INTRODUCTIONEthiopic; the frequency of translation to and from Greek and eastern lan-
guages, especially Syriac, is a very important aspect of eastern culture in
this period.
An enormous number of saints’ lives (the genre known as hagiography)
survive from this period, after the example set by Athanasius’ unforgettable
Life of Antony (c. 357–62), and this material has provided the stimulus for some
fine recent work. Saints’ lives can provide historical information, but they are
also invariably written with an apologetic purpose, and many are based on
the rhetorical structure of encomium or panegyric. They therefore need to be
used with caution by the historian, though they also provide very important
ways into social and cultural questions. Indeed, the recognition of the great
importance of rhetoric in all forms in the interpretation of late antique writing
has been one of the major advances since 1993, as instanced in many contri-
butions to the influential Journal of Early Christian Studies. Saints’ lives are also
well represented among the texts covered in the series Translated Texts for
Historians, which at the time of writing has published more than sixty vol-
umes. Designed to make important, but otherwise hard to find, texts available
in reliable translations and with annotation, this wide-ranging series is one of
the most important factors in making late antiquity so accessible a field. The
impact of its recent publication of the entire Acts of the Council of Chalcedon
(451), followed by those of the Second Council of Constantinople in 553,^19 a
major departure for the series, is already evident.
In addition to the abundant written sources, there is a wealth of docu-
mentary material, ranging from the proceedings of the major church coun-
cils (Ephesus, 431, Chalcedon, 451, Constantinople, 553) to the law codes
of Theodosius II and Justinian. The acts of the second council of Ephesus
(449) are known from the proceedings of the Council of Chalcedon two years
later, and partly survive in Syriac (Chapter 1). The official document known
as the Notitia Dignitatum, drawn up some time after AD 395 and known from
a western copy (see Jones, Later Roman Empire, Appendix II), constitutes
a major source for our knowledge of the late Roman army and provincial
administration. There is also a large and increasing number of dedicatory
inscriptions from the Greek east in the fifth and sixth centuries, sometimes
written in classicizing Greek verse, and while major public inscriptions are
few in comparison with their number in the early empire, large numbers of
simple Christian funerary epitaphs survive, often inscribed in mosaic on the
floors of churches, which also frequently carry dedications by the builder or
the local bishop. In churches of the Near East these are sometimes written
in Aramaic or Syriac. The first inscriptions in Arabic script begin to appear
in the sixth century. Important papyri also survive from the desert region
of the Negev in modern Israel, from Petra in Jordan and from Ravenna in
Italy, as well as from Egypt. Language change, especially as demonstrated in
the epigraphic evidence, is a major concern of current scholarship.^20 Finally,
the archaeological record is now huge, and increasing all the time, and while
it is still necessary to consult individual excavation reports, more and more