds of camels.

The presence of these nomads in the desert regions from an early stage is evident not only from the widespread physical traces of their simple structures at camp sites and from 'kites' (probably animal traps), but from the thousands of graffiti left scratched on rocks by the southern, 'Safaitic', tribes. Most of the literary evidence for them is, however, late in date.

In the first and second centuries there is a handful of epigraphic references mainly from the region of the Hauran to individuals described as'General' (strategos) or 'Tribal Chief (phylarchos) of the Nomads'. This is a period, however, when much of the land along the desert fringe was under the control, not of Roman troops, but those of various allied rulers. Thus, relations with the tribes and the task, if necessary, of policing their movements, fell to states whose populations were themselves often Arab. The removal during the first century of most of these native rulers, brought Rome directly into contact with some of the tribes. These direct responsibilities increased in the second century with the annexation of the Nabataean kingdom in 106. There was a brief confrontation with the Arabs east of theEuphrates at the time of Trajan's Parthian War and, half a century later, Rome extended her control into north-western Mesopotamia. Significantly, it is then, in the middle of the second century, that the first clear evidence emerges for a Roman garrison at Palmyra, a city which had hitherto provided its own troops to police the desert caravan routes. The corollary to this is that there is virtually no clear evidence for Roman military installations in the desert regions before the end of the second century. There are few such traces anywhere in the region in this period, but in the desert areas where structures are well preserved, their near absence may be regarded as significant and not merely the consequence of later building or agricultural activity.

There is a little evidence for the possible trouble the nomads could cause. Inscriptions from Palmyra honouring various leaders allude to trouble with the nomads: one of 132 speaks of the deliverance of a recently arrived caravan from Vologesias 'from the grave danger that surrounded it'; another of 199 honours a man for the continuous expeditions he has raised against the nomads'; and a third, of about the same period, shows us a strateos who received imperial approval for his work of pacification in the desert. A Nabataean inscription from the Sinai with the date 190/1 speaks of that as being the year 'during which the Arabs [?] ravaged the land' . But these were almost certainly modest affairs, the nomads posing no threat to major settlements, much less any of the cities of the region.

In the first and second centuries, in the absence of forts there is little information about the Roman forces only at Hegra, with some graffiti scratched by Roman auxiliary soldiers on a cliff face, and an inscription dedicated by a legionary of the III Cyrenaica, do we get some hint of where troops were. Perhaps the Roman military presence was like that of the nomads- seasonal and in tents. However, physical evidence for Roman military presence becomes more abundant towards the end of the second century, as at Qasrel-Hallabat and around the Azraq Oasis.

There seems however to have been a change taking place in tribal nomadic society in this penod which may have had serious consequences for Rome. This is the process of 'bedouinization'. It is suggested that in the early Principate there took place in the region of north Arabia a breakdown of such modest urbanism as had developed. Instead of a nomadic society influenced and controlled by a town-based aristocracy, there appeared one dominated by those already adapted to desert life. Typical bedouin society emerged with the characteristic blood feuds and raids. The case is difficult to prove. It is a fact, however, that the desert tribes begin to appear in the records from the Severan periodas a troublesome element on the frontiers, looming ever larger over the next four centuries and playing a growing role in the developing contest between Rome and Persia.

The danger posed by nomads should not beover estimated. Undoubtedly hostile if relatively small nomadic tribes could cause extensive disruption and tie down a disproportionate number of soldiers. The evidence that they did so and are xplanation for many of the forts which first appear along the desert fringe of Syria and Arabiain the third and fourth centuries, is at best thin. An interesting alternative explanation which draws on the evidence for upheaval in the Arab population of the provinces in the aftermath of the collapse of Palmyrene power in the late third century, envisages many of the forts as built to guard communications against uprooted dissident provincials operating in the difficult fringes of the province itself .

Nevertheless, nomads seem to have been more significant in Roman military thinking from the third century. There is evidence of a changed relationship; it is in this period that we begin to find the literary sources preserving the names of nomad chiefs and the names of tribal confederations become common. Thus there was Jadhima, king of the Tanukh, who fought for Rome against the Palmyrenes. It would seem that this confederation had once been localized in the vicinity of the north-west shore of the Persian Gulf, but had subsequently removed to the Roman frontier; more precisely, Jadhima is named on an inscrlptlon from Umm el-Jemal. We can hardly doubt that the downfall of Palmyra and its subsequent inability to police the desert (we hear of no more caravans through Palmyra after that of 269) gave far greater power to nomad chiefs especially one such as Jadhima who had assisted the Romans. Not that we need believe Jadhima motivated by loyalty to Rome. Rather, hostility to Palmyra seems the key.

The appearance of larger tribal groupings is notable and helps explain the growing potency of Arab chiefs in the subsequent centuries. Bedouinization need not have led to such a development. Rather, we should perhaps see it as a response to the very success of Rome. It is surely no coincidence that all round her frontiers tribes were coalescing in this period to form powerful confederations: the Maeatae who appear in northern Britain in the Severan period, the Alammani on the Rhine (and later the Franks), and now in the East, the Tanukh, responding to Roman and Palmyrene power in the same way. Indeed, it seems that the very name 'Saracen' is derived from a word meaning 'confederation'. More was to come. Within a generation, the Tanukh itself was absorbed into the new powerful Lakhmid confederation ruled over by Imru'lqais, 'king of all the Arabs', and whose power stretched from the Arabian peninsula to the Persian Gulf to the Hauran. Imru'lqais is said to have offered the service of his troops to both Rome and Persia, but it may be indicative of a closer relationship with Rome that in 328 he was buried at Nemara in the Hauran, near a former Roman military post.

The wide power of the Lakhmid kingdom seems not to have survived Imru'lqais. The confederation itself survived, based henceforth on the Sasanian frontier at el-Hira and closely allied to Persia. Indeed, for the next three centuries the desert tribes were to be largely divided between the pro-Persian Lakhmids and the pro-Roman Ghassanids who were soon to emerge on the Roman frontier. It would be misleading to present this development as simply a return to the Early Empire system of client-rulers being left in charge of difficult areas or peoples. In the Early Empire Rome was acting from a position of strength, choosing to administe rsome regions in thls manner; in the Late Empire it is clear that these Arab phylarchs were powerful and independent. Many were keen to obtain recognition in their role by Rome or Persia but they were plainly far less reliable than were the one-time rulers of Commagene or Arabia Petraea.

In the pages of Ammianus Marcellinus there is a description of the Saracens as fighters. They appear in the Emperor Julian's campaign as raiders and guerrilla fighters, well-adapted to desert conditions; in battle with the Goths it is their ferocity and barbaric appearance which arrests the attention of even their opponents.

What the appearance of such allied tribes or confederations might mean for the Roman defences begins to become clear both from literary references as to where these nomads were operating and from the archaeological evidence. Some of the more distant frontier forts such as Qasr el-Azraq in the desert itself or on its fringes began to be given up from the later fourth century, security being vested instead in the hands of individual tribal chiefs who entered into formal alliances with Rome and probably undertook the protection of travellers previously secured by the forts.

Throughout this period there are references to Saracen raids: on the hermits on Mount Sinai in c.373; another attack on those of Palestine in the early fifth century; widespread raids in Palestine, Phoenicia and Syria in 410; an attack on northestern Syria in the mid fifth century; in 473 after a period of raiding, the Emperor Leo was asked to recognize a tribal chief in the Hedjaz, Imru'lqais (= Amorcesos), as phylarch; and at the close of the century, St Sobas asked the Emperor Anastasius for a fort and garrison to protect his new monastery in Palestine, this coming at about the same time as the raids o f41I-2 which struck in northern Syria as deep as Emesa. In other respects, the fifth century was, however, apparently one without any great upheavals, perhaps because of the power and influence of a new confederation, the Salih, based in central Syria.

With the sixth century there was a resurgence amongst the Arab tribes. The period saw various major developments, above all, the appearance of the Ghassanid confederation. This, according to Procopius, was the outcome of a policy decision by the Emperor Justinian to transform one of his Arab Phylarchs, al-Harith (= Aretas), son of Jabalah, into a paramount chief with the title of patricius, probably interpreted by his followers as king. In doing so, he was evidently concerned to create on the Roman side an organized counterpoise to the powerful pro-Persian Lakhmids at Hira near the Lower Euphrates, whose raids into Roman territory were proving disruptive. Al-Harith first appeared alongside the Roman forces in 53 I1at the Battle of Callinicum but was prominent thereafter throughout the c.40 years of his reign. Ghassanid troops not only assisted as allies in Roman armies, but also conducted a war of their own against the Lakhmids c.544. Al-Harith appeared too as a more traditional king, responsible for building and the patronage of art. TheGhassanid kingship did not long survive his death: the Emperor Maurice early in his reign, ended the patriciate, retaining the Ghassanid successors as phylarchs only. The period of some half a century is significant both as reflecting the important role being played by Arab tribes on both the Roman and Persian side, the dominance nevertheless of the emperor who could apparently make and unmake a kingship, and the extent to which the defences of the eastern frontier in desert and steppe were placed in the hands of Arab allies.

Both in the time of the patriciate and later under the rule of the fragmented Ghassanid family and other Arab phylarchs, we find exte-sive tracts of eastern Syria under their authority. Not just the desert and semi-desert, but settled, urbanized areas from Resafa through Damascus and Bostra to the vicinity of Jericho. In short, many of the forts of the desert frontier, previously garrisoned by Roman troops, were now in regions under the authority of Arab phylarchs. The building inscription of 529 fromQasr el-Hallabat is the latest piece of certain evidence of direct Roman military involvement in Arabia. The peasant militia into which the limitanei had sunk, had long since ceased to have any serious military function. Imperial forces now only garrisoned the majo rtowns to the west and along the Euphrates, towns whose populations sheltered behind massive and imposing walls.

The great tragedy of Heraclius' remarkable recovery of his eastern provinces from the Persians after a titanic struggle, was that they were now weakened and disorganized by years of war and recent Persian occupation. Further, they were divided from the imperial court by religiou sdifferences. When the first Muslim assault on southern Palestine came in 629 - the only one directed by Muhammad before his death -it would have been seen as of no great significance; another Arabian tribe thrusting out of the desert as the tribal constituents of the Tanukh, Lakhmids, Kindites and Ghassanids, and many others had done before, and in due course to be assimilated as foederati, their chief recognized as phy-archus. Besides, this was the moment at which Heraclius, having freed Syria the preceding year from more than 14 years of Persian rule, was triumphantly replacing in Jerusalem the fragment of the True Cross. Muhammad's death and the internal struggle which took place in Arabia, resulted in the dramatic outburst of Arab armies in 633 which led to the overthrow of Sasanian Persia and to a series of Roman defeats culminating in the Battle of the Yarmuk in 636 and the loss of Syria to the Roman Empire.

The Army

From the earliest days of Rome's recorded history, her forces had evolved to meet changed circumstances and different opponents. In the Eastthey had to adapt to climate, geography and the military situation. The military needs of the region naturally varied over several centuries. The elimination of allied rulers and the extenion of Roman territory brought additional military rponslbilities. New conditions were created by political and social developments amongst the peoples beyond the frontiers outlined above and changes within the Roman Empire itself. As a survey of the evidence shows, changes appeared in the character of the Roman forces and in the tactics and strategy employed. Throughout the Roman period, the province of Syria had the principal military force in the entire East. Consequently, its governors exercised a general responsibility over not just the province of Syria, but the adjacent provinces too, from the Black Sea to the Red, and even, on occasion,to the Nile. Even when additional major military provinces were created in neighbouring Cappadocia, Judaea, Arabia and Mesopotamia, Syriar emained the largest and most important. Because of the military interdependence of all the provinces in the region, it is more apt to look at the forces not just in the provinces of the central and southern areas of the eastern frontier with which we are concerned, but of the Asiatic East as a whole. Much of the East was technically 'un-armed', though all governors had some troops at their disposal.

In the Late Republic, the governors of Syria were generally allowed only two legions of citizen soldiers (approximately IO,OOO men), although the civil wars had often seen many more there. With the establishment of the Principate the number increased. For the first century of the Principate, with the possible exception of a legionary province of Galatia under Augustus (c. 25 BC -AD 6), the entire Asiatic East from Sinai to Hellespont had only four legions, all of them in the single province of Syria. Three imperial provinces - Cappadocia, Syria and Judaea -emerge in the Flavian period (69-96), a fourth under Trajan with the annexation of Arabia Petraea, while with Septimius Severus, Syria was divided into Syria Coele and Syria Phoenice, and a new legionary province of Mesopotamia was created. Finally, in the Diocletianic period legions are strung out through nine provinces from the Black Sea to the Red. The legions are of course only part of the story .Unfortunately, we cannot produce a picture of the auxiliary forces (largely recruited amongst non-citizen provincials) with anything like the same confidence. Nevertheless, from Tacitus' observation (Annals IV.s referring to AD 23) that overall within the Empire auxiliary forces were broadly equal in strength to the legions, we may tentatively infer some 20,000 under Augustus and the early Julio-Claudian emperors. By the time of Nero our information has improved somewhat: the army mustered by Vespasian at Ptolemais in 67 for the Jewish War is said to have included over 22,000 auxiliaries to which would have to be added the units retained by Mucianus in Syria, and the units in Cappadocia and in the so-called 'Unarmed Provinces' of Asia Minor. However, it is for the mid second century that our best estimates are available. Including the 'Unarmed Provinces', there would have been in total some 3 5,000 auxiliaries; adding on the legions gives 75-80,000. This latter figure may hav- risen to perhaps 90,000 by the death of Severus.

The third element is that of the armies of the allied kings and princes in the region. These had their own role to play in providing internal security, but could be called upon in time of major warfare. The evidence for these armies is even more fragmentary than for the auxiliaries. Occasional references give us some idea of the order of magnitude, but it is again from the passage of Josephus just cited that we get our most comprehensive insight: Vespasian's army at Ptolemais was augmented by some 15,000 troops from four allied kings. The forces of allied kings were not, of course, a constant. The annexation of allied states eliminated the royal armies which then often appeared amongst the local auxiliary forces or were exchanged for existing units elsewhere. Thus, the annexation of the Nabataean kingdom led to the appearance in the Roman army lists of six Cohortes Ulpiae Petraeorum, some 4500 men. By the early second century, there were no longer any allied states west of the Euphrates to contribute to Roman campaigns.

The evidence for the tactical distribution of legions and auxilia within any province of the Asiatic East is patchy even when the evidence is at its best. For theJulio-Claudian period we have precise locations for legions on only two occasions (Cyrrhus and Raphanaea; Zeugma may beinferred). From a passage in Tacitus (HistoriesII.80), we may infer that some at least of the legions of the East in 69 were based amongst o rclose to the urban populations of the province. Little can be said about the location of auxiliary units except in Judaea, where cities such as Caesarea, Ascalon and Jerusalem had garrisons,as well as the border fortress palaces at Masada and Machaerus.

After 70 th s information improves, especially all that showing legions now firmly located on the Euphrates itself (Melitene, Samosata and Zeugma) and auxiliary units likewise pushed out onto the Euphrates and into the desert further south. Vexillations ('detachments') of legions appear more frequently, two at least at apparently temporary outposts in distant locations: Baku on the Caspian Sea under Domitian, and another at Hegra in the Hedjaz in, perhaps, the mid second century.

No new province was created under Marcus Aurelius but the army was thrust further eastwards again. Troops appear at Dura-Europos and a reasonable inference from the report in Dio (LXXV.I.2) of Roman troops being attacked in1I93 by the Osrhoeni and Adiabeni - Nisibis is explicitly mentioned - is that units were in central North Mesopotamia. With Severus one must suppose that auxiliary units were firmly established east of the Euphrates but only one - onthe Lower River Khabur - can be located. LegioI Parthica is now known to have been at Singara in his reign; the other legion assigned to the province was probably at Nisibis. Legionary detachments again appear operating far from the parent unit. Dura, for example, has them from three different legions. A few years later, under Severus Alexander and Gordian III, an auxiliary cohort is attested inside Hatra far to the east.

With the upheavals in the East in the mid third century, our evidence becomes very scarce and it is not until the end of the century that we can again see something of what is going on. Then the Notitia Dignitatum gives a list of units which nominally reflects the situation c. 400 but is commonly believed to have changed little since the reforms of Diocletian and Constantine. Under these emperors, the entire structure of the Roman army altered. Diocletian is conventionally -though, perhaps, erroneously - credited with massively increasing the size of the Roman army after the near collapse of the third century. The restored units and new regiments were, however, distributed along the frontiers again, rather as they had been in former times - albeit now rather more numerous. It is to Constantine that historians traditionally attribute the change which resulted in a major mobile field army developed out of the nucleus of one which had first begun to take snape in the tlme of Seplmlus Severus. To do so, however, was to some extent a matter of withdrawing some units from the frontier forces. Although initially held centrally by the emperor, this field army was later divided to provide a few regional field armies, one of which was assigned to the East. Thus, from the late fourth century through to the time of Justinian, the arrangement in the East consisted of this field army, the comitatus, held as a strategic reserve, below which came the limitanei who actually garrisoned the forts and frontier cities, then the federate tribes.

There was also a reversal of status. Legions - or rather their much smaller Late Empire successors) - were no longer the elite troops, but were now largely part of the static, relatively low-grade frontier forces, the limitanei who garrisoned most of the sites with which we are concerned here. Ancient references make it clear that increasingly the quality of these was often poor, their morale low, and, in times of monetary shortage, it was not uncommon for their payand equipment to have been neglected; they tended too to become more farmers than soldiers and less useful even as garrison troops. The units became smaller as may be seen not just from the documentary evidence, but from the size of the forts entire units now garrisoned. From time to time too, elements of this frontier force were drawn off to join the field army; in short, the trend over the three centuries to Heraclius was for the first line of defence to decline in numbers and quality and for the real defence to depend ever more on the field army. Both the comitatus and the limitanei declined in numbers. Jones has calculated that at the time of the compilation of the Notitia Dignitatum in c. 400, on paper at least, the former in the eastern half of the Empire numbered some 1o4,000; the latter in the same region, 248,000. We have no way of estimating the decline in numbers of the limitanei, but it comes as something of a shock to be told tha twhen Justinian reinforced the comitatus in the East, he brought its strength up to 25,000!

These changes in the make up of the army reflect an altered strategy and new tactics. No longer was it possible, as in the Early Principate,to concentrate the bulk of the garrison of the reglon behind the trontler and leave much ot the everyday policing to the armies of allied rulers. Rome was now responsible for the protection of a frontier often under threat and for providing a field army in time of major war. The character of the army also changed. Cavalry was more prominent, the field army as a whole being more mobile. Rome had always been willing to adopt and adapt the weapons and tactics of her opponents. Thus the huge numbers of auxiliary troops included not only infantry but the cavalry in which the Roman armies were deficient, and the archers and the dromedarii one increasingly finds in the East from an early date. Significantly in the great wars in the East, it was Rome which adopted major features of the armies of her opponents, not vice versa. Only the technique of siege war seems to have been taken up by any of Rome's enemies. Where the Parthians had been notably deficient, the Sasanians became adept. Hence the very different character of Roman-Sasanian campaigns, settling down in the third century into a series of sieges, usually of Mesopotamian fortresses, and the increasing emphasis placed by both sides on fortifications and heavily ,garrisoned strong points.

Barbarian troops become more prominent not just as foederati but in the field army and limitanei. Thus, after the defeat of Valens by the Goths in 375, it was felt necessary as a precaution to carry out a surprise massacre of all the Gothic troops in the East before they could think to rebel. In the aftermath, as Theodosius attempted to fill the gap created by the annihilation of Valen's army, many regiments were drawn westwards and new regiments introduced to the East. Since these latter, unusually, have no ethnic title, it has been proposed that they were pure barbarian units, the name being omitted to disguise their numbers. The Notitia Dignitatum also refers to several units of Arabs, some of whom were probably recruited from amongst the allied nomads. The practice continued, and a century and half later, we hear of five regiments of Vandals brought by Belisarius from Africa being sent to the eastern frontier.

In the final battles for Syria against the forces of Islam, the Byzantine armies seem modest. Even for the last battle, at the River Yarmuk the field army is said to have been only 50,000.By that time of course, the troops of the limitanei were no longer a meaningful force in any area and many of their forts will have been either abandoned or become the homes of the peasantry into which the former frontier army had disintegrated.

 

Fergus Millar, "Communal and Cultural Identities," chpt. 6 of his The Roman Near East, 31 BC - AD 337, Harvard University Press, 1993, pp. 225-235.

A social and economic history of the Near East in the Roman period cannot be written. None of the conditions for such a history are present. Though good descriptions of the geology and (in very broad terms) the ecology of the region are available, nothing is clearer than the fact that in this area above all we cannot speak of constant or enduring patterns of social and economic life. To take only the crudest and most obvious variables, the extent of cultivation along the margin of the steppe and the heights reached by regular settlement in the very large mountainous zones have both varied widely according to political and military circumstances. The most important factor of all has been simply the presence or absence of political stability and of effective policing. Even within the present century the area under cultivation and marked by regular settlement has expanded immensely within the modern states of Syria, Israel and Jordan. Conditions have thus changed dramatically within the period covered by modern archaeological and epigraphic researches; and precisely those books which are fundamental to the understanding of the region in antiquity may set their discoveries in a context which, while valid over half a century ago, bears no relation to the conditions prevailing now.

Take for instance the wonderful account of the antiquities of the Hauran contained in Maurice Dunand's book on the museum at Soueida, published in 1934 - one of the most impressive presentations of the art and archaeology of a sub-region from anywhere in the Empire. Some things are of course unchangeable, for instance the black basalt of the region, which was perforce the medium in which a striking local variant of Graeco-Roman sculpture and architecture had to be expressed. But the situation described in Dunand's preface belongs in another world: a French company encamped in the Roman theatre of Bostra and then annihilated in the Druse uprising of 1925; the museum beginning life in that same year as an open-air enclosure outside Soueida. The photographs show the museum in a rolling, barren landscape, with a few one-storey houses beyond it. Nothing would prepare the reader for the substantial modern town of today (nor for the fact that the Jebel Hauran, entirely inhabited by Druse, is now officially called Jebel Arab).

Though archaeology, in the Hauran above all, has made immense strides since then, modern historical circumstances have meant that the detailed archaeology of (for instance) farming, animal husbandry, the means of human subsistence, the exchange of food and manufactured objects and of the products of longer-distance trade has not arrived at anywhere near the stage at which a strictly economic interpretation of the history of the region could be written. If standing remains can be surveyed and mapped, some sites excavated, and objects and inscriptions collected, that is as much as can yet be expected. Even in those respects many of the more mountainous regions remain unknown territory to historical research, as do many areas which lie too close to the boundaries of modern states.

This book can thus make no pretence whatsoever to present a social or economic history of the region. Desirable as such a work might be, it cannot begin from a coherent body of knowledge-or even any serious hypotheses about the economic history of the area-or locate within that the major social formations visible in our fragmentary evidence, the nature of their communal life, their role within the wider Greek-speaking world and their relation to the Roman Empire.

Instead the book presents a map of surface appearances, of communal and cultural identities as seen and expressed by both insiders and outsiders. That has at least the advantage of relying above all on explicit statements in words, preserved on inscriptions, in perishable documents and in literary works, which at a certain, and important, level cannot be falsified. If, as we have seen, the latest known document from Dura-Europos presents the place as 'Koloneia of the Europaioi of [Seleukos] Neikator, the sacred and inviolate and autonomous', that piece of self- representation remains a historical fact even if we could prove that the place had not been founded by Seleucus Nicator in the early Hellenistic period, or was not entitled to the status of colonia. Similarly, if Heliodorus, the author of the novel Aethiopica, finishes his work by identifying himself as an 'Emesene Phoenician', we may well want to discuss why he should have chosen to describe himself in this way; but we cannot argue away his own self-representation, or presume to prove that the people of Emesa were 'really' Arabs.

That is not to say that such self-identifications are not liable to be completely misunderstood in the modern world. Take the case of Tatian, the second-century author of a composite version of all four Gospels called in Greek Diatessaron, of which a fragment in Greek was found at Dura-Europos. He also wrote an Address to the Greeks in which he describes himself as 'he who philosophises in the manner of barbarians, born in the land of the Assyrioi, educated first on your principles, secondly in what I now profess'. Does he mean to say that he came in reality from 'Assyria', that is, from an area (Adiabene or Babylonia?) east of the Euphrates? Was he in origin therefore a Syriac or Aramaic-speaking 'Oriental' from outside the Roman Empire? Not at all. 'Assyria' and 'Assyrioi' were common terms for Syria and its inhabitants; which is why, like so many other people from that area, he had a name which is in origin Latin, with an extended ending, and transliterated into Greek. Another, closely comparable, 'Assyrian' of the second century was the satirist Lucian, that is, 'Loukianos' from Samosata in Commagene. The education which Tatian, like Lucian, had received in Syria was Greek, and the 'barbarian philosophy' which he practised was Christianity.

These questions of personal and communal self-representation are crucial, if only because the relevant names and identities might change and evolve so profoundly. Tatian was at some point a pupil, perhaps at Rome, of another man from a Near Eastern province, with a transliterated Latin name, that is, Justin Martyr: or, as he presents himself in the Apology which he addressed to Antoninus Pius, 'loustinos, son of Priskos, son of Bakcheios, of those from Flavia Neapolis, belonging to Syria Palaistine'.  Every element in his self-identification is a product of rapidly changing circumstances under the Empire: the Latin names of his father and himself, the name of his city, and the name of the province to which it belonged. The village of 'Mamortha' or 'Mabartha' in Samaria had become the city of 'Flavia Neapolis' in 72/73, and its Greek coinage had begun under Domitian. (Josephus had evidently been anticipating when he mentioned Vespasian, on campaign in 68, as passing 'the place called Neapolis, but Mabartha by the natives [epichorioi]'.)  'Syria Palaestina' had replaced 'Judaea' as the name of the province only after the Bar Kochba war of 132-135.

Such a transformation raises in particularly acute form the question of what such an instantly created Greek city really 'was'. Justin is in fact unusual among writers in Greek, whether pagan or Christian, originating from the Near East, in reflecting so much of the local history, culture and languages of his native region: the Bar Kochba war and the destruction of Jerusalem; the nefarious careers of two magicians originating from Samaritan villages; the original Hebrew meanings of words like 'Jesus' and 'Israel'; and 'the language of the Suroi', or what we would call Aramaic. In converting to Christianity Justin had of course, like everyone else, simultaneously embraced a historical tradition enshrined in texts originally written in a Semitic language; and this would have been so irrespective of his local origins. Nonetheless, as a man of pagan origin, born perhaps about AD 100, from the recently formed Greek city of Flavia Neapolis, he is aware of three separate non-Greek groups present in his native region: Jews, Samaritans and 'Syrians'.

Justin and the city from which he came thus represent a special case. But even in the case of much longer established 'Greek cities', their names, constitutions and formal public identities as Greek cities, while important facts in themselves, must leave open the question of the cultural roots and personal identity of their individual citizens, and their relation to the surrounding world of villages.

Even for the modest first step of surveying the public nature of the communities we find in the various sub-regions of the Near East, the evidence is often simply non-existent. We know for instance that at the northern limit of the region, in the western part of Commagene and just below the Taurus Mountains, there was a city which the geographer Ptolemy calls Germanikeia (Germanicia), and whose coins, also of the second half of the second century, label its inhabitants as 'Kaisareis Germanikeis'. It is normally located at present-day Maras in southern Turkey. Its Latin-Greek name had clearly been given to it to honour a member of the Imperial house, perhaps Germanicus during his visit in AD 18/19, when Commagene had been temporarily part of the province of Syria. But Gaius (37-41), Claudius (41-54) and Nero (54-68) each had 'Germanicus' as part of their full official names, and the city might equally have been a royal foundation, by the last king of Commagene, Antiochus IV (AD 38-72).  If so, it was a parallel to the succession of royal foundations by the Herodian dynasty. In each case both the conception that what should be created was a 'Greek city' and the Imperial names used to denote the new community are significant features of the social and cultural map of the whole region. But the almost complete lack of local evidence (other than a few coins) and even of passing allusions in literary sources means that we cannot attach any real meaning to the creation of the city of Germanicia in its more immediate context.  We are hardly much the wiser in learning from brief later quotations that the third-century Roman historian Asinius Quadratus, who like Cassius Dio wrote in Greek, referred to 'Germanikeia' in his Parthica, as he did to places and peoples in Armenia, to a village called Tarsa down the Euphrates from Samosata and to 'Thelamouza', a fort on the river.  At least some of his 'Parthian History' narrated the war fought by Lucius Verus in the 160s. We might therefore, if the work had survived, have gained some extra insight into routes and geography in this little-known area. But it is not until the writings of Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus in the fifth century, that we can find even passing allusions to places in this region which come from someone closely involved in it. Even in his case his only allusion to 'Germanikeia' simply records that it was a city on the borders of Cilicia, Syria and Cappadocia, whose bishop managed under Constantine to get himself improperly translated to the see of Antioch.

Much the same indeed applies to Cyrrhus itself, a substantial Greek city first attested in the Hellenistic period. Not only was it the focus of a large and fertile area, which has never been explored for ancient remains, but, lying on the river Afrin which runs down to the plain of Antioch, it was on the route from Antioch to the Euphrates at Zeugma, and the station of a Roman legion as early as the reign of Tiberius. The surviving remains-of walls, the acropolis, bridges, a temple and two churches, as well as a vast theatre, 115 m in diameter-make clear that it was a considerable urban centre. But until we come to the writings of Theodoret himself, we have virtually no evidence to illuminate the social history of the city or the very extensive area of villages attached to it. For our whole period, therefore, we have to admit that there  is no means of access to the life and culture of this northern part of the Syrian region. It is not even possible to say what language, if any, other than Greek was spoken there.

It must be accepted that even on the most superficial level the evidence of all kinds is inadequate, discontinuous and very erratically distributed. If the works of Josephus provide a unique density of narrative information, not just for Judaea but for the surrounding area and even for places like Antioch --  or even a brief glimpse of Palmyra --  there is no comparable view from any contemporary living in the second, third or fourth century. The nearest parallel is provided by the works of Eusebius of Caesarea. Nor do we have any continuous history of any one city until we come to the Chronicle of John Malalas, written in the sixth century; in intention a Christian world chronicle, it nonetheless comes close to being a history of his native Antioch. Yet its account of this period, which certainly contains a mass of valuable information is also riddled with misconceptions, above all about the relation of city to the Roman state and the Emperor.

Any attempt to grasp the nature of culture and social formations in the region has to depend largely on representations by contemporaries, whether in literature (and if so whether by outside observers or by insiders), in formal public documents such as inscriptions and coins (the most deliberate of symbols of public identity), in perishable documents (of which the number discovered is now rapidly increasing) or as embodied in building and artefacts. It is useless to complain of the obvious inadequacy of the evidence available. For it lies in the nature of our access to the past (as indeed to the present) that it is wholly dependent on the means of information which happen be available.

Pessimism is in any case unjustified. For, first, the evidence, though grossly inadequate, is nonetheless very extensive in total volume. Second, a vast range of evidence securely located in space and time is available to us. It can thus be set, with all due caution, against the varied and impressive landscapes of the region. However dependent we are on the accidents of the 'epigraphic habit', on the interests of our literary sources and on the further hazards modern discovery and excavation, it is still possible both to compare the various sub-regions with each other and to see how the visible and surviving manifestations of the culture of each change over time. Of course we cannot always distinguish between a change of interest in our sources and a real change in society and culture. For instance, biographical portraits of fourth-century Christian hermits immediately take us down to social levels, and to geographical contexts in the countryside and the steppe, which earlier literature hardly touches. We will not always be able to tell whether the social patterns revealed were new or are only now revealed to us. Had there, for instance, always been 'Saracens' in the Negev, and thus well within the 'frontier' of the Empire as it appears on the map? Or had the process of 'beduinisation', which Werner Caskel suggested took place during the Imperial period in Arabia proper, beyond the frontier, been matched by a growth of nomadism within? We can say only that they are visibly present, in a way not paralleled before, in the pages of Jerome's Life of the hermit Hilarion. At all events we cannot deny the significance of the ascetic movement itself, which began in the first few decades of the fourth century and represented a revolution in Christian values. The hermits, by the nature of the symbolic postures which they adopted, were to be found by the faithful out on the fringes of settled and cultivated land, on mountains or on the edge of the steppe. Thus Theodoret, in describing the career of a hermit of the early fourth century named Julianus, begins by describing the geography of Osrhoene: 'in this province there are many large and heavily populated cities, and a countryside which is largely inhabited, but also largely uninhabited and desert'; Julianus chose the edge of the desert.

it is often just such a narrative of the establishment of a hermit which itself reveals the existence of the large villages which were characteristic of the whole region, and in some cases the significance of the rural cult-centres located near them. For instance, further on in his account of the hermits of Syria, Theodoret describes how Asterius, a young man of good family, founded what was to become a monastery 'in the countryside round Gindarus-this is a very large village (kome) placed under the control of Antioch'. The place, modern Genderesse, situated near the river Afrin, was probably in origin an early Hellenistic settlement; but its only earlier significant mention in our sources comes from Strabo, reflecting the unsettled condition of the first century BC: to him Gindarus was a polis, the acropolis of the district called Cyrrhestice and a natural stronghold for robbers. The large settlement (polis or kome?) of Gindarus had thus always been there. The complete silence about it is broken only thanks to the literary record of the two great historic changes which mark the limits of the period studied here: the Roman imposition of order over a large part of the world as known to Strabo, and the beginnings of the monastic movement. It is only the latter which takes us close to the rural world of the Near East. Theodoret again provides what is perhaps our only picture of a rural sanctuary in the territory of the little town of Gabala, which lay on the coast some 30 km south of Laodicea. Some 7 km from the town was a shrine for the worship of 'demons', whom the country-people had to appease with constant sacrifices to avoid harm to themselves, their asses, mules, cattle, sheep and camels. A hermit named Thalelaios then took up his station exactly there, nullified the power of the demons and was later assisted in destroying the temenos and substituting for it a shrine to some Christian martyrs.

However many isolated insights into the life of the region we may be able to accumulate, we will not necessarily be able to construct out of them any meaningful history. Moreover, it has already been conceded that a true social and economic history of the region is still wholly out of reach.  But at a different level three lines of approach are feasible. One has already been exploited: to survey the progressive stages by which large parts of the Near East came under Roman direct rule, and to raise some initial questions about the nature of the Roman impact on them. Second, there is the question which the story of the imposition of Roman rule itself serves to raise: the nature of the different political formations and social groupings which the Romans encountered. For instance, the political map of the Near East under Augustus was dominated by kingdoms. But by the early second century all those west of the Euphrates had disappeared. What was the significance of that disappearance, and did the kingdoms leave no legacy behind them, in terms of monuments, of traditions or of group identities or loyalties which might be capable of reactivation? If, as seems clear, they left very little trace, why was that so, and what other forms of communal or personal identity were more significant?

Third, even our fragmentary and erratic evidence can yield some meaning, or potential meaning, when different sub-regions are compared. Take for in- stance the linguistic history, or rather histories, of the region, involving the complex interplay of Greek, Latin and a series of Semitic languages. As else- where, Greek words were readily transliterated and absorbed into Latin, and Latin into Greek. But in the Near East we can see how Latin words could pass through Greek to be absorbed by transliteration into Semitic languages. So centurio could become kenturion in Greek, as in the New Testament (for instance in Mk 15, 3 9), and then QTRYN' or QTRWN' I in Palmyrene and QNTRYN' in Nabataean; colonia could become koloneia in, Greek, and QLNY' or QLWNY' in Hebrew, Jewish Aramaic, Palmyrene and Syriac.

The interplay of languages can also be viewed from quite different perspectives. One major question is whether the oral use of at least one Semitic language was in fact characteristic of all the sub-regions of the Near East without exception. In most areas it is beyond doubt. But some question must persist as regards Commagene, from Germanicia in the west to the Euphrates in the east, and over the north-Syrian tetrapolis, with the major early Hellenistic foundations of Antioch, Seleucia, Laodicea and Apamea.

What is certain at least is that these two areas have not so far produced any examples of formal public inscriptions (for instance, communal decrees, statue-bases, dedications or epitaphs) in a Semitic language. This fact might be regarded as insignificant (a mere product of a conventional association of Greek with the epigraphic habit), if it were not for the presence of such inscriptions in all the other areas; notably in the territory of Palmyra, which directly bordered on that of Apamea. If we cannot draw a map of the distribution of spoken languages, we certainly can draw provisional maps of the distribution of languages as inscribed.

Any such map would be a complex one, for it would have to allow for the co-existence of inscriptions in different languages-for example, Greek and Latin, especially in Berytus and Heliopolis, or Greek and one or more Semitic languages (as for instance in the ossuary-inscriptions from Judaea). But it would also have to reflect a different phenomenon, systematic inscriptional bilingualism, especially in Palmyra, where a large proportion of the inscriptions are in both Greek and Palmyrene. A few Palmyrene inscriptions are even trilingual, in Greek, Palmyrene and Latin.

The small but growing number of archives preserved on perishable materials (papyrus or parchment) cannot of course yet yield results which can be plotted on a linguistic map. But they do show that Greek and Syriac could both be used within the same archive; that a single archive (that of Babatha, covering the years from the 90s to the 130s) could contain documents in Nabataean, Aramaic and Greek; and that witnesses to documents in Greek could add their names in Nabataean or Aramaic or Syriac.

In the case of Babatha we are at an important moment of transition, for the archive covers the last decades of the kingdom of Nabataea and the first three decades of the Roman province of Arabia. There is a clear progression, from Nabataean under the kingdom to Aramaic and then (for the main text of each document) Greek in the provincial period. Precisely one of the more important questions concerns progression in time: did Roman rule tend to depress (or in certain areas forbid?) the public or official use of Semitic languages? Or does that question itself embody anachronistic assumptions about the nature and ambitions of the state? But here again comparisons between regions and across time will be suggestive.

Any results of such a comparison must, however, be tentative, For, first, we must allow for the presence of oral bilingualism; that is, the use of different languages in different contexts and to different interlocutors. Such a pattern is perfectly exemplified in Acts, when Paul, after speaking to the Roman tribune in Greek, is represented as turning to address the crowd 'in the Hebrais dialektos'.  It is only unfortunate that we cannot be certain whether Luke means to represent him as speaking in Hebrew or in Aramaic (or even whether he was fully aware of the difference).

Second, and more important, it remains to ask whether the Semitic languages employed in the East were either a necessary or a sufficient condition for the transmission of local cultures or of distinctive, conscious ethnic identities. Language is only one aspect of culture. There are many other questions to be asked about social and political structures, about cities and villages and about gods and temples in the different regions of the Near East. But here again, if our scattered evidence can be made significant at all, it is only by comparison between areas.

Such a survey and comparison can hardly fail to emphasise differences. At the same time these differences have to be seen within the context of two unifying factors. One is the progressive imposition of Roman direct rule, military occupation and taxation. Hence the survey will take the different subregions in roughly the order in which they seem to have been absorbed into the provincial system. Second, however strong the imprint of any local culture may have been, the dominant factor is the absorption of the region within the wider Greek world. Persons educated in the common stock of Greek literature and tradition, and writing in Greek, might come from Petra and Bostra, from Emmaus/Nicopolis or Flavia Neapolis, from Damascus, Emesa, Tyre, Apamea, Antioch, Samosata, Carrhae or Nisibis. An actual map of the origins of known writers in Greek, whether pagan or Christian, would of course be an absurdity. But at the level of a wider popular culture a map really can be drawn of those places which were the location of the named recurrent agones -- musical, theatrical and athletic contests -- which were so important a feature of the communal life of Greek cities. Once again comparison is significant: they are attested as far south as Gaza and Bostra, but no further; at Damascus but not at Palmyra; and up to, but not across, the Euphrates. In that very respect, the status of the public contests put on by its cities, all of the Near East clearly enjoyed no more than a secondary rank within the wider Greek world. By contrast, however, as a perpetual military or frontier zone within the Roman Empire, it was open to an exceptional degree of Romanising influence, from the widespread conferment of the rank of colonia to the popularity of gladiatorial and wild-beast shows.

The social and cultural history of the Near East in this period is no simple matter of a conflict between 'Classical' and 'Oriental'. The various local cultures could find expression in ways which were strikingly different one from another. The most vigorous impulse to urbanisation and the creation and adornment of Greek cities was that due to a king of Judaea, a Jew by religion, the son of an Idumaean father and a Nabataean mother, who was also a Roman citizen. Within a century, or at the most two centuries, of Herod's death both pagan Greek philosophical ideas and Christian theology were to find expression in Syriac. But whatever metaphor we use for the interplay of cultures in this region, every aspect of society and culture was influenced both by Greek civilisation and by the progressive extension of Roman rule. When we have examined the different sub-regions of the Near East in comparison with each other, it will be necessary to ask whether the region as a whole should be seen as part of the 'Orient' or as part of the wider Graeco-Roman world.

Cyril Mango. Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome. Scribner's, 1980.

[beginning with pg. 13]

CHAPTER I

PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES

All empires have ruled over a diversity of peoples and in this respect the Byzantine Empire was no exception. Had its constituent population been reasonably well fused, had it been united in accepting the Empire's dominant civilization, it would hardly have been necessary to devote a chapter to this topic. It so happens, however, that even before the beginning of the Byzantine period - indeed, when the grand edifice of Rome started to show its first cracks towards the end of the second century AD- the various nations under Roman sway tended to move apart and assert their individuality. The rise of the Christian religion, far from healing this rift by the introduction of a universal allegiance, only accentuated it. We must, therefore, begin with the question: Who were the 'Byzantines'? In an attempt to answer it we shall undertake a rapid tour of the Empire, noting as we proceed the populations of the various provinces and the languages spoken by them. The time I have chosen is about 560 AD, shortly after the recovery by the Emperor Justinian of large parts of Italy and North Africa and several decades before the major ethnographic changes that were to accompany the disintegration of the Early Byzantine State.

It will have been sufficient for our imaginary traveller, provided he did not intend to stray far from the cities, to know only two languages, namely Greek and Latin. The boundaries of their respective diffusion were not in all places sharply drawn. It may be said, however, as a rough approximation that the linguistic frontier ran through the Balkan peninsula along an east-west line from Odessos (Varna) on the Black Sea to Dyrrachium (Durres) on the Adriatic; while south of the Mediterranean it divided Libya from Tripolitania. With the exception of the Balkan lands, where there was a fair amount of mingling, the western half of the Empire was solidly Latin and the eastern half solidly Greek in the sense that those were the languages of administration and culture. Nearly all educated persons in the East could speak Greek, just as all educated persons in the West spoke Latin, but a great proportion of ordinary people spoke neither.

Our traveller would have had considerable difficulty in supplying himself with an up-to-date guidebook. He could have laid his hands on a bare enumeration of provinces and cities called the Synecdemus of Hierocles as well as on a few itineraries of earlier date that gave distances between staging posts along the main roads. He might have drawn some useful but antiquated information from a little book known to us as the Expositio totius mundi et gentium which was composed in the middle of the fourth century; but if he wanted a systematic treatise combining geography with ethnography, he would have had to pack a copy of Strabo in his luggage. If he had been able to find the geographical treatise (now lost) by the Alexandrian merchant Cosmas Indicopleustes, he would probably have derived little practical benefit from it. Let us imagine that our traveller was content with such imperfect documentation and that, starting from Constantinople, he intended to travel clockwise round the Empire.

Constantinople, like all great capitals, was a melting-pot of heterogeneous elements: all seventy-two tongues known to man were represented in it, according to a contemporary source. Provincials of all kinds had either settled there or would drift in and out on commercial or official business. The servile class included many barbarians. Another foreign element was provided by military units which in the sixth century consisted either of barbarians (Germans, Huns, and others) or some of the sturdier provincials like Isaurians, Illyrians and Thracians. It is said that seventy thousand soldiers were billeted on the householders of Constantinople in Justinian's reign. Syrian, Mesopotamian and Egyptian monks, who spoke little or no Greek, thronged to the capital to enjoy the protection of the Empress Theodora and impress the natives with their bizarre feats of asceticism. The ubiquitous Jew earned his living as a craftsman or a merchant. Constantinople had been founded as a centre of latinity in the east and still numbered among its residents many Illyrians, Italians and Africans whose native tongue was Latin as was that of the EmperorJustinian himself. Furthermore, several works of Latin literature were produced at Constantinople, like Priscian's famous Grammar, the Chronicle of Marcellinus and the panegyric of Justin 1l by the African Corippus. Necessary as Latin still was for the legal profession and certain branches of the administration, the balance was inexorably tilting in favour of Greek. By the end of the sixth century, as Pope Gregory the Great avers, it was no easy matter to find a competent translator from Latin into Greek in the imperial capital.

Facing Constantinople lies the huge land mass of Asia Minor which has been compared to a jetty attached to Asia and pointing towards Europe. Its most developed parts have always been the coastal edges, especially the gently shelving west face, favoured by a temperate climate and studded with famous cities. The Black Sea coastal strip is much narrower and discontinuous, while the southern shore has, with the exception of the Pamphylian plain, no low-lying edge at all. The coastal areas, save for the mountainous part of Cilicia (Isauria), where the Taurus range advances to the very edge of the sea, had been hellenized for a good thousand years and more before Justinian's reign. Along the Black Sea the limit of Greek speech corresponded to the present frontier between Turkey and the Soviet Union. To the east of Trebizond and Rizaion (Rize) dwelt various Caucasian peoples, such as the Iberians (Georgians) as well as the Laz and the Abasgians (Abkhazians), the latter two barely touched by Christian missions. The Empire also possessed a Hellenized foothold on the southern shore of the Crimea, while the high tableland of the Crimean peninsula was inhabited by Goths.

Quite different from the coastal areas of Asia Minor is the high inland plateau, where the climate is rough and much of the land unfit for agriculture. In antiquity as in the Middle Ages the plateau was sparsely populated and urban life was relatively undeveloped there. The more important cities were situated along the major highways, such as the so-called Royal Road that ran from Smyrna and Sardis, by way of Ancyra and Caesarea, to Melitene; the road connecting Constantinople to Ancyra by way of Dorylaeum; and the southern road that extended from Ephesus to Laodicea, Antioch in Pisidia, Iconium, Tyana and, through the Cilician Gates, to Tarsus and Antioch in Syria. The ethnic composition of the plateau had not undergone any notable change for some seven hundred years beforeJustinian's reign. It was a bewildering mosaic of native peoples as well as immigrant enclaves of long standing, such as the Celts of Galatia, theJews who had been planted in Phrygia and elsewhere during the Hellenistic period and Persian groups of even more ancient origin. It appears that many of the indigenous languages were still spoken in the Early Byzantine period: Phrygian was probably still extant, since it appears in inscriptions as late as the third century AD, Celtic in Galatia, Cappadocian farther east. The unruly Isaurians, who had to be pacified by force of arms in about 500 AD and many of whom drifted all over the Empire as professional soldiers and itinerant masons, were a distinct people speaking their own dialect, often to the exclusion of Greek. Next to them, however, in the Cilician plain, Greek had solidly taken root, except, perhaps, among the tribes of the interior.

Lying to the east of Cappadocia and straddling a series of high mountain chains were a number of Armenian provinces that had been annexed to the Empire as late as 387 AD when the Armenian kingdom was partitioned between Persia and Rome. These were strategically very important, but practically untouched by Graeco-Roman civilization, and they continued to be ruled by native satraps until Justinian imposed on them a new form of military administration. In the fifth century the Armenians acquired their own alphabet and began building up a literature of translations from the Greek and the Syriac which strengthened their feelings of national identity. Indeed, the Armenians, who were to play a crucial role in later Byzantine history, proved very resistant to assimilation as did the other Caucasian peoples.

The boundary between Armenia and Mesopotamia corresponded approximately to the river Tigris. Three centuries of Parthian occupation (from the middle of the second century BC until the Roman conquest in about 165 AD) had obliterated in Mesopotamia practically all traces of the Hellenization which the Macedonian kings had tried so hard to impose. In the period that concerns us Mesopotamia spoke and wrote Syriac. The literary form of Syriac represented the dialect of Edessa (Urfa), and it was in that 'blessed city' as well as at Amida (Diyarbakir), Nisibis (Nusaybin`, and in the Tur 'Abdin that a vigorous monastic movement of Monophysite persuasion fuelled the cultivation of that language. Mesopotamia was a frontier district: the boundary between Rome and Persia lay a short distance south-east of the garrison town of Dara, while Nisibis had been ingloriously ceded to the Persians by the EmperorJovian in 363. The cultural apartness of Mesopotamia was certainly no help to the imperial government in so sensitive an area.

The dominance of Aramaic dialects, of which Syriac is a member, extended throughout Syria and Palestine to the confines of Egypt. Here we witness a phenomenon of considerable interest. When the Hellenistic kingdoms were established following the death of Alexander the Great, Syria was divided between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. The Ptolemies, who obtained the southern half of the country, did rather little to plant Greek colonies there. The Seleucids, on the other hand, for whom northern Syria was of crucial importance, carried out intensive colonization. They established a number of new cities, such as Antioch on the Orontes, Apamea, Seleucia and Laodicea, and injected a Greek element into existing cities, such as Aleppo. From that time onward all of Syria remained continguously under a Greek-speaking administration. Yet, some nine centuries later, we find Greek speech confined not only to cities, but largely to those very cities that had been founded by the Hellenistic kings. The countryside generally and the towns of non-Greek origin, like Emesa (Homs), clung to their native Aramaic.

It is unlikely that the use of Greek should have been more widespread in Palestine than it was in northern Syria, except for an artificial phenomenon, namely the development of the 'holy places'. Starting in the reign of Constantine the Great, practically every site of biblical fame became, as we would say today, a tourist attraction. From every corner of the Christian world people poured into Palestine: some as transient pilgrims, others on a longer-term basis. Monasteries of every nationality sprang up like mushrooms in the desert next to the Dead Sea. Palestine was thus a babel of tongues, but the native population - and we must remember that it included two distinct ethnic groups, namely theJews and the Samaritans - spoke Aramaic as it had always done. The pilgrim Egeria, who witnessed the Easter services at Jerusalem about the year 400, has this to say:

"Seeing that in that country part of the people know both Greek and Syriac, another part only Greek and yet another part only Syriac, given also that the bishop, although he knows Syriac, always speaks in Greek and neer in Syriac, there is always by his side a priest who, while the bishop is speaking in Greek, translates his comments into Syriac so that everyone may understand them. Similarly for the lections that are read in church: since these must be read in Greek, there is always somebody there to translate them into Syriac for the benefit of the people, that they may receive instruction. As for the Latins who are there, i.e. those who know neither Syriac nor Greek, to them also is an interpretation given lest they be displeased; for there are some brethren and sisters, proficient in both Greek and Latin, who give explanations in Latin."

Another element of the population of-both Syria and Palestine consisted of Arabs who had spread as far north as Mesopotamia. Some of them, like the Nabataeans of Petra and the Palmyrenes, had become sedentary and lost their native language. Others roamed the deserts either as brigands or as vassals of the Empire whose duty it was to protect the settled areas and oversee the transhumance of the nomads. We should not, in any case, imagine that the Arab conquest of the seventh century introduced a foreign element into those provinces: the Arabs had been there all along, their numbers were increasing and, in Justinian's reign, they assumed more and more the role of keepers of the emperor's peace. When, for example, the Samaritans staged a bloody revolt in 529, it was an Arab chieftain, Abukarib, who put them down.

Closely linked with Syria by virtue of its situation was the island of Cyprus. Here Greek had been spoken since prehistoric times, but there was also a sizeable colony of Syrians as may be deduced from the prevalence of the Monophysite heresy . St Epiphanius, the most famous bishop of Salamis (d. 403), was a Palestinian and is said to have known five languages - Greek, Syriac, Hebrew, Egyptian and Latin. An exaggeration perhaps, but even so an indication of the multilingualism that characterized, as it still does, the more enterprising among the Levantines.

Separated from Palestine by an area of desert lay the rich and ancient land of Egypt. Here, too, the distribution of Greek was a direct legacy of the Hellenistic age. The capital, Alexandria, was a predominantly Greek city, but it was officially described as being ad Aegyptum, not in Aegypto, an intrusion into an alien country; and the farther one travelled from Alexandria, the less Greek was spoken. Apart from the capital, only two cities had been founded by the Greeks, Naukratis in the Delta and Ptolemais in the Thebaid; nor did Hellenization make much progress under Roman administration. Setting aside theJewish colony, which in the first century AD is said to have numbered about one million, the bulk of the population, even though they were administered in Greek, continued to speak Egyptian (Coptic), and there are signs that in the Early Byzantine period Coptic was gaining ground so that, by the sixth century, even some official acts were published in the native tongue. Above all, Coptic was the language of Egyptian Christianity, while Greek was identified with the alien hierarchy that was imposed by the imperial government.

The settled part of Egypt, which was practically limited to the Nile valley and the Delta, was threatened on all sides by barbarian tribes. From the east came raiding Saracens; in the south the black Nobadae and Blemmyes were particularly troublesome, while the west was open to Berber incursions, as was also Libya, a province that was administratively joined to Egypt. St Daniel, who was a monk at Scetis, no great distance from Alexandria, was three times kidnapped by barbarians and managed to escape only by killing his captor - a sin for which he did penance for the rest of his life. When, in the second half of the sixth century, the itinerant monk John Moschus visited the Egyptian monasteries, he picked up many tales of depredations both by barbarians and by native brigands. Some monasteries had become practically deserted.

With Libya we come to the limit of the Greek-speaking provinces. Farther west lay Tripolitania, a narrow coastal strip, then the important regions of Byzacena, Proconsularis and Numidia, and finally the two Mauretanias extending as far as the straits of Gibraltar. These had all been extensively romanized, and the richer areas, corresponding to modern Tunisia, had counted in better days among the most developed and prosperous parts of the Empire. How far the native population had been assimilated is a matter of uncertainty; nor it is entirely clear whether the vernacular language of the cities, which St Augustine calls Punic, was a legacy from ancient Phoenician (as appears more probable) or whether it was Berber. Our traveller in 560 would have found in any case a situation somewhat different from that which the Bishop of Hippo had known a century and a half earlier: for Africa had barely been recovered from the Vandals (in 533) who had held it for a century as an independent power. The Vandals had not been sufficiently numerous to have made a significant impact on the ethnography of the population, but their intrusion had led to the upsurge of the various Berber tribes who now seriously threatened the settled areas.

We need not concern ourselves with Spain, although part of its southern coast was recovered by Justinian from the Visigoths and remained in Byzantine hands for about seventy years. And so we may lead our traveller to Italy, whereJustinian's rule had just been established on a somewhat shaky basis after a great deal of bloodshed. The whole country was then in a dreadful state. Continuous warfare between Byzantium and the Ostrogoths, lasting from 535 until 562, resulted in the destruction of Milan with a reputed loss of three hundred thousand males, the virtual depopulation of Rome which sufered three sieges, and widespread starvation in the countryside. 'Italy has become everywhere even more destitute of men than Libya,' wrote Procopius, perhaps without great exaggeration. As to the composition of the population, there can be little doubt that the ltalitai, as Procopius called them, were basically Latin; even in the imperial capital of Ravenna, which had close ties with the East and numerous oriental settlers, Latin was the normal medium of communication. Some tiny pockets of Greek may have survived in the southern part of the peninsula and Greek certainly continued to be spoken on the east coast of Sicily. There were other minority groups, such as the Jews and the recently arrived Ostrogoths, but the latter could hardly have numbered more than a hundred thousand. Many more waves of invaders and settlers were to come, without, however, altering the fundamentally Latin character of the population.

Crossing the Adriatic, our traveller may have disembarked at Dyrrachium and followed the Via Egnatia all the way back to Constantinople. The regions he would have to traverse were then about as desolate as Italy. To quote Procopius once again,

"Illyricum and all of Thrace, i.e. the whole country from the Ionian Gulf [the Adriatic to the outskirts of Byzantium, including Greece and the Chersonese, was overrun almost every year by Huns, Slavs and Antae, from the time when Justinian became Roman emperor, and they wrought untold damage among the inhabitants of those parts. For I believe that in each invasion more than two hundred thousand Romans were killed or captured, so that a veritable 'Scythian wilderness' came to exist everywhere in this land."

Procopius omits to mention here that some of the most destructive invasions of the Balkan peninsulahad occurred beforeJustinian's time, in particular by the Goths in 378, by the Huns in 441-7, by the Ostrogoths in 479-82, by the Bulgars starting in 493. There can be little doubt concerning the immense amount of havoc caused by these and later incursions, but their effect on the ethnography of the regions in question is difficult to assess. The native populations were the Illyrians to the west, the Thracians and Daco-Mysians to the east and, of course, the Greeks to the south, but it would take a brave historian to state who was living where and in what numbers in the middle of the sixth century. The Slavs had already begun to settle, especially in the area between Nis and Sofia, as proved by the place names listed by Procopius, and we may imagine that the prolonged presence of Gothic and other barbarian troops had left some trace. As to languages, we have already commented on the boundary between Latin and Greek. Of Illyrian (whose relation to modern Albanian is disputed) very little is known, but Thracian, in particular Bessic, was still very much alive in the sixth century.

Such, in brief outline, were the peoples and languages of Justinian's Empire; and if I have laid any stress on the native elements, it was in order to correct the bias of our literary and narrative sources. To take but one instance, the fourth-century rhetorician Libanius, who was born at Antioch and lived most of-his life in that city, whose writings fill eleven printed volumes and are a mine of useful information, mentions only once the existence of the Syriac language. Yet it is an indisputable fact that Greek-speaking Antioch was an island in a sea of Syriac. Cultivated authors simply took no notice of such 'uncivilized' phenomena. Nor are inscriptions much more illuminating. Whoever set up an inscription, be it even on a tombstone, naturally used the 'prestige' language of the area. Besides, many of the vernacular dialects were not written. It is largely in the milieu of monks that we are occasionally brought face to face with ordinary illiterate folk and gain some inkling of what they spoke. Predictably, it was their native patois. Hence the custom of setting up 'national' monasteries. Others, however, were multinational: that of the Sleepless Ones (Akoimetoi) was divided by language into four groups - Latin, Greek, Syriac and Coptic. The monastery founded by St Theodosius the Coenobiarch in Palestine catered for Greek, Bessic and Armenian. On Mount Sinai in the sixth century one could hear Latin, Greek, Syriac, Coptic and Bessic. In 518 the abbot of a monastery at Constantinople could not sign his name to a petition because he did not know Greek. Similar examples could easily be multiplied.

Our survey would have been much more instructive had we been able to express in figures the relative importance of the various ethnic groups. Unfortunately, we have no reliable figures at our disposal, as has already been indicated in the Introduction. One eminent scholar has nevertheless ventured the view that Justinian's Empire, including the reconquered western provinces, had no more than 30 million inhabitants. Not taking into account the losses caused by the great plague of 542, this appears to be too low an estimate: we may be nearer the truth in postulating 30 million for the eastern half of the Empire. In very approximate terms, the distribution would have been the following: 8 million in Egypt, 9 million in Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia combined, 10 million in Asia Minor, and 3 to 4 million in the Balkans. If these figures are anywhere near the truth, it would follow that the native Greek speakers represented less than a third of the total population, say 8 million, making allowance for the unassimilated peoples of Asia Minor and for the Latin and Thracian speakers of the Balkans. The Greek, Coptic and Aramaic elements would thus have been on a footing of near parity. Compared to the spread of Latin in Gaul and Spain, it must be admitted that the Greek language had made very limited progress between the third century BC and the sixth century AD. This was no doubt due to the fact that Hellenization was largely centred on cities. About a century after the Arab conquest Greek had become practically extinct in both Syria and Egypt, which can only mean that it had not grown deep roots.

One further observation may be made on the basis of our survey, namely that in spite of mounting insecurity in nearly all parts of the Empire, most of Justinian's subjects still lived in their traditional homelands. The diaspora of the Greeks, of the Jews and, to a lesser extent, of the Syrians had occurred several centuries earlier. From the viewpoint of ethnography, as in so many other respects, Justinian's age represents, therefore, the tail end of Antiquity.

It would be wearisome to describe here all the ethnographic changes that the Empire witnessed after the sixth century, but we must say a few words about the greatest mutation of all, which started happening a few decades after Justinian's death. Its first sign was the massive installation of the Slavs in the Balkan peninsula. The Slavs came in several waves and, unlike earlier invaders, they came to stay. In an oft-quoted passage John of Amida (also known asJohn of Ephesus) records that in 581

"an accursed people, called Slaonians, overran the whole of Greece, and the country of the Thessalonians, and all TXrace, and captured the cities, and took numerous forts, and devastated and burnt, and reduced the people to slavery, and made themselves masters of the whole country, and settled in it by main force, and dwelt in it as though it had been their own.... And even to this day [584 AD], they stili encamp and dwell there, and live in peace in the Roman territories, free from anxiety and fear, and lead captive and slay and burn."

Another source, the so-called Chronicle of Monembasia, states that in the year 587-8 the Turkic Avars (with whom the Slavs were usually allied)

"captured all of Thessaly and all of Greece, Old Epirus, Attica and Euboea. Indeed, they attacked the Peloponnese and took it by war; and after expelling and destroying the native Hellenic peoples, they dwelt there. Those who were able to escape their murderous hands were scattered here and there. Thus, the citizens of Patras moved to the district of Reggio in Calabria, the Argives to the island called Orobe, the Corinthians to the island of Aegina.... Only the eastern part of the Peloponnese, from Corinth to Cape Maleas, was untouched by the Slavonians because of the rough and inaccessible nature of the country."

There is some doubt concerning the exact date of these events, but it is undeniable that at the end of the sixth century and the beginning of the seventh, when the Danubian frontier completely collapsed, practicallv the entire Balkan peninsula passed out of imperial control. Only a few coastal outposts, such as Mesembria on the Black Sea, Thessalonica, Athens and Corinth, held out. Elsewhere the old population sought refuge on off-shore islands, as it did on Monembasia, or emigrated to Italy. The domain of barbarism extended as far as the outer defences of Constantinople - the so-called Anastasian Long Walls which described a wide arc from the Black Sea to Selymbria (Siliv on the Sea of Marmora - but even these had soon to be abandoned.

The last important Slavonic settlement was that of the Serbs and Croats who in the reign of Heraclius occupied the lands where they still dwell. Then, in 680, came the Turkic Bulgars and conquered the country that bears their name, where they were eventually assimilated by the sitting Slavonic population. The barbarization of the Balkans began to be reversed only towards the ed of the eighth century, but by that time its effects had become permanent.

Simultaneously with the loss of the Balkans the Empire suffered a more serious amputation by being deprived of its eastern and southern provinces. This happened in two stages. First, between the years 609 and 619, the Persians conquered all of Syria, Palestine and Egypt. They were then defeated by the emperor Heraclius and withdrew to their own country; but a few years later the same provinces were overrun by the Arabs and, this time, lost for good. The whole of the north African coast also succumbed to the invader. The Mediterranean empire of Rome simply ceased to exist, while the Byzantine State found itself limited to Asia Minor, the Aegean islands, a bit of the Crimea and Sicily.

The Persians also initiated another development that was to have important demographic consequences by striking at Constantinople through Asia Minor. In so doing they caused immense havoc. When the Arabs had succeeded to the Persians and made themselves masters of all the territories up to the Taurus mountains, they, too, struck into Asia Minor- not once or twice, but practically every year- and this went on for nearly two centuries. Many of the raids did not penetratc far from the frontier, but several of them extended as far as the Black Sea and the Aegean, and a few reached Constantinople itself. As it turned out, the Arabs never managed to gain a foothold on the Anatolian plateau. What happened instead was that every time they marched in the local population would take refuge in the inaccessible forts with which Asia Minor is so liberally proviced. The Arabs would pass between the forts, taking prisoners and booty, while the Byzantines would burn the crops to deprive the enemy of supplies and keep him on the move. The consequences of this prolonged process are easy to imagine: much of Asia Minor was devastated and depopulated almost beyond repair.

In this way an enormous demographic gap was created. The Empire urgently needed farmers as it also needed soldiers. To achieve this end it had to resort to massive transfers of population. The Emperor Justinian Il, in particular, applied this policy on a wide scale. He moved a good part of the population of Cyprus to the region of Cyzicus on the southern shore of the Sea of Marmora. It was, apparently, a failure: many of the immigrants perished en route, and those who reached their destination later asked to be repatriated. Justinian II also moved 'a great multitude' of Slavs to Bithynia. Once again, he had little luck: the thirty thousand soldiers he raised from among this group to fight against the Arabs defected to the enemy, whereupon the emperor inflicted cruel reprisals on their families. In the 760s, however, we are told that 208,000 Slavs came to live in Bithynia of their own accord. In the eighth century we repeatedly hear of the organized settlement of Syrians in Thrace.

Among the new immigrants the most prominent, however, were the Armenians, many of whom arrived without being forced to do so. The Armenians were excellent soldiers, and the Empire, deprived of its Illyrian recruiting ground, needed them badly. In fact, the immigration of Armenians had started in the sixth century, and from the reign of Maurice onwards they formed the backbone of the Byzantine army. The trickle of Armenians into the Empire was spread over many centuries. Many settled in Cappadocia and other parts of eastern Asia Minor close to their original homeland, others in Thrace, others in the region of Pergamon. It is impossible to give even a rough approximation of their numbers. Unlike the Slavs, however, the Armenians quickly rose to prominent positions, even to the imperial throne, and dominated the military establishment throughout the Middle Byzantine period.

Thus, if we place ourselves at about the time when the Empire started on the slow course of its recovery, say towards the end of the eighth century, we find a population that had been so thoroughly churned up that it is difficult to tell what ethnic groups were living where and in what numbers. It is often stated that by shedding, however painfully, its principal non-Greek-speaking elements, such as the Syrians, the Egyptians and the Illyrians, the Empire had become more homogeneous. It is also asserted that the non-Greeks were gradually assimilated or Hellenized through the agency of the Church and the army, and that this happened in particular to the indigenous populations of Asia Minor as well as to the Slavs in the Peloponnese and elsewhere in Greece. The critical reader may be advised to treat such generalizations with a measure of caution. It is true, of course, that following the eclipse of Latin, Greek became the only official language of the Empire, so that a knowledge of it was mandatory for pursuing a career or transacting business. Neither Armenian nor Slavonic ever supplanted it as a general medium of communication. It is also true that in the long run Slavonic died out in Greece and in Bithynia, and if any Armenian has been spoken in Thrace within living memory, it was not on the part of descendants of the colonists planted there in the eighth century. But then it is also known that Greek survived in Asia Minor on a continuous basis only in Pontus and a small part of Cappadocia, whereas it had become practically extinct in the western part of the subcontinent until its reintroduction there by immigrants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We would not argue from the last observation that western Asia Minor was not predominantly Greek-speaking in the Middle Ages. However illuminating it may be in some respects, the long view does not help the historian of Byzantium to solve the specific problems that confront him. Was Hellenization, for example, a conscious aim of the imperial government, and if so, how was it implemented and with what success? And if it succeeded in the Middle Ages, why had it not done so in Antiquity under conditions of a more settled life and a higher civilization?

When we look at our scanty sources; we realize that the formulation of the above questions does not correspond to the Byzantine way of thinking. First of all, the very designation 'Greek', which we use so freely today to describe those Byzantines who did not belong to any alien group, is entirely absent from tlie literature of the period. An inhabitant of Greece south of Thessaly would have referred to himself as a Helladikos (a name already current in the sixth century AD), but he could have been a Slav as well as a 'Greek'. The same holds true of other regions whose dwellers called themselves by the names of their respective provinces, for example Paphlagonians or Thraksians (after the Thraksian 'theme' in western Asia Minor). Since, therefore, there was no notion of'Greekness', it is hard to see how there could have been one of 'hellenization'. The only passage, to my knowledge, that may imply something of the kind says that the Emperor Basil I converted the Slavonic tribes from their old religion and, 'having grecized them (graikosas), subjected them to governors according to Roman custom, honoured them with baptism, and delivered them from the oppression of their own rulers'. It has long been, however, a matter of dispute what the term 'grecized' may mean in the present context. What we do hear about, again and again, is the conversion of various peoples to Orthodox Christianity, be they pagan Slavs or Muslim Cretans, and the setting up of an ecclesiastical organization. Here is how the Chronicle of Monembasia describes the activity of the Emperor Nicephorus I in the Peloponnese: 'He built de novo the town of Lacedaemon and settled in it a mixed population, namely Kafirs, Thraksians, Armenians and others, gathered from different places and towns, and made it into a bishopric.' Surely, neither the Kafirs (possibly a generic term for converts from Islam) nor the Armenians would have contributed to the hellenization of Laconia. The emperor's purpose was simply to implant a Christian population and set up a bishopric.

There can be little doubt that the evangelization of non-Christian peoples settled in the Empire was carried out in Greek. This may cause some surprise in the case of the Slavs since the Slavonic alphabet was itself devised by a Byzantine, St Cyril, presumably in the 860s. Its invention, however, and the consequent translation of the essential Christian texts were intended for a far-away Slavonic country, Moravia; and it was entirely a matter of chance that the Cyrillo- Methodian mission, after its initial failure, should have found a fertile soil in a country for which it was not intended, namely the Bulgarian kingdom. As far as our knowledge goes, no attempt was ever made to evangelize the Slavs in Greece in their own language, just as the liturgical use of Greek was imposed on conquered Bulgaria after 1018. Clearly, this must have contributed to the spread of Greek. But was it due to deliberate policy? Is it not more likely that the absence of a linguistically qualified clergy, the relative inaccessibility of the Slavonic Scriptures, and the mixed nature of the population should have combined to make the use of Greek the easier option?

However efficacious the liturgical imposition of Greek may have proved, it has to be admitted that the assimilation of barbarian enclaves was a very slow process. In the Peloponnese the presence of pagan Slavs a short distance south of Sparta is attested in the latter part of the tenth century, that is nearly two hundred years after the first attempts to bring about their conversion. Equally telling is the case of the Slavs in Bithynia. We have seen that these were transplanted in v ery considerable numbers at the end of the seventh century and towards the middle of the eighth. Some two hundred years later, the Byzantine armament assembled in an effort to conquer Crete in 949 included a contingent of 'Slavonians who are established in Opsikion' (this being the administrative name of a part of Bithynia) placed under their own commanders. Clearly, these Slavonians still formed a distinct group. In the next century Anna Comnena refers to a village in Bithvnia 'locally called Sagoudaous', presumably after the tribe of the Sagoudatai, attested in Macedonia in the seventh century. A little later the Slavonic element in Bithynia was augmented by the EmperorJohn II Comnenus who settled near Nicomedia a throng of Serbian captives. Serbian villages are still mentioned in those parts in the thirteenth century. In other words, it is quite possible that the Slavs of Bithynia, or at any rate part of them, were assimilated by the (Ottoman Turks without having ever become 'Greek'.

The obvious conclusion to be drawn from these and many other cases is that the Middle Byzantine Empire was by no means a solidly Greek state. In addition to the Armenians and the Slavs, there were many other foreign elements, such as the Georgians and the Balkan Vlachs. A massive influx of Syrians and other Christian orientals followed the eastward expansion of the Empire at the end of the tenth century; and when, in 1018, the imperial frontier was once more extended to the Danube, it comprised vast areas where Greek had never been spoken or had been extinguished a long time previously. Whether Greek speakers formed at the time the majority or a minority of the inhabitants of the Empire is a guess I should not like to hazard.

It is not altogether easy to define the feelings of solidarity, if any, that bound together the multinational inhabitants of the Empire. In the sixth century the slogan Gloria Romanorum still appeared from time to time on the imperial coinage, but it is not likely that there was much devotion in the eastern provinces to the idea of Romanias. Besides, loyalty to Rome and admiration for her ancient greatness had been a regular theme of pagan polemic, whereas the Church maintained the position that Christians were, above all, citizens of the Heavenly Jerusalem and in so doing probably weakened the cohesion of the Empire. That is not to say that instances of loyalty to the State are absent from Byzantine history: quite the reverse is true. It is enough to recall the despair of the population of Nisibis when their city had been ceded to the Persians in 6, the demonstrations of Dro-Roman sentiments at Edessa in 449 in the context of sectarian strife, and a multitude of similar cases. But then we must remember that at the time the only alternative to living under Roman rule was living under Persian rule (which was usually worse). People crushed by the burden of taxation were often tempted to desert to the enemy, even to join some barbarian tribe that levied no taxes, but that was not an option for those who enjoyed a reasonable standard of living. A feeling of Romanitas was hardly the determining factor.

As far as we can judge, the main links of solidarity were two: regional and religious. People identified themselves with their village, their city or their province much more than they did with the Empire. When a person was away from home he was a stranger and was often treated with suspicion. A monk from western Asia Minor who joined a monastery in Pontus was 'disparaged and mistreated by everyone as a stranger'. The corollary to regional solidarity was regional hostility. We encounter many derogatory statements concerning 'the cunning Syrian' who spoke with a thick accent, the uncouth Paphlagonian, the mendacious Cretan. Alexandrians excited ridicule at Constantinople. Armenians were nearly always described in terms of abuse. Even demons had strong feelings of local affiliation and did not want to consort with their fellows from the next province.

Religious identity was often more strongly felt than regional identity. Had the Church been less intolerant, it may well be that different religious groups could have lived peaceably side by side, but there was usually some zealous bishop or monk who incited a pogrom, and then the fight was on. It is not surprising that Jews and the few remaining pagans should have proved the most consistently disloyal elements in the Empire. Within the Church, however, religion and regionalism overlapped to a considerable extent. And herein, perhaps, lies the key to the 'heretical' groupings. For what seems to have motivated the Syrian or the Egyptian Monophysite was not so much his belief in some abstruse point of doctrine as his loyalty to his own Church, his own bishop and the holy men of his neighbourhood. Whenever a Christian splinter group had a solidly established territorial base, all attempts to impose on it a uniform, imperial orthodoxy ended in failure.

If in the Early Byzantine period the idea of Romanitas held little potency, the same was even truer of the Middle period when the old imerial caDital had receded into some 'Scthian wilderness' and the Latin tongue had been forgotten. Even in contexts of international confrontation the emotive concept became that of Christian rather than that of Roman identity. When, in 922, Romanus I Lecapenus urged his army officers to put up a spirited defence against Symeon of Bulgaria, they vowed to die on behalf of the Christians, and this although the Bulgarians were by this time, at any rate nominally, Christian themselves. Significantly, however, no new term emerged to describe the identity of the Empire as a whole. Nor was it much needed on the level of everyday life. When, in the early ninth century, St Gregory the Decapolite, a native of southern Asia Minor, landed at the port of Ainos in Thrace, he was promptly arrested by the imperial police and subjected to a bastinado. We are not told why; perhaps he looked like an Arab. He was then asked: 'Who are you, and what is your religion?' His answer was: 'I am a Christian, my parents are such and such, and I am of the Orthodox persuasion.' Religion and local origin constituted his passport. It did not occur to him to describe himself as a Roman.

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HST 372 Middle East: Muhammad to 1800

Roman Provincial Government

As the following map will show, large parts of the Middle East (and Egypt and north Africa) were ruled by Rome in their empire.  The map shows, in good detail, the Roman divisions of the empire into provinces.  For most of this unit, as well as the next four, this map can be of help.  For many of the provinces, the provincial capital is shown as well, with the Latin name.  For example, for the province of Britannia, the capital is Londinium.  East of the provinces of Armenia and Mesopotamia is Persia/Iran (not identified as such here).  For the early centuries of Roman rule in that area, the Persians were ruled by the Parthian dynasty.  For the later centuries (under Byzantine governance) the Roman empire in the east was bordered by the Persians ruled by the Sassanian dynasty.

Rather than give a detailed discussion of Roman rule more generally, I'm going to focus on those elements of Roman governance that had a long-term influence in the Middle East - continuing in most cases long after the Roman/Byzantine government was replaced by an Arab system;  and in some cases surviving until today.  (my information for this section comes primarily from an excellent recent book on Roman rule in Syria:  Kevin Butcher, Roman Syria and the Near East, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2004) 

The Middle Eastern Roman provinces were taken by Rome over a period of several hundreds of years.  Carthage (in today's Tunisia in North Africa) was taken as a result of the Third Punic War, in 146 BCE.  Bithynia (in today's Turkey) was annexed via inheritance from its last king Mithridates in 74 B.C.E.  Pontus was conquered by Pompey in 64 B.C.E.  (Pontus is mentioned several times in the Christian New Testament, and inhabitants of Pontus were among the very first converts to Christianity. On Bithynia and Pontus, see  Ruling the Empire , the account of Pliny's governorship - I am using that example (because there is a lot of information about it) to show just how the Romans governed these distant Middle Eastern provinces, with populations speaking various languages, but not Latin. See the map of the Middle East in 89 B.C.E., on the eve of the beginnings of Roman conquests, in the list of maps on the syllabus page.

Syria was conquered by Pompey also in 64 B.C.E.  Aegyptus (Egypt) was conquered by the Roman Emperor Augustus in 30 B.C.E. after deposing the last Egyptian ruler, Queen Cleopatra.  Much of the Middle East that ended up in the Roman Empire was conquered and annexed by the Roman Emperor Trajan (reigned 98-117 C.E.).  The Roman provinces he created (and you can see them on the map above) includedArabia Petraea - constructed out of the regions controlled by the Nabataean Kingdom; Armenia and Mesopotamia - after his war with the Iranian Parthians and his attack on their capital Ctesiphon.  See map  Roman Empire 117 C.E.

When one looks at the map, above, of the Roman Empire, and realizes how large it was, how many very different regions with peoples speaking different languages, and living in different cultural circumstances, it is clear that governing would have been difficult in the best of times.  Scholars at Tulane University have put together a website giving the estimates of population in the Empire, and then of some of the largest cities. See:  Population Estimates for the Roman Empire in the Fourth Century C.E.   It is worth noting that of the 5 largest cities in the Empire, 4 were in the Middle East and North Africa:  Antioch, Alexandria, Ephesus and Carthage.  Only Rome itself was outside of this region.

The Roman army at its peak consisted of 33 legions (heavily armed infantry) of about 5,500 men each.  Given the vast distances, and the fact that these units moved on foot, Roman military presence in many parts of the empire would have been infrequent and not substantial.  (Though as I will show below, the Romans did their best to make the movement of armies from one part of the empire as speedy as possible through the building, and maintenance, of a highly effective transportation infrastructure - that is, a great road network.)

Rather than depend, or even trying to depend upon military force to keep subjects in line, the Romans developed two other important means for governance.  In the first instance, the Romans offered "citizenship" to peoples from all of the provinces, giving in effect quite different peoples "stakes" in the maintenance of the empire.  Secondly, though, and even more importantly, the Romans organized their provinces as (in the words of Butcher) "a collection of self-regulating political entities of various sizes and types, usually ruled by local elites, all of which were loosely managed by a small number of officials appointed by the emperors." 

Roman officials included governors and very small numbers of lower ranking officials.  Again, from Butcher: " ...their ability to control the provincials rested on good relations with provincial elites, or if that failed, on military coercion."  But since for the most part the empire did not experience civil unrest on long or wide scale, the elites did support Rome most of the time. These options provided the true limits to Roman imperial rule.  Rome was so successful, for so long, because Rome's leaders recognized what the real nature of their power was, and seldom tried to pursue a policy which could not succeed.  Many other imperial systems did not have such wise rulers, and found difficulty in surviving for even a fraction of the time that Rome did. 

Those elements of Roman rule which had lasting power in the Middle East included the vast and well maintained road network, the building of urban centers throughout the region with architecture and institutions modled on those of the city of Rome herself, a tax system that was designed not "to kill the goose that lays the golden egg", that is taxes which would not impoverish the payers.  While we think of law as perhaps the most important Roman legacy in the west, in the Middle East it was Roman civil and land law which has remained the most resilient, not so much administrative and political law.  (We will see in the next unit, that these latter two sets of law that the Middle Easterners found most suitable came from the Persians/Iranians, not the Romans.)

Those of you who choose the selection by Mango will discover how Roman provincial government and law began to change, not all at once or suddenly, but steadily after the adoption by the emperors of Christianity as the only tolerated religion for the empire.  Church officials came to occupy political positions, even in regions in which Christianity was followed by only a small minority of the population.  And with the various Church councils held from the mid 4th century C.E. through the 7th century C.E., the development of Christian theology came to dominate politics and law in most parts of the empire.  (This proved in the long run to have been a policy which made it much easier for Muslim Arabs to conquer these areas, promising that they would not interfere in their subjects' religious beliefs and practices.)

Once the Empire adopted Christianity as its only tolerated religion via the 380 C.E. Edict of Thessalonika (a city in today's northern Greece), and began to combine civil and religious law into one with the Church Councils, and then finally with the reorganization of law from that developed in the Republic and maintained in the early empire to the Law Codes of the Emperor Justinian, much began to change in the provinces.  The large buildings which had housed civic officials and Roman provincial government, called basillicas, became gradually transformed into major Christian churches, and ultimately often the seat of a bishop - and then called a cathedral.  Some few ruins of civic basillicas remain in areas of the Middle East, but most became churches.  And it was natural that this would happen, given the transformation of Roman law from secular/civil to religious.  One such basillica, in ruins, is at Um Qaiss (in today's Jordan).  This had been an important Roman provincial city, but little remains today (see photo below).

We will see in some future units just how important the differences were between the ways that the Byzantine Romans and the earlier Imperial Romans governed.

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HST 372 Middle East: Muhammad to 1800

Roman Technology - Transportation Infrastructure, Water Supplies

Reconstruction in Bonn, Germany, of a Roman treadmill crane.  Men walked around inside the wheel (as hamsters in a cage) to provide the energy to hoist very heavy objects.

One of these treadmill cranes being used to construct an aqueduct

A sculpture of a treadmill crane in operation in construction of a large Roman building.  This scultpture is on a sarcophagus of a Roman engineer.

Almost everywhere one travels today in that part of the world where the Romans ruled at one time or another one finds physical evidence of their expertise in building, engineering, and technology.  Whether it is water systems - aqueducts, baths, piping, sewage - one quickly discovers that the Romans had very modern "tastes" and demands, and built their "infrastructure" to last.  Of course nothing that Americans have built has lasted as long as many of the Roman buildings connected to water - we've only been around for a couple of hundred years, and some of the Roman water systems have lasted more than 2000 years!  Unfortunately we are now discovering that elements of the infrastructure which are not maintained tend to break and collapse, as for example the interstate bridge in Minneapolis in 2007.

How did they do it?  Did they have models from earlier civilizations to copy?  Did they have excellent educational systems?

· From the BBC in Britain, look over this excellent site by Adam Hart-Davis -  Discovering Roman Technology  - which focuses of course on the Romans in Britain.  Britain, as you will see here, has many Roman sites which continue to be used for their original purposes!

Three of the most important areas in which the Romans excelled technologically were in their bringing fresh water to their cities and towns, in establishing in almost every city and town heated baths for the public, and finally in connecting almost all of their towns and cities together with a long and beautifully constructed system of roads and highways.  In many parts of the Middle East where the Romans ruled, water supplies were and remain today scarce, and the climate is arid.  When one looks at the maps of cities in Syria alone, many of which the Romans founded, you can see the difficulties which the Romans were able to overcome. 

Aquaducts

The distribution of natural water supplies throughout the Middle East is very uneven, and water, more than any other resource, has shaped the patterns of settlement, and then also of cities.  If an area averages annually less than 250 millimeters (about 10 inches) of rainfall, farming is very difficult without irrigation.  If you look at the map below, you can see this 250 mm line - on the yellow side, rainfall is less than 250 mm/year.

One of the best ways to begin a discussion of the great Roman aqueducts is to look at a couple of them - surviving in three different parts of the Roman Middle East (though some of the largest aquaducts remain in place, and in some cases in use, in  southern France, Germany and Spain, and of course Italy). 

Constantinople, the Roman capital after 350 C.E., required enormous amounts of fresh water (though it is almost surrounded by water, this is mostly salty).  The Romans built 13 large, and in some cases as long as 60 miles, aquaducts to bring the water to the city from lakes in Thrace.  The city in later Ottoman times reached a million people and still depended on Roman and Byzantine aquaducts for their water.  Today, the population of the city, now called Istanbul, exceeds 15 million.  A section of one of these aquaducts cuts right through the center of the city leading to a system of underground cisterns built by the Romans to store the water (a scene in the James Bond movie, "From Russia with Love" was filmed in one of these cisterns!). This aquaduct ceased providing fresh water only at the end of the 19th century.  It was built by the emperor Valens who ruled from 364 to 378 C.E.

The Valens Aquaduct in the center of Istanbul

A section of a Roman aquaduct in Thrace, bringing water to Constantinople (Istanbul) 55 miles away.

Romans used their military forces to build these aquaducts - they required skilled engineering, measurements, and abilities to carry out the building of these water channels to permit a gradual flowing of the water over as long a distance as 60 miles.  As with all other elements of infrastructure, then as now, aquaducts required constant maintenance and often repairs.  In the image below see the most complicated of Roman aquaducts ever built - over a 100-mile distance underground in today's Jordan and Syria.  The greatest depth was 70 meters.

Roads

If you have studied ancient history, you will have read about the famous "Royal Road" of the Persians, from Persepolis and Susa in Iran all the way west to Sardis, near the Aegean Sea between Greece and Asia Minor.  The Persians used this road, mostly paved with cobbled stones, to move news, information, trade and supplies, and when necessary military forces from one end of their empire to the other.  It was a great feat for its time.  It was along this road that Cyrus and Xerxes transported their armies to attack the Greek city states.

But the Romans far surpassed what the Persians had accomplished in road building.  At the highest point of Roman imperial expansion, Rome's road network contained more than 370 sections and 53,000 miles!  We must remember that every mile of this road system was built "by hand", no heavy-duty equipment that we are accustomed to use in road construction today.  The United States' interstate highway system consists of about 46,000 miles. And by extending their road system throughout the Middle East, the Romans "connected" the Middle East to the rest of the Mediterranean world - for the transport of goods, but also of ideas.

Click on this link to see a  map of the Roman Empire  with its road system. On that same link, you'll also see a brief discussion of the technology of road building used by the Romans - to make their roads stable and long-lasting.

One of the most important roads was the  Via Egnatia , from Constantinople in the east to the Adriatic Sea, across what is today western Turkey, northern Greece and Macedonia, to Albania.  Some parts of that road can be seen today, and if one rides horses, you can follow the route through north-western Greece and eastern Albania.  This road served as a western extension of the Silk Road.

Look at "Viae" - which is the Latin plural of "Via" which is Latin "road."  This is a serious study of Roman road building and use.

All along the Roman roads were what we might call "mile markers" - what you see on our Interstate Highway system, but with small green (and thus much less expensive) signs.  The Roman mile markers noted how many miles it was to the Roman forum, no matter where you were on their road system.  The Roman word for "mile" was milia passuum which means in English 1000 paces - which turns out to have been about 1620 yards or 1480 meters - very close to what we would now call a "mile."  The Latin name for the miles stone was "miliarium" - it was a circular column on a solid rectangular base weighing about 2 tons! - thus our little green signs are obviously more easily afforded by our governments which pay for them!  Some of the Roman milestones are still standing today!  See  Reducing Distance  for some other views of the importance of Roman roads.

It was these roads which gave to the Romans the ability to move their military legions around the empire so quickly, to meet frontier enemies and internal revolts so effectively, for so long.  It is interesting that one of the arguments made in the U.S. Congress in the mid 1950s for the construction of our interstate highway system was the need to move military men and material from one coast to the other - so that they would be better able to be shipped abroad, no matter across which ocean the need had arisen!

 Roman Cities and International Trade

Earlier in this module you read about the size of Roman cities - and learned that of the 5 largest, 4 were found in North Africa and the Middle East: Antioch, Alexandria, Carthage, and Ephesus. While these were located in different regions, all shared some important characteristics. All were on a coast - thus opening their access to the outside world available both on land and sea. In fact, all four were port cities which thrived economically primarily through trade. All were important intellectual centers too - as trade was not only in goods but also in ideas. They also all had some of the same institutions, and buildings to house those institutions. All had colonaded main streets, temples, governor's palaces, public baths, aqueducts, well-maintained harbors; and all were connected to inland regions by networks of excellent road systems.

Some images below indicate Roman remains in these four cities. Of course, all four are today large modern cities - Alexandria in Egypt, Carthage in Tunisia, Ephesus and Antioch in Turkey. As a result, most Roman traces are found underneath the modren city.

Ruins of Carthage in near Tunis, Tunisia

Antioch was destroyed on many occasions including by the members of the First Crusade in 1098 C.E. Not much remains of Roman Antioch save for some mosaic floors found beneath the modern city. The temple above is an exception, on the outskirts of the city.

But there remain today many sections of Roman roads which connected Antioch with the towns and cities to the east and north.

Remains of a well-built Roman road leading from Antioch eastward towards Palmyra.

This road led from Antioch to the north, towards Tarsus. Both of these roads were well built - and have lasted almost 2000 years; both are still in use!

The main colonaded street of Ephesus. In the distance is the front wall of the famous library of Ephesus.

The ruins of the Roman resort of Aphrodisias, east of Ephesus in the Anatolian mountains.

These were the four largest cities of the Roman middle East. All survive today, though Ephesus is just a small town with a large ruin (and tourist attraction). The other three remain today large cities.