History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East.

• Author: Van Dam, Raymond
• Position: Book review

History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East. Edited by PHILIP WOOD. Oxford Studies in Late Antiquity. Oxford: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2013. Pp. xxiii + 237, map. S82.

Identity has become a popular topic among historians of antiquity. This is a laudable trend, because it offers a more productive way of utilizing close readings of ancient texts. The positivist search for facts that has long dominated ancient historical studies has always rested on wobbly epistemological premises. In contrast, rather than obsessing about the truthfulness of ancient texts, studies of identity concentrate on how ancient people thought about and constructed their own past heritages. Because appropriation of the past was often an important component of the self-definitions of individuals and communities, identity studies are closely akin to memory studies, and hence also to our postmodern sensibilities. If presentist concerns had shaped representations of the past already in antiquity, then our modern historical analyses of the identities of ancient communities should highlight narratives of peoples memories, rather than of mere events.

The chapters collected in this book about the Near East in late antiquity are excellent contributions to the ongoing analysis of identity, memory, and history. As a collection, the chapters stretch the notion of "late antiquity" both chronologically, by extending from the later Roman empire to Arab scholars at Baghdad during the eleventh century, and geographically, by linking the eastern Mediterranean under Roman rule with the Sasanian empire in Iraq, the Umayyad empire in Syria, Arabs at Medina and Mecca, and finally the Abbasid empire in Iraq and Iran. As discrete studies, the chapters offer many interesting arguments about some of the strategies for coping with great social changes and their consequences.

Religion was one significant upsetting factor. The doctrinal controversies of the fifth century had left Christianity in the eastern Roman empire divided among Chalcedonians, Miaphysites, and Nestorians. Roman emperors were caught in the middle. When the Persians assaulted Jerusalem in 614, the Chalcedonian churchman Sophronius had hoped for assistance from the emperor Heraclius; but after Heraclius tried to reconcile with anti-Chalcedonian communities, Sophronius no longer dreamed of a Roman reconquest when the Arabs defeated the Roman army in 634. He now thought of Christian orthodoxy separate from Roman rule (Philip...