THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN – A REGION IN FERMENTThe culture of the Near East in late antiquity was a mosaic which can only
be interpreted by reference to local differentiation. In north-eastern Arabia,
Aramaic appears from the second century BC onwards, and ‘Nestorian’ Chris-
tianity was well established there in late antiquity, with Syriac as its liturgical
language;^34 there were also many Nestorians in south-eastern Arabia (Oman)
when the area was under Sasanian rule before the Arab conquests.^35 Again,
while Syriac was the main written language of the Persian Nestorian church
(the Church of the East, for which see Chapter 9), Arabic was the spoken
vernacular of the Christians in Arabia. The diffi culty remains of matching
modern notions of ‘Arab’, ‘Syrian’, ‘Semitic’ and other such terms, which are
still entangled in a mesh of confusion and even prejudice, with the actual
situation in our period. But what seems to be observable in late antiquity is
a heightened awareness of and readiness to proclaim local traditions, with a
consequent increase in their visibility.
In this context the application of the concept of Hellenism is much more
diffi cult. Greek continued to be used as a literary language, and there is a huge
volume of theological, hagiographical and other writing from the sixth and sev-
enth centuries. The controversial bishop Severus of Antioch wrote in Greek,
though his works survive in Syriac; Gaza was the centre both of monasticism
and of a highly sophisticated Greek literary culture in the early sixth century,^36
while Procopius the historian came from Caesarea in Palestine. The monastic
author Cyril of Scythopolis composed biographies of Palestinian monks, and
Figure 8.2 The city of Scythopolis (Bet Shean), birthplace of the sixth-century monk and
hagiographer Cyril of Scythopolis and other learned theologians. Scythopolis remained a
flourishing city throughout the seventh century and into the eighth.