THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN – A REGION IN FERMENTcountry, in the period before the seventh-century invasions? One striking fea-
ture is the progressive reliance of both Byzantium and Persia on Arab groups
who based themselves not in cities, the traditional centres of Roman/Byzan-
tine culture and the location of most of the army units in the later empire, but
rather in desert encampments. The Ghassanids or Ghassan, with their ruling
Jafnid elite, would congregate at the pilgrimage centre of St Sergius at Resafa
or, it has been argued, at the shrine of John the Baptist at er-Ramthaniyye
on the Golan Heights, while the pro-Sasanian Lakhmids, led by the Nasrids,
had their base at al-Hira in modern Iraq. The earliest Arabic inscriptions use
Aramaic script, but by the sixth century Arabic language and Arabic script were
slowly coming into use alongside Greek, and church patronage by al-Mun-
dhir is mentioned in the Syriac Letter of the Archimandrites of 569/70.^1 Kinda
were another major Arab grouping, occupying large tracts of central Arabia
in the fi fth and sixth centuries; they were remembered as ruling a ‘kingdom’
in later Arabic sources, but were in fact clients of the south Yemeni state of
Himyar (see below). Al-Harith (Arethas) the Kindite concluded a peace with
Byzantium under Anastasius, and according to one account his descendant
Kaisos received an embassy to the Ethiopians (as the new rulers of Himyar),
Amerites and ‘Saracens’, headed by the historian Nonnosus, probably in
531, according to a summary preserved by Photius in the ninth century; both
Arethas and Kaisos are called phylarchs, and Kaisos was being pressed by
Byzantium to intervene against Persia. Two Sabean inscriptions confi rm the
domination of Himyar in central Arabia.^2 The presence of Arabs (‘Saracens’)
both within and on the edge of Roman territory in the east had been familiar
since the fourth century and before, and some had been Christianized at an
early date; but under patronage from both Rome and Persia these ‘federa-
tions’ acquired a new sense of infl uence and identity. In the case of Ghassan,
their relationship with Constantinople suffered a blow in the late sixth century
when al-Mundhir fell from favour; eventually, however, both the pro-Roman
and the pro-Persian groups gradually became Muslim.^3 During their period
as Roman or Persian clients, both the Ghassanids and the Lakhmids were
Christian, the Ghassan being Miaphysite, the Lakhmids becoming Nestorian
when their king, Nu’man, converted in the late sixth century. The luxury of
the Ghassanid court is remembered in Arabic literature, and their transition
to Islam and absorption into the Umayyad state is a key question, though it is
unlikely that they were patrons of the so-called ‘desert castles’ in the area, as
has been argued.
At the same time a different phenomenon is emerging with increasing
clarity in recent scholarship, namely the high density of settlement in certain
areas from the late fi fth century into the sixth. This is true of certain parts
of southern Palestine, the Golan and especially the Negev, which reached
its highest density of settlement, and presumably of population, at this point
(Chapter 7). The villages of the limestone massif of northern Syria studied by
Tchalenko, Tate and many others since (Chapter 7), also testify to a pros-
perous and dense habitation, and to intense cultivation in the hinterlands of