Ethnic Identity in the Roman Near East,
..–: Language, Religion, and Culture
*For a historian who approaches the social, cultural, and religious history of
the Near Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire in the period between
Constantine and Mahomet, it does not take long to become painfully aware
of having had few predecessors, or of the reasons why this might be so. For
the evidence—literary, epigraphic, and archaeological—is immense, and in
the sixth century, though not earlier, it is joined by two major collections
of papyri, from Nessana and, very recently, Petra.^1 ‘‘Literary’’ in this context
refers not just to vast ranges of text, in Latin, Greek, Syriac, and Jewish Ara-
maic, as well as retrospective narratives in Arabic, but to a truly remarkable
series of original manuscripts in Syriac, starting with one, now in the British
*First published inMediterranean Archaeology (): –.
This paper derives from a lecture which I gave at the seminar on ‘‘Identities in the East-
ern Mediterranean in Antiquity’’ held at the Humanities Research Centre at the Austra-
lian National University in Canberra, on – November . I am extremely grateful
to Graeme Clarke, and also to Leena Messina, for the organization of the seminar, which
formed the focal point of a profoundly rewarding and enjoyable stay at the Centre. It also
owes something to a paper entitled ‘‘Jerome and the Near East,’’ given at the Late Antiquity
Research Seminar at Macquarie University on November , and at the University of
Melbourne on November . These visits also were extremely rewarding. For very
helpful comments on the text I owe many thanks to Graeme Clarke as editor, to Peter
Brown, and to Sebastian Brock.
. For the documentary papyri from Nessana, see C. J. Kraemer,The Excavations at Nes-
sana(AujaHafir,Palestine)III:Non-literaryPapyri(), also listed in H. M. Cotton, W. E. H.
Cockle, and F. G. B. Millar, ‘‘The Papyrology of the Roman Near East: A Survey,’’JRS
(): , nos. –; for the fullest preliminary report of the Petra papyri of the sixth
century, see L. Koenen, ‘‘The Carbonised Archive from Petra,’’JRA (): . See now
The Petra PapyriI, ed. J. Frösén, A. Arjava, and M. Lentinen ().