Monks, Martyrs, Soldiers and Saracens: Papers on the Near East in Late Antiquity (1962-1993).

• Author: Millar, Fergus

This very enjoyable and engaging book consists, as its title indicates, of a collection of papers (forty in all) written over the last three decades, and dealing with the Near East in Late Antiquity, a term which the author in his introduction (p. 1) defines as covering the period from Constantine to the Ummayads. The "Near East" on the other hand turns out to mean strictly the southwestern corner of what would generally be understood by this term, namely the region made up of the Negev, Sinai, and (to a lesser extent) the settled territory east of the Wadi Arabah.

The book is in general attractively produced, with a number of maps, site-plans, photographs of standing remains, and aerial photographs of sites, all deriving from the original publications. There is thus no overall map, which is a serious handicap, and no indication in the introduction that the nearest to a general map is to be found on p. 175, deriving from Mayerson's 1981 article on the Clysma-Pharan-Aila road in the Peutinger Table. The papers are reproduced photographically, but (as is not always done) reduced or blown up so that they come out in a generally comparable format. They are thus not revised to take account of subsequent work; moreover, engagement with subsequent work, or with alternative views put forward by others, also plays no part in the introduction. Instead, the introduction usefully surveys the main themes touched on in the collection, recalls how the author came to be involved in this region (work on the Nessana papyri, and survey-work in Sinai in 1956-57) and then, rather surprisingly, gives simply a summary of each paper in turn.

It is a very serious limitation that the introduction looks entirely inwards, to the author's own work, and not outwards, and it is a significant practical handicap that there is no index. An index would have been all the more helpful because the author has tended in his papers to return several times to specific themes and sources. As regards themes, predominant is the urban development of the towns of the Negev in Late Antiquity, Nessana, Elusa, Shivta/Sobata, Avdat, and Mampsis, and the contrast these places make with the Wadi Arabah and with the area to its east, where no such development took place. (He is wrong however to state, p. 234, that no church was built in Petra; there is an archaeologically known church, beside which a group of some fifty carbonized Greek papyri of the fifth-sixth centuries was found in 1994.)...