Epilogue
Some such reflections are already offered in the prologue to volume ,
and in an earlier paper included there, ‘‘Taking the Measure of the Ancient
World,’’ and there is no need to repeat here the confession as to the many
significant forms of history—ecological, environmental, biological, demo-
graphic, technological—which nothing in my work can claim to approach.
I also remain an avid admirer of, but no rival to, the sort of sweeping so-
cial history, combining a sense of environment with the results of archae-
ology, represented in Barry Cunliffe’sFacing the Ocean,^6 or in Nicholas Pur-
cell and Peregrine Horden’sThe Corrupting Sea.^7 Prospectively, however, if
the project for a history of the Near East in the late Roman period were to
come off, it can be asserted that there is no better territory for the study
of related small communities, each in their particular environments, than
the still-visible ancient villages of several different regions of the Near East.
Equally, the sixth-century Petra papyri, now in the course of publication,
promise to reveal a developed agricultural economy and village society in an
environment which at first glance seems to preclude any such possibility.^8
If we can approach the ancient world in an incomparably closer and more
intensive way now than was possible two centuries ago, this is due, first, to the
organisation of knowledge achieved primarily in the nineteenth and early
twentieth century, with the greatcorporaof inscriptions, coins, and papyri,
and massive series of archaeological reports. But we should be aware also
of just how far the advance of technology has completely transformed our
capacity to confront the remains of antiquity: firstly, simply by the avail-
ability of photographic images of everything from pottery to papyri, inscrip-
tions, coins, statues, architectural elements, wall paintings, relief sculptures,
or mosaics. But secondly, and only now beginning to be exploited, the ca-
pacity to record, transmit, compare, and combine these images electroni-
cally. That brings its own problems, of information overload, of categorisa-
tion and storage, and above all of the long-term maintenance of data-bases,
whether visual, textual, or both. The capacity to travel relatively easily, and
thus literally to see any (or almost any) area of the ancient world, is also a
fundamental transformation in itself. But perhaps even more fundamental is
. B. W. Cunliffe,Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples, ..–..().
. P. Horden and N. Purcell,The Corrupting Sea: A Studyof Mediterranean History();
note esp. W. V. Harris, ed.,Rethinking the Mediterranean().
. See J. Frösén, ed.,The Petra PapyriI (), and the evocative survey of late Roman
Petra by Z. T. Fiema, ‘‘Late-Antique Petra and Its Hinterland: Recent Research and New
Interpretations,’’ in J. H. Humphrey, ed.,The Roman and Byzantine Near East ( JRA, supp.
, ), . Note also Z. T. Fiema, ‘‘Roman Petra (..–): A Neglected Subject,’’
ZDPV (): .