TIME: BEyOND LATE ANTIQUITy | 39Current scholarship maintains, in the light of a great deal of archaeolog y
done since Pirenne’s day, that there was less commercial continuity than he sup-
posed, and that things had been coming adrift ever since the third century.
Trade gradually got more and more localized; Pirenne concentrated too much
on literary sources that focused on exotic long- distance exchanges and the lux-
ury goods favored by the elites they wrote about. On the other hand, it contin-
ues to be held that there was indeed a further relaxation of Mediterranean-
wide communications and commerce, reaching its nadir c. 700.^84 Our concern
here, though, is not so much the economic realities of late Antiquity as the
historiographical trends of the twentieth. Not only was Pirenne’s thesis widely
debated, and indeed adopted by many; it was also perceived to have moral
justice on its side. Who better than the Muslim Arabs, doubly alien, to assume
the role of Antiquity’s executioner? Hence the still widespread conviction that
late Antiquity lasts until c. 600 rather than ending in 410, or 476 with the last
Western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, or in 529. After Pirenne, a student of
late Antiquity might elect to include the Germanic successor states on formerly
Roman soil, while a student of late Roman history might exclude them, as did
A. H. M. Jones in what remains the standard reference work,^85 The later Roman
Empire 284–602: A social, economic and administrative survey (1964). But all
were agreed that the Arabs and Islam were not relevant. Their coming marked
an entirely new epoch not just in religion but in society, economy, and admin-
istration—not to mention the language of the sources.
Given that my purpose is not to write the history of late antique studies,
but to point out that the birth and early development of Islam has long been
perceived, at least by some, as an integral part of the story, and that this
should be our model, there is little to detain us in the post- Pirenne period. In
Germany Albert von Le Coq, publishing his spectacular pre–Great War,
often eighth- and ninth- century Buddhist and Manichean finds from the
Silk Road oases of the Tarim Basin (especially Turfan) under the title Die
buddhistische Spätantike in Mittelasien (1922–33), was pushing far beyond
the bounds, both geographical and chronological, of what anybody else
meant by late Antiquity. Hans Lietzmann, tackling the general cultural iden-
tity of late Antiquity, broadly followed Strzygowski in his positive evaluation
of the Orient, yet saw Islam as a step too far. Riegl’s art- historical analysis he
found far too divorced from its general historical context.^86
84 M. McCormick, Origins of the European economy (Cambridge 2001) 117–19, 576.
85 Or “the greatest intellectual achievement of twentieth- century ancient history”: F. Millar, A
Greek Roman Empire (Berkeley 2006) 4. Jones offered several dates for the end of the ancient world, none
of them very convincingly argued: Av. Cameron, “A. H. M. Jones and the end of the ancient world,” in D.
M. Gwynn (ed.), A. H. M. Jones and the later Roman Empire (Leiden 2008) 241–43.
86 H. Lietzmann, “Das Problem der Spätantike,” Sitzungsberichte der preussischen Akademie
der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch- historische Klasse (1927) 345–46, 358 (= id., Kleine Schriften [Berlin
1958–62] 1.7–8, 24).