xiPREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
The period of nearly eighteen years since the publication of The Mediterra-
nean World in Late Antiquity has seen a veritable explosion in the amount of
publications on the period. I am therefore very pleased to have been able to
revise and expand its original contents, and in particular to extend the book’s
chronological coverage by adding two new chapters taking it up through
the seventh century and including the emergence of Islam. The Byzantine–
Persian wars of the late sixth and early seventh century, the Persian conquests
and the subsequent victories of the Emperor Heraclius, followed quickly by
the Arab invasions, have all received a great deal of recent attention, as have
the continuing religious divisions in the seventh century and the wider cul-
tural linguistic and religious landscape of the eastern provinces. The decline
or disappearance of Byzantine urbanism in the seventh century has long been
a topic for Byzantinists, and the question of the survival or decline of cities in
the eastern empire continues to be a major topic for students of late antiquity,
especially in the light of new archaeological and epigraphic work. The circum-
stances in which Islam itself developed, and the reasons for the success of the
Arab conquests are of course enormous subjects, and they too have acquired
a new salience with the development of two competing views of late antiquity:
on the one hand, a return to an emphasis on the fall of the western empire and
the rise of ‘barbarian’ successor states in the west; and on the other, a more
eastern-focused view of a ‘long late antiquity’ lasting well into the Umayyad
period, or even as late as the mid-eighth century. On the latter view, the de-
velopment of Islam belongs fi rmly within the world of late antiquity. Such is
the approach of the infl uential Late Antiquity. A Guide to the Postclassical World,
edited by G.W. Bowersock, Peter Brown and Oleg Grabar, and published by
Harvard University Press in 1999. It is a view that is not without its critics, and
these different perspectives are discussed in the Introduction and Conclusion.
But it is hardly surprising if the peoples and cultures of the region where Islam
fi rst took shape should now attract such an amount of scholarly attention.
Many of the specifi c themes addressed in the previous publication have
been revised and further developed in recent scholarship; both text and notes
have been extensively revised, especially the notes, and new material added in
many places, as well as substantial extra coverage to take the narrative well into
xi