The Christian Communities of Palestine from Byzantine to Islamic Rule: A Historical and Archaeological Study.

• Author: Walmsley, Alan
• Position: Review

Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, vol. 2. By ROBERT SCHICK. Princeton: DARWIN PRESS, 1995. Pp. xviii + 583, maps, plates. $59.95.

The speed and processes by which solidly Christian Palestine and Jordan of the sixth century C.E. became more and more Islamicized after the conquest of 633-36 C.E. are poorly documented and little studied. While the non-violent conquest of towns and the countryside is now commonly accepted by historians and archaeologists alike, the manner and extent of socioreligious change in the Christian communities in the centuries immediately after the conquest has been difficult to assess. The issue is complicated by the lack of any general agreement on socio-economic conditions in the decades before the Islamic conquest. Were towns in accelerating decline (as, for instance, Antioch in north Syria), or successfully adapting to new trade and commercial opportunities? Recent work at centers such as Jerusalem, Caesarea, Pella, and Scythopolis would argue for a continuing urban vibrancy well into the early seventh century, and likewise for a line of Arab villages on the Jordanian steppe east of Amman, from Umm al-Jimal to Rihab, Samra, and Umm al-Rasas. What elements of society continued after the Islamic conquest and what changed - either because of or in spite of the conquest - is only cursorily known and imperfectly understood. Our poor comprehension of these issues, which lie at the core of late antique and early Islamic studies in Palestine and Jordan, is in many ways attributable to major deficiencies in the quality, quantity, and availability of data, be it literary, epigraphical, numismatic, or archaeological.

All credit, then, to Schick for recognizing and tackling an important, yet much neglected, topic regardless of the major difficulties involved in gathering, collating, and analyzing the available data. His stated intention was to identify and explain, through an integration of archaeological and literary sources, developments in the social history of the Christian population of Byzantine Palestine and Arabia from 602 to 813 C.E. Literary works and epigraphical data, although patchy in their coverage, make an important contribution to the analysis. These sources have their own problems of interpretation, of which Schick is only too aware. Standing at the center of his study, however, are the region's numerous Byzantine churches: their architecture, their decorative regimes of brightly colored mosaics, the detailed imagery presented, and subsequent structural modifications and damage (usually iconoclastic) to the mosaics...