VIEWPOINTS AROUND 1000 | 213sized that it is no alternative to the already existing periodizations based on
the Arsacid and Sasanian dynasties in Iran, the Roman Empire, late Antiq-
uity, East Rome (“Byzantium”), and early Islam. It is a parallel periodization
with its own logic and usefulness, which also helps contextualize the others
just enumerated. But what of its effect on the periods either side of it, Antiq-
uity more broadly conceived, and the Middle Ages?
Early Antiquity—the ancient Near East, “classical” Greece, and the Hel-
lenistic period including the Roman Republic—will assuredly feel some
gravitational pull from the arrival of this large and dynamic presence in place
of or alongside “late Antiquity.” It would make sense for students of the an-
cient world to pay more attention to those religious and intellectual systems
which originated in the First or even Second Millennium BCE but devel-
oped or matured in the First Millennium CE: the Avestan from c. 1000
BCE, and the Mosaic from the first half of the First Millennium BCE. (The
Vedas, from c. 1500 BCE, were already fixed before the Common Era.) Maz-
daism and Judaism, but also Aristotelianism and Roman law, could do with
being pulled closer to the focus of research, just as the broad category of an-
cient monotheism has been of late.^60 Among geographical regions, Iran and
Arabia are obvious candidates for further integration. None of these subjects
is so obscure or peripheral that interest in it can be dismissed as teleologically
inspired; some even constitute independent disciplines; yet none can as yet
be called central to the concerns of general ancient historians. One that
can—imperial Rome—also demands reassessment in the light of the First
Millennium, of which it is part. Ancient historians focus on its political his-
tory and the workings of empire; students of Judaism and Christianity also
assign it high importance, but from their own sectarian perspective. Neither
the compartmentalization nor the sectarianism is favored by the First Mil-
lennium viewing point.
It is historians of the medieval West, though, who will be most affected by
attention to the First Millennium. The idea that important evolutions occur
across Europe and West Asia in the period around the beginning of the Sec-
ond Millennium has in fact been gaining ground of late, and it is widely
agreed that if one is to identify what it means to be “medieval,” it is to the
period just after 1000 CE that one had best look, with the expansion of
Christianity and the establishment of new polities in northern and eastern
Europe, the extension and reform of ecclesiastical structures and religious
orders, the formation of dynastic cults and the development of social catego-
ries, for example through the growth of bureaucracies, or the rise of a self-
conscious aristocracy in the East Roman Empire.^61 The prominence attached
60 See, e.g., S. Mitchell and P. Van Nuffelen (eds), One God: Pagan monotheism in the Roman Em-
pire (Oxford 2010).
61 G. Klaniczay, “The birth of a new Europe about 1000 CE,” Medieval encounters 10 (2004) 99–
- J. R. Davis and M. McCormick, “The early Middle Ages: Europe’s long morning,” in J. R. Davis and