THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYcommon artistic repertoire; while various explanations have been put forward
for Jewish use of pagan imagery, the sheer magnifi cence and lavishness of
these mosaics cannot fail to impress.^46
Arguments about prosperity versus decline are not easy to balance. It is
partly a question of what indicators one uses. Whittow, for instance, argues
for the prosperity of Edessa (Urfa, south-east Turkey) in the sixth century
from the large sums of gold paid to Chosroes I in 540 and 544, and the quan-
tities of silver in the city when it was captured by the Persians in 609.^47 In
contrast it has been deduced from a study of settlement patterns in the region
that while settlement density reached an unprecedented peak from the fourth
to the sixth centuries, from the seventh century there was a dramatic fall in
occupation.^48 Edessa continued as an urban centre through the Islamic period
until the Byzantine recovery in the tenth century, but the silver it possessed in
the sixth century does not tell us very much about the general distribution of
wealth or about urbanism as such. Complex readjustments seem to have been
taking place in many areas, which involved both rural and urban sites and their
mutual relationships. There are, moreover, serious gaps in our knowledge due
to the uneven degree of excavation and the lack of certain sorts of evidence.
For reasons of local settlement, little may survive now of a place known to
have been a prosperous city, while casual information from textual sources
such as the Life of Symeon the Fool (for Emesa/Homs, seventh century, but
referring to the sixth century), the Miracles of St Demetrius (early seventh cen-
tury, Thessalonica) or the Life of Theodore of Sykeon (for late sixth-century
Anatolia),^49 sometimes belies any general theory of urban decline. Even more
important to remember is the fact that the picture is literally changing all the
time as new evidence comes to light and existing theories are revisited. Many
excavations on major sites are still continuing, and one season’s work can and
does frequently modify previous results – the important site of Pella, one of
the Decapolis cities in Jordan, a city extensively studied in the late antique
and early Islamic periods since the 1980s by Alan Walmsley, is a case in point.
Finally, a reliable ceramic typology for the Near East is only now beginning to
be agreed, and it also seems likely that there was much more regional variation
than previously supposed.
How far it is possible to generalize, even within these limitations, let alone
across the Mediterranean, is obviously very questionable. It is worth rehears-
ing again some of the main factors that have been adduced by historians as
agents of urban change, starting with the plague which hit Constantinople and
Asia Minor in the mid-sixth century and continued to strike Syria in succes-
sive waves throughout the seventh century. Though the effects may be hard
to quantify (see Chapter 5), it is hard not to think that plague must have been
a factor in undermining the generally thriving state of cities in the Near East
in the early part of the sixth century. But since neither epigraphic nor papy-
rological sources offer clear evidence of the scale of mortality, and one can
make only a general connection between urban and settlement decline and the
factor of plague, it is dangerous to use the plague of 541 as a dating reference