50 | CHAPTER 3
the same time it places the Islamic synthesis achieved in ninth- to tenth-
century Baghdad outside its remit, despite the important role played there
by, for example, translation into Arabic of Greek scientific and philosophical
literature.
Although I agree that a long late Antiquity is more useful than a short
one, I assign more of a role to religion. Rather than joining the editors of the
Harvard Guide in viewing the centuries after 250 as primarily an Age of Em-
pires (as if the ancient world had not been full of them, while after 800 they
were hardly in short supply), I foreground pre- 600 the two major monothe-
istic traditions, rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, as they move toward a
mature form still readily recognizable today. Then I add the third, closely re-
lated revelation, Islam, gradually emergent from soon after 600. All three of
these major, seminal developments are unique to their period, without paral-
lel in any other. Furthermore, I consider them in relation to each other, rather
than separately as is so often the case. On closer inspection of the period in
question, I also see other major intellectual developments, as for example the
formulation of classical syntheses of Greek philosophy and Roman law. The
combined effect of all these more or less interrelated evolutions justifies a
new periodization running, as I shall shortly explain, from the lifetime of
Jesus of Nazareth (c. 4 BCE–c. 30 CE) and the reign of Augustus (31 BCE–
14 CE) to about the end of the First Millennium. During this period the
ancient world was gradually transformed and there came into being, across
Europe and West Asia, a triad of sibling civilizations, successors of Rome and
Iran, whose commitment to revealed monotheism either Biblical in Greek
and Latin Christendom, or Qurʾanic in the Muslim world, was to varying
degrees tempered by the rational principles derived from Greek and Roman
Antiquity.
Put in terms of current historiographical convention, what we are talking
about is a recontextualization of late Antiquity, however this period may be
defined. The aim is to expand late Antiquity both backward and forward in
time—exactly what Giardina objected to. (In chapter 4 we will expand late
Antiquity—or rather its Mediterranean focus—in space as well.) The dura-
tion of the period in question—which will of course admit the possibility of,
among much else, a narrative of political, military, and other events—will
primarily be determined by cultural, conceptual, and literary developments.
This recontextualization needs to take account of what can realistically be
aspired to in university courses and textbooks. Nonetheless, if we are to make
the most of what late Antiquity can contribute to our understanding of our
own world, what is often anyway seen as a transitional or transformational
zone, a subperiodization derived from Antiquity, needs to be reset within a
new major periodization, the First Millennium. This new period is of roughly
comparable length to Antiquity (Homer to Justinian, 1,200 years) or the
Middle Ages (Boethius to Luther, 1,000 years).