Fisher G. Between Empires. Arabs, Romans, and Sasanians in Late Antiquity

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Acknowledgements

The work for this study could not have been completed without

extensive help from a variety of different sources. In particular

I would like to acknowledge the support provided by the Social

Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canadian

Centennial Scholarship Fund, the UK Government ORSAS, and the

Clarendon Fund of the University of Oxford.

I would also like to acknowledge the support given by the Keble

Association, the Faculty of Classics at Oxford, and the Council for

British Research on the Levant for providing me with the opportunity

to conduct ﬁeld research in Syria.

Thanks are due to Ellen Aitken, Dean of the Faculty of Religious

Studies at McGill University, for making it possible to bring a central

aspect of this subject to the classroom in a self-contained course; and

to the students at McGill who, in the winter of 2009, allowed me to

inﬂict it on them. I am also grateful to those students and faculty at

the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as those others in

or otherwise connected with the UC system, who have led the way in

the study of ancient borderlands through a series of conferences held

at UCSB, and who provided valuable feedback and criticism about my

ideas on the subject.

I am grateful to Mat Dalton of the University of Cambridge for

drawing the maps; to the anonymous reader at OUP for his/her

comments on the manuscript; and to Emma Barber, Kathleen

Fearn, Kathie Gill, Veronica Ions, and Dorothy McCarthy for their

editorial assistance throughout. Thank you as well to my research

assistant at Carleton, Anik Laferrière, for her help prooﬁng and

checking the ﬁnal manuscript, and for the precision which she

brought to the job of indexing.

I thank Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to include

material in Chapter 3, originally published as ‘The political develop-

ment of the Ghassān between Rome and Iran’, which appeared in

the Journal of Late Antiquity, 1/2 (2008), 313–36,

# Johns Hopkins

University Press.

The hard work and support of my teachers, colleagues, and friends

has been instrumental: most notably, the criticisms and encouragement

of Andrew Brown, Nikola Casule, Elizabeth Digeser, Hal Drake,

Geoffrey Greatrex, James Howard-Johnston, Ariel L ewin, Yahya

Michot, Meredith Riedel, Albert and J une Schachter, Andrew

Sherwood, David Taylor, Faith Wallis, Mark Whittow, and Philip

Wood. I would like to thank Robert Hoyland, Sir Fergus Millar, and

Michael Macdonald for allowing me to see their work in progress. I

amgratefultoSirFergusMillarforhissupportthroughout,forhis

advice on the manuscript, and, together with Robert Hoyland, as the

examiners of the original project; I am grateful for the valuable help

offered by both with preparing the monograph. I would like to

underscore my gratitude to Michael Macdonald, whose critical

feedback and help are gratefully acknowledged. Any errors which

remain are mine alone. I would like to pay tribute to my friend and

mentor, Tom Sizgorich, who died suddenly and tragically in January

2011. Tom took an interest in my work and my career and I owe

him a great d eal. His warm heart and wonderfully inventive sense

of humour will be deeply missed by all who were fortunate to

know him.

In particular, I would like to acknowledge my debt to Dame Averil

Cameron, for her patience with the numerous (and frequently off-

topic) tangents this originally followed as a DPhil thesis under her

supervision, and for her continued help and support throughout and

after my time at Keble.

Most of all, none of this would have been possible without the

unfailing support of my parents, Janet and David, my sister, Lucy, and

of course my wife, Paola, who has given so much of herself in this

endeavour and to whom this study is dedicated, with love.

Acknowledgements xi

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Contents

Abbreviations xv

Note xvii

List of Maps xviii

1. Introduction 1

Arabs and antiquity 1

Jafnid or Ghass ān: Arab elites 3

Rationale and background 7

Sources and methodological approach 14

Geography 26

Rome and the Sasanians 29

2. Aspects of Arab Christianisation

in Late Antiquity 34

Introduction 34

Part One: Processes, consequences, and subtexts

of Christianisation 35

Part Two: The Jafnids and Nas



rids between the Romans

and Sasanians 49

Conclusion 71

3. Empires, Clients, and Politics 72

Introduction 72

Arabs and empires 73

Arabs, the west, and the east 80

The H

ujrids and the Nas



rids in Arabia and

Mesopotamia 84

The Jafnids and Ghassā n95

Damascus and H

aurān99

Settlement and sedentarisation? 108

Clients and allies 116

Conclusion: Between state and tribe 124

4. Arabic, Culture, and Ethnicity 128

Introduction 128

Language, communal membership, and identity:

the problem 129

Old Arabic and ethnic identity 135

The Nabataean kingdom and Nemāra 138

The sixth century 144

The oral tradition 153

Bedouin identities and the question of Ishmael 162

Conclusion 170

5. Between Empires: The Jafnids, the Nas



rids,

and Late Antiquity 173

Introduction 173

Rome and the Jafnids after 582 174

The Nas



rids at the end of the sixth century 184

The economy and the Justinianic plague 186

Conclusion 193

6. The Jafnids and History in East and West 194

Introduction 194

The Jafnids and history in east and west 194

Late Antiquity and after 199

Conclusion 210

Bibliography 213

Abbreviations 213

Primary Sources 214

Secondary Literature 217

Index 245

xiv Contents

Abbreviations

In addition to those abbreviations listed in the Bibliography, please note:

ADAJ Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan

AHR American Historical Review

AI Ars Islamica

AncSoc Ancient Society

Ann. Arch. Syr. Annales Archéologiques Arabes Syriennes

Arab. Arch. Epig. Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy

BA Biblical Archaeologist

BASOR Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research

BF Byzantinische Forschungen

BJMES British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies

BMGS Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies

BSMESB British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Bulletin

BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies

CAH Cambridge Ancient History

DaM Damaszener Mitteilungen

DOP Dumbarton Oaks Papers

IEJ Israel Exploration Journal

JAL Journal of Arabic Literature

JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society

JESHO Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient

JFA Journal of Field Archaeology

JJS Journal of Jewish Studies

JLA Journal of Late Antiquity

JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies

JRA Journal of Roman Archaeology

JRS Journal of Roman Studies

JSS Journal of Semitic Studies

LA Liber Annuus

ND Or. Notitia Dignitatum (Eastern Empire)

PSAS Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies

ReAug Recherches Augustiniennes

SCI Scripta Classica Israelica

T&M Travaux et Mémoires

TLS Times Literary Supplement

VChr Vigiliae Christianae

WZKM Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes

ZDMG Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft

ZDPV Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins

ZPE Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik

xvi Abbreviations

Note

With regard to terminology and transliteration, I have aimed throughout for

simplicity and consistency. Where several ways of expressing a Syriac or

Arabic letter exist in transliteration, I have chosen a conventionally recog-

nised means of expressing it, in accordance where possible with those used in

the Enyclopedia of Islam, 2nd edn, and used it throughout. Variations in

footnote entries (e.g. Ğ for J, as in Umma al-Ğ/Jimal) reﬂect the titles of

original publications; these are retained to avoid confusion. Where several

variations on place names exist (e.g. Seis, Usais, al-Usays) I have chosen one

and used it throughout. Further, for the sake of simplicity, I have followed

e.g. al-Sham, not ash-Sham. For personal names, I have used common means

of spelling (e.g. Procopius, not Prokopios).

Maps

1. The Near East 27

2. Western Syria 50

3. The northern Arabian peninsula and the Near East 65

4. The Arabian peninsula 85

5. The H

aurān and surrounding areas 101

6. Northern Syria 106

7. Western Syria 146

Introduction

ARABS AND ANTIQUITY

Even as allies of Rome or Sasanian Iran, the people whom we call

‘Arabs’ would ﬁnd it difﬁcult to escape the numerous associations,

many of them negative, which came with the name in antiquity. In a

famous passage, Ammianus dismissed Julian’s Saracen militia as of

little use as either allies or adversaries, and devoted a digression in his

work to describing their bloodthirsty, savage, and uncivilised ways.

For Christian authors, Arabs remained a convenient target on which

all manner of wrongs could be blamed; such episodes were good

rhetoric. The capture of St. Malchus by Arab raiders, who forced

him to engage in uncivilised ‘nomadic’ pursuits and eat half-raw

meat, drink camel milk, give up his clothes, and tend to the ﬂocks,

made for a dramatic and easily recognisable story for those who read

or heard Jerome’s Life of the saint.

The enduring popularity of the ancient stereotypical prejudice

against uncivilised and barbarous nomads was just one aspect of the

name ‘Arab’.

In the eyes of ancient authors, the term shifted in

meaning depending on who was using it. It could, and did, describe

Amm. 14.4.1.

Jer. Vit. Sanct. Malch.4–5(PL 23, col. 55).

B. D. Shaw, ‘“Eaters of Flesh, Drinkers of Milk”: the ancient Mediterranean

ideology of the pastoral nomad’, AncSoc 13–14 (1982), 5–31. The stereotype has

persisted well into more modern times, where it was often tinged with ideas of the

romantic and noble savage. Such ideas about the bedouin were common elements in

the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century accounts of travellers in the Near East.

See, for example, G. L. Bell, The Desert and the Sown (London, 1907); A. Musil, The

Manners and Customs of the Rwala Bedouins (New York, 1928); J. L. Burckhardt,

Notes on the Bedouins and Wahaʾbys (London, 1831).