Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century.

• Author: Boullata, Issa J.
• Position: Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century: Economic, Social, and Cultural History, vol. 2, pt. 2 - Book review

Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, vol 2, pt. 2: Economic, Social, and Cultural history. By Irfan Shahid. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2010. Pp. xxiii + 391. $50.

For the last forty-five years or so, Irfan Shahid has devoted his time and scholarship to the study of the history of Byzantium and the Arabs in late antiquity and, in addition to scholarly works on other topics, he has published a series of several multi-part volumes on the fourth, the fifth, and the sixth centuries thereof that are today some of the most definitive books on the subject.

The volume under review is concerned with the economic, social, and cultural history of the Ghassanids, the Arab foederati of Byzantium in Oriens. Scholars in this field know that research in it requires control of many languages, including Arabic, Syriac, Greek, and Latin, in addition to several modern European languages in which scholarly works on the subject have appeared; it also needs full acquaintance with the original sources and the necessary methodologies. This is a daunting task, which Professor Shahid has accepted confidently and fulfilled creditably.

The sixth-century contemporary sources that specifically deal with the Ghassanids are few and some are lost. However, references to the Ghassanids in sources of that century and in earlier times are plentiful, but they are fragmentary and scattered in many works in several languages. In his research Shahid obeys what he calls "Noldeke's Law" for reconstructing the history of Arab-Byzantine relations in pre-Islamic times, namely, the employment of Greek and Latin sources and early Arabic poetry, rather than the prose sources of later Islamic times. Although Shahid has sometimes judiciously used later Islamic sources, with qualifications, the history he has reconstructed is amazing with its interesting detail and development. Regarding some sections, it may be "partly inferential and partly evidential," as he says; but the caution and scholarly acumen with which he treats the invaluable references he finds are exemplary, his argument for a point of view when there is insufficient or mutually exclusive evidence is strongly persuasive, and the elegant literary style in which he presents his historical narrative gives the history he writes clarity and wholeness that bring alive the Ghassanids of the sixth century.

The picture of the Ghassanids that emerges in the end is that of a refined society...